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This study aims to characterize how ecosystem actors shape customer experience (CX). The study also proposes implications for managers and research regarding the customer ecosystem, its actors and actor constellations in the context of CXs.

A qualitative study is conducted among activity tracker users to identify how actors within their ecosystems shape CXs. Data include 28 in-depth interviews and ten self-reported diaries.

This study delineates six actor categories in the customer ecosystem shaping CX within and beyond the service. The number of actors and their importance to the focal customer in various actor constellations form individual-, brand- and socially driven ecosystems. These customer ecosystem types show how actors combine to drive CXs.

Researchers should shift their attention to experiences emerging in the customer’s lifeworld. A customer ecosystem highlights the customer-centered actor configuration emergent within the customer’s lifeworld. It is self-constructed based on the customer’s reference point.

Managers should aim to locate, monitor and join the customer’s lifeworld to gain more insight into how CXs emerge in the customer ecosystem based on customer logic.

Customers are not isolated actors simply experiencing service; rather, they construct idiosyncratic actor constellations that include various providers, social groups and peers.

This paper extends the theory on CXs by illustrating how the various actors and actor constellations forming the customer ecosystem shape CXs.

New actors have emerged in the food supply chain in response to the increased awareness of food waste and the need to distribute surplus food. The purpose of this study is to analyse the different supply chain structures that have emerged to make surplus food available to consumers.

This study adopts a qualitative multiple-case study of three new surplus food actors: a surplus food platform, an online retailer and a surplus food terminal. Data sources included interviews, documentary evidence and participatory observations.

Three different types of actor constellations in surplus food distribution have been identified: a triad, a tetrad and a chain. Both centralised (for ambient products) and decentralised supply chain structures (for chilled products) have emerged. The analysis identified weak links amongst new actors and surplus food suppliers. The new actors have adopted the roles of connector, service provider and logistics service provider and the sub-roles of mediator, auditor and consultant.

This paper contributes to research on closed-loop or circular supply chains for the reuse of products in the context of surplus food distribution.

The paper explores the links between network structures and internationalization, conceptualized as a process of value innovation. The exploration sets off from the concept of an entry node, i.e. whether network entrance is facilitated by a direct dyadic or an indirect triadic relationship.

The paper is mainly conceptual, but also presents an empirical cross-border actor constellation which highlights the implications of the study.

Bi-directionality implies that value innovation is contingent on the fit between the actors involved in the entry node, not on the fulfilment of the needs of a focal actor. Further, the attractiveness of an entry node depends on network structures, the network positions of the actors in the entry node, the desired outcomes of entry (immersion or reach), and the actual behavior of the actors. The dynamics of transitivity can influence triadic entry nodes. However, transitivity operates differently in business networks than in social networks constituted by inter-personal ties. Therefore, closure of open triadic entry nodes is neither an automatic outcome of strong ties, nor a normatively better outcome.

The theorizing offered by this paper must be further explored in different empirical contexts to assess its practical adequacy. Still, the presented empirical case indicates that the expected attractiveness of entry nodes is closely linked to (in)transitivity.

The paper supports the relevance of expanding from a dyadic to a network perspective in order to capture the dynamics of value innovation in an international setting.

This paper examines the socio-ecological co-evolution and transformation of organic pioneers and the organic food market from a politically structuring actor perspective. It aims to identify strategies and activities used to contribute to the change of structures in the organic market and how the companies, in turn, reacted to the structural influence of the changing environment to position their company successfully in the market.

This study is based on interviews with four managing directors who were responsible over several decades for the strategic corporate management of the pioneer companies they founded as (or converted to) organic. Content analysis was used to analyse the data.

Strategic challenges regarding building up, maintaining and using resources, shaping actor constellations, and professionalising management are explained. The analysis demonstrates that also small pioneers have the possibilities and scope to influence and change markets and structures.

The results are significant for developing sustainable transformation strategies for markets, considering the interaction of the micro and meso-levels over time and the role of small businesses that might be struggling with growth and loss of values. The study answers recent calls in the literature to empirically investigate sustainability transformations from a practice perspective and gain insights into the roles of corporate actors.

When comparing novel centralized and distributed communications and video streaming services, the authors identified a need for a theoretic framework to position a multitude of ICT services and technologies according to their value proposition. Literature does not integrate existing value analysis concepts into a holistic theoretical framework. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by proposing a value analysis framework for ICT services capable of describing the value exchanges between different actors and their role constellations based on technological componentizations.

The paper evaluates a representative selection of communications and video streaming services and an extensive literature study on existing value analysis research was conducted to develop the framework and to verify it.

The paper demonstrates the applicability of the value analysis framework in communications and video streaming case studies, which are technically very different from each other but, at the abstraction level the framework provides, display very similar characteristics in value flows and role constellations.

The value analysis framework could be extended and verified with other case studies and complemented with quantitative modeling and system dynamics.

The authors combine existing literature into a proposal of a holistic value analysis framework and apply it to novel centralized and distributed communications and video streaming services. Both academics and practitioners can use the framework to evaluate the value proposition of ICT services and technologies.

The authors argue that the mainstream scholarly discourse on hybridity and accounting is thus far primarily interested in the use and effects of accounting “in” hybrid organizations. Consequently, the literature has to a lesser extent explored how accounting mediates hybrid settings (while also being mediated), and the role of disentanglements in such processes. In hybrid settings, objects are difficult to define, and measures and tools difficult to agree upon. However, the literature on hybrid accounting is inconclusive and indicates that accounting can potentially both stabilize and de-stabilize relations in a hybrid setting. The authors address the research question of how accounting emerges and manifests itself in a process of entangling and disentangling in a heterogeneous emerging hybrid setting.

The paper is based on a longitudinal qualitative case study of the implementation of social investments, a public sector calculative framework based on the logic of measuring long term and social and economic impact of prevention. Methodologically, the study was guided by actor-network theory. In total, 18 observations and 48 interviews were conducted.

The observation the authors make in their case study is that much effort was spent on both keeping things apart and tying elements together. What the authors add to the literature is an illumination of how the interplay between entanglements and disentanglements facilitated the design idea of social investments to be enacted as multiple semi-integrated and purified hybridizations. The authors describe different translation points, each representing a specific hybridization where elements were added, recombined and disentangled. Still, the translation points were not completely compartmentalized, but rather semi-integrated where associations were facilitated through active mediation, likeness and productiveness for each other.

One limitation is the single case approach. A second limitation arises from the ANT approach to hybridity.

A practical implication of this paper is that in hybrid settings, the semi-integrated character may be interpreted as a strength because it allows the mobilization of heterogenous actors. However, this may also come at the cost of governability and raises further questions of managerial practices in hybrid settings.

The paper suggests the potentially productive role of disentanglements in allowing multiple hybridizations to evolve in hybrid accounting settings.

The paper suggests the potentially productive role of disentanglements in allowing multiple stabilized hybridizations to evolve in hybrid accounting settings.

Decisions which are based on formally organized evaluation processes are widespread in the academic world. In order to develop a theoretical framework which can be used to systematically analyze various evaluation-based decision-making procedures, this chapter focuses on the example of appointment procedures for professorships in German universities. Drawing on systems theory, we start with theorizing universities as formal organizations in order to explain how organizational structures generally affect decision-making procedures. Then three dimensions of academic decision-making are introduced – temporal, social, and matter-of-fact – which are the main cornerstones of our analytical framework. By applying this framework to appointment procedures for professorships, different phases can be distinguished (temporal), participants and their interests as well as their influence potentials come into view (social), and different types of criteria for assessing the candidates can be identified (matter-of-fact). The exemplary application of the framework shows its analytical advantages as an adaptable means of investigating a broader array of (academic) evaluation-based decision-making procedures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential roles for service robots (i.e. socially assistive robots) in value networks of elderly care. Taking an elderly person’s perspective, it defines robot roles according to their value co-creating/destroying potential for the elderly user (i.e. focal actor), while acknowledging consequences for a network of users around the elderly (i.e. network actors).

This qualitative, interpretative study employs in-depth phenomenographic interviews, supported by generative cards activities (i.e. Contextual Value Network Mapping), to elicit an elderly person’s tacit knowledge and anticipate the effects of introducing an automated actor on institutionalized value co-creation practices.

The proposed typology identifies six roles of socially assistive robots in an elderly person’s value network (enabler, intruder, ally, replacement, extended self, and deactivator) and links them to three health-supporting functions by robots: safeguarding, social contact, and cognitive support.

Elderly people have notable expectations about the inclusion of a socially assistive robot as a new actor in their value networks. The identified robot roles inform service scholars and managers about both the value co-destruction potential that needs to be avoided through careful designs and the value co-creation potential that should be leveraged.

Using network-conscious phenomenographic interviews before the introduction of a novel value proposition sheds new light on the shifting value co-creation interplay among value network actors (i.e. elderly people, formal and informal caregivers). The value co-creation/destruction potential of socially assistive robots and their corresponding roles in care-based value networks offer insights for the design of meaningful robotic technology and its introduction into the existing service networks.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) (UN, 2006) obliges its signatory states to establish inclusive school systems. Germany ratified the document in 2008. This international steering impulse triggered a real “inclusion shock” (Heinrich, 2015, p. 235) when it came into force, because hardly any other country in Europe has worse conditions for implementing the convention than Germany. The school structure with up to nine special schools was called upon to fundamentally changes or adaptations by the CRPD. Since 2008, it has been observed that the various federal states in Germany react very differently to this impulse according to their own development. From an empirical point of view, this raises the question of the concrete “steering” of these inclusion-oriented transformations. The chapter examines the question of how the actors in the school system of the federal state Schleswig-Holstein reacted to this challenge between 2008 and 2014. The focus of the research interest is above all on the collective coordination of action by state and non-state actors in the multi-level system, the intentions of regulatory impulses and the effects of steering efforts in the process of implementing the CRPD. With regard to the implementation of Art. 24 of the CRPD, the “Governance-perspective“ makes it possible to conceive state activities and hierarchical forms of coordination as an integrative component of political regulatory processes, so that the complex mechanisms of influence, the intention to change, steering decisions and steering effects can be examined from an overarching perspective.

The last four decades have seen the rise of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) as the core locus of transnational accounting regulation. Initial steps of associational cooperation were superseded by establishing a standard setting organization that heavily draws on consultation procedures. The purpose of this paper is to focus on recent changes in governance and accountability of IASB in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Emphasis is given to the organizational configuration, the ambivalence of consultation procedures and reactions to mounting criticism after the crisis. The paper proposes that IASB is the heart of a new transnational regulatory constellation in accounting.

The material and analysis presented in the paper derives from an extensive review of official reports, consultation documents and related responses and a range of additional information available on IASB's web page.

The paper analyzes how IASB uses legitimation strategies to defend its position as a transnational standard setter. From analysis of recent changes, the paper reveals a growing reliance on – and domination through – consultation procedures. The paper also shows the IASB’S swift action to counter substantial criticism emerging with the financial crisis.

By highlighting developments surrounding IASB, its governance structure and the emphasis on consultation, the paper establishes the importance for public policy of further study and debate the operation of IASB. It could also contribute to re-politicize accounting regulation at the transnational level.

IASB is an integral player in global financial governance processes and is only recently receiving substantial academic accounting research. This paper seeks to provide an introduction and critical account of the organization's development.