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This study examines whether engagement with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-focused specialized training programs enable senior public officials (focal actor) to collectively deliver on public services that have a transformational societal impact over time. Further, the study explores the factors that impede and facilitate the delivery of such services. The authors do so by using service mechanics theorization and drawing on the lens of actor and collective engagement.

This study undertakes a longitudinal exploratory qualitative study design. SDG-focused training programs were delivered, as interventions, for two cohorts of senior public officials from Bangladesh in an Australian University in 2017 and 2019. In-depth interviews were conducted upon the training's completion and then after 8- and 12-month intervals to assess the short- and long-term impact respectively.

An empirical framework is proposed from the study findings. It shows that engagement – cognitive, emotional and behavioral – with SDG-focused specialized training programs enables focal actors (i.e. senior public officials) to engage other actors (other public officials, community members) in networks, facilitated the delivery of SDG-aligned public services. Such engagement results in a transformative impact that spans micro (individual), meso (organizational) and macro (societal) levels over time. Factors that impede and facilitate SDG-aligned delivery of public services are also identified.

Theoretically, the authors contribute to the literature that relates to actor and collective engagement, SDG-focused capacity-building training programs and service mechanics. Practically, this study informs organizations about the ways that they can effectively engage their senior employees with capacity-building training programs that focus on sustainability.

This study is one of the few that connects the interface between public service delivery for enacting societal changes and SDG-focused capacity-building training programs through service mechanics theorization and using the lens of actor and collective engagement.

Recent literature on customer engagement has introduced the concept of “actor engagement,” which serves as the foundation for this study. The study aims to investigate the formation of engagement and engagement's impact on the performance of sharing economy platforms in an international context.

The study analyses unstructured data from 145,434 service providers and 1,703,266 customers on Airbnb across seven countries (USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, China and Singapore). Machine learning techniques are used to measure actor engagement, and the research model is tested using structural equation modelling (SEM).

The findings suggest that actor engagement, encompassing the reciprocal relationship between customer engagement and service provider engagement, has a significant impact on platform performance. The moderator analysis highlights the role of cultural differences in the relationship between customer engagement and service provider engagement and between actor engagement and platform performance. Specifically, the study reveals that actor engagement exhibits a more pronounced impact on platform performance in Western countries (such as the USA, Australia and the UK), compared to Eastern countries (such as China and Singapore).

The analysis of the conceptual model is based on the utilisation of behavioural data obtained from the Airbnb website. Due to the nature of the available data, proxies are employed as measures for variables such as platform performance.

This research is amongst the first to provide empirical evidence for actor engagement formation and the function's role in platform performance in the sharing economy. The global nature of Airbnb as a platform facilitates the investigation of country-level factors, specifically cultural values, across seven diverse countries and highlight differences from business to customer (B2C) business models.

Actor engagement (AE) literature shows inconsistent understandings of engagement intensity. However, a holistic picture of the nature of AE intensity is foundational to advance empirical AE models and measurement frameworks. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of what engagement intensity is and how it unfolds on different network levels.

This conceptual study draws from a literature review and offers a comprehensive classification scheme of AE intensity. The literature review extends beyond marketing and service research and draws from the etymology of AE intensity in management and social science, specifically, the fields of student, employee and civic engagement.

The classification scheme clarifies that AE intensity at the individual level refers to actors' affective and cognitive tone and varying magnitudes (i.e. efforts, duration, activeness) of resource investments. At the dyad level, AE intensity represents relational strength, and at the network level, it refers to the degree of connectedness in the network.

The research reconciles conceptual inconsistencies in the AE literature. Our classification scheme goes beyond the individual actor and actor–actor dyad and offers a holistic overview of possible ways to operationalize AE intensity in networks.

The classification scheme can be used as a strategic checklist to include AE intensities of individual actors (e.g. customers and employees), relationships between these actors and network connectedness, when further developing engagement measurement tools and benchmarks.

This is the first study providing a comprehensive understanding of AE intensity from an individual, dyadic and network perspective.

This paper aims to present the literature review on engagement in marketing, specifically on the concept of actor engagement (AE), to identify the most influential countries, authors, journals and institutions, their structure and research lines.

This review was carried out from a bibliometric and network analysis of documents published in the Scopus and Web of Science databases.

A total of 223 documents were found that were scientifically mapped in this field. The network analysis identified four perspectives or research clusters: customer engagement, the conceptualization, co-creation of value and service ecosystems. Finally, the agenda for future research is presented.

This paper carries out a bibliometric and network analysis, so far not done, of the literature on AE in which its perspectives and future lines of research were identified.

The customer as an active and engaged value co-creator raises new challenges for theory and practice, especially in the hospitality industry. However, the connection between engagement and co-creation is little studied in the hotel/tourism literature. This paper proposes a connection between customer engagement (CE) and value co-creation frameworks to ascertain and depict the internal actors' activities and factors that foster or hinder guests' co-creation and destruction of value.

The researchers used qualitative methods (35 in-depth interviews, document analysis and four observation sessions) in seven regions of Ghana to explore the customer's perspective. Data were analyzed with NVivo11 within a thematic analysis framework.

The findings suggest that positive and negative engagement fosters or hinders guests' interactions, which lead to value co-creation or destruction. The research also discovered that negative interactions occasioned by any factor or actor trigger value destruction at multiple stages of the experience journey.

Industry players can use the framework developed to assess their businesses, explore and reflect on the proposed value they aim to generate, and thus be more aware of how they can better facilitate value co-creation with their consumers and avoid value destruction.

This research proposes a novel connection between customer interactions, engagement and value co-creation to ascertain and depict the internal actors' activities and factors that foster or hinder customers' experience in the hotel/tourism industry.

This study aims to deal with actor engagement practices and identifies different roles in actor engagement (AE), using the service-dominant logic (S-D logic) literature and the pivotal concept of value co-creation within the frame of engagement platforms.

The context of this research is an online health community, provided by a pharmaceutical firm, which moderates the interaction between its members. The authors use a grounded theory approach with the methodology of netnography. These research are based on the approaches of ethnography and is a suitable qualitative method for analyzing human behavior in certain situations.

The results indicate that customers and/or actors operate as resource integrators in the perspective of S-D logic. Independent social and economic actors adopt both the roles of service providers and service beneficiaries in a reciprocal manner. Value co-creation in online communities based on practices, which actually define the respective role. Three main engagement practices are identified: information-, advising- and empathy-practices.

The findings point to the importance of the dynamic and interactive concept of actor engagement and present a clearer understanding of customer, who act both in provider- and beneficiary-roles. However, it becomes evident that a customer orientation should address the actor playing a beneficiary-role, who uses (or selects) the value proposition, and not actors who play the role of financial resources provider.

In recent years, the construct of AE, and, in particular, customer engagement have been established both in theory and in practice. However, there are few empirical research publications so far, that try to explain engagement practices in online communities, especially in the healthcare sector.

Valence is one of the key dimensions underlying actor engagement, yet there is limited research to provide a comprehensive understanding of the concept. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise engagement valence in actor networks and develop an agenda for future research.

The exploration of the psychological foundations of the concept of valence and a systematic literature review from a multiple database search contribute to four sets of propositions defining the domain of the concept of actor engagement valence.

The propositions posit that valence resides in the engaging actor’s past, current and future psychological dispositions, which can shift between positive, negative and ambivalence. Actor engagement valence is triggered by the engagement objects and value propositions of other actors in the network. The antecedents of actor engagement valence comprise individual factors such as cognitive evaluations and hedonic feelings, as well as network-related factors such as social norms and shared beliefs, and the network structure. The net balance of actor engagement valence determines the actor’s engagement behaviours, and this relationship is moderated by individual and network factors.

This is the first study to conceptualise actor engagement valence, which contributes to the refinement of the actor engagement concept. This research defines the conceptual domain, deepens the understanding and provides an agenda for future research into the valence of engagement among actors in networks. The study recognises the institutional influences on actor engagement valence, and contributes to an understanding of the nature of actors’ psychological dispositions and how their valence determines the actors’ behavioural engagement manifestations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamic process of multi-actor engagement by examining how it evolves and spreads in actor networks. The authors challenge the dyadic perspective adopted by previous research.

An abductive theorizing approach uses a longitudinal case study to develop a theoretical framework of the iterative process of multi-actor engagement. The authors draw on the contemporary literature on engagement, service-dominant logic and value propositions.

The research shows that engagement conditions, via actors’ appraisals, lead to engagement properties and result in engagement outcomes as the new conditions for the next iteration. Changes within this multi-actor engagement process lead the network to evolve over time.

The authors highlight the importance of adopting a dynamic multi-actor perspective of engagement and provide foundations for further research. The use of longitudinal methods that focus on the groups of actors in the evolving network is a key consideration.

There is the need to understand and measure the dynamic process of engagement among different groups of actors within networks in the service context.

This is the first empirical study to explore the dynamics of engagement among multiple actors in the network. This leads to the expansion of Storbacka et al.’s (2016) conceptual work by identifying the iterative nature of the multi-actor engagement process, and new components in the process (i.e. actors’ connections, value propositions and engagement outcomes), as well as clarifying existing ones (e.g. engagement properties and actors’ appraisals).

It is argued that the service-dominant (S-D) view of the value co-creation concept is mainly of a macro nature and is difficult to examine empirically. In this regard, marketing research using the micro-foundation theory proposes some conceptual models, through which relationships (involving value co-creation) at a micro/meso level may be studied. The purpose of this paper is to add to such exchanges regarding value co-creation and conceptualize the link of embeddedness of an actor (in a service-ecosystem) to their engagement in the value co-creation process.

The authors draw on the S-D logic and the value co-creation concept and make propositions with regard to two micro-foundational concepts: actor engagement and actor embeddedness.

The authors show that actor embeddedness can be considered as an antecedent of actor engagement, which leads to value co-creation at a macro level and perceived value in context at the micro level.

The authors fill some gaps in literature with regard to S-D logic and value co-creation by combining two micro-foundational concepts: actor engagement and actor embeddedness and propose how through these, some macro-level outcomes such as value co-creation and resource integration may be determined.

While (customer) engagement has been proposed as a volitional concept, our structuration theory/S-D logic-informed analyses of actors’ (e.g. employees’) engagement in service innovation reveal engagement as a boundedly volitional theoretical entity, which arises from actors’ structural and agency-based characteristics and constraints. In line with this observation, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model of actor (i.e. customer, firm, employee) engagement with service innovation.

Based on the observed gap, the authors propose an integrative S-D logic/structuration theoretical model that outlines three particular service innovation actors’ (i.e. customers’, the firm’s and employees’) engagement, which comprises institution-driven (i.e. fixed) and agency-driven (i.e. variable) engagement facets. In addition, the authors integrate the key expected characteristics of positively (vs negatively) valenced service innovation engagement for each of these actor groups in the analyses.

The authors develop a 12-cell matrix (conceptual model) that outlines particular service innovation actors’ institution-driven and agency-driven engagement facets and outline their expected impact on actors’ ensuing positively and negatively valenced engagement.

The authors discuss key theoretical implications arising from the analyses.

Outlining service innovation actors’ structure- and agency-driven engagement facets, the authors’ model can be used to explain or predict customers’, the firm’s or employees’ service innovation engagement-based activities.