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Only a few concepts in the service literature are as pervasive yet as undertheorized as is the concept of the actor. With a growing interest toward value creation as a systemic and institutionally guided phenomenon, there is a particular need for a more robust conceptualization of humans as actors that adopts a processual, as opposed to a static, view. The purpose of this paper is to build such processual conceptualization to advance service-dominant (S-D) logic, in particular, and service research, in general.

The paper is conceptual and extends S-D logic's institutionally constituted account of the actor by drawing from identity theory and social constructionism.

The paper develops a processual conceptualization of the human actor that explicates four social processes explaining the dynamics between two identity concepts—social and personal identity—and institutional arrangements. The resulting framework reveals how humans are simultaneously constituted by institutions and able to perform their roles in varying, even institution-changing, ways.

By introducing new insights from identity theory and social constructionism, this paper reconciles the dualism in S-D logic's current description of actors, as well as posits the understanding of identity dynamics and the processual nature of actors as central in many service-related phenomena.

This paper is among the few that explicitly theorize about the nature of human actors in S-D logic and the service literature.

Research on value co‐creation has gained ground rapidly but remained at a very theoretical level. Thus, it has provided relatively little insight into the nature of individual processes of service provision/value creation, and how firms interact with their customers and contribute to their value creation processes. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to identify and elaborate possible roles firms and their customers enact in the service provision/value creation process.

The research utilizes a multiple case study approach building primarily on qualitative interview data from eight service concepts in the Finnish residential real estate industry.

The research reveals three roles of the firm based on the extent to which firms engage in service provision/value creation processes with their customers. At one extreme, the output of the firms acts as a resource, which is transformed into an outcome and used by the customers. At the other, firms and customers jointly co‐create value, with the firm coordinating the whole offering for the customer. In between, firms transform their resources into relatively standardized outcomes, which customers use in their value creation processes.

The results contribute to the understanding of service provision by categorizing firm‐customer interaction into differing configurations of roles. This reinforces the notion that the depth of interaction affects the extent to which value is co‐created between the firm and customer; different services having different configurations of roles which shape the interaction. Limited to eight service cases, the results only exemplify aggregate role configurations. Moreover, by focusing only on the perspectives of firm representatives, the results do not allow a closer analysis on customer‐specific roles in the value creation process.

This research presents an empirical analysis and interpretation of the service co‐production/value co‐creation process, complementing the extensive theoretical research on the topic. Particularly, the results display different depths of interaction between firms and their customers in co‐producing and co‐creating value, which suggests that it is not necessarily meaningful to consider everything co‐creation from an empirical perspective.

The purpose of this study is to examine supply network designs that large service organisations use in the residential-FM sector to respond to the organising requirements of their operating environments.

The study is theoretically grounded in the well-established literature on the organisational design and structural contingency theory. Utilising a framework of generic organising problems proposed by Miles and Snow (1978) and a multiple-case study design, the study elaborates how large service organisations organise and manage their supply networks in the Finnish residential-FM sector.

The study identifies four supply network designs that organisations use for responding to the organising problems inherent in the property and resident services domains in the residential-FM sector. These include regional production organisation, horizontal decentralisation, environment stabilisation and demand – supply pooling, reflecting the type of the service-market domain and the organisation’s service strategy.

The study contributes to the facilities management literature by expanding the field of inquiry from the commercial real estate sector into the emerging field of professional residential facility services. In particular, the study adds to the discussion on supply strategies and design, offering a service provider perspective to the organisation of service supply in housing.