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Many scholars have urged firms to empower consumers to become co-producers, arguing that this empowerment leads to a win-win situation that benefits consumers and providers alike. However, critical voices have emphasised that co-production is a way to exploit rather than empower consumers and hence represents a win–lose idea that benefits providers only. Regrettably, these polarised positions remain disconnected and lack empirical investigation. The aim of the present study is to move the debate beyond this stalemate by integrating these perspectives using an empirical study to explore enabling and constraining implications of the attempts to “empower” consumers.

This paper is based on a qualitative empirical study of an internationally unique example of a long-term co-production process in rheumatology care. Data were collected using both focused interviews and observations.

The study indicates that both the optimistic and the critical perspectives of co-production are valid and the implications of “empowering” consumers are two-edged.

The study highlights the need to zoom in and analyse how empowering and disempowering mechanisms relate to specific aspects of particular co-production processes rather than to co-production as a general phenomenon.

The empirical data illustrate the feasibility of employing patients in everyday healthcare production through simple means while raising numerous issues related to, for example, traditional healthcare roles and process design.

The present study of a unique, long-term co-production illustrates how both perspectives of co-production are valid.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay of the internet and the spatial designs of the bricks‐and‐mortar contexts within which face‐to‐face services are provided.

Focuses on the travel, the banking and book‐selling industries; the methods involve interviews, observation and visual material of the new physical spaces within which customer‐sales representatives interact face‐to‐face.

The internet has not reduced the importance of physical space; on the opposite, this study argues, it has revalorised and emphasized the significance of space.

The study's explorative nature does not allow for generalization. Whereas space and time are traditionally regarded as contextual factors, this study recognizes their dynamic nature, regarding spacing and timing as economic phenomena. However, further studies may seek to establish more thoroughly such economic effects.

Changes in spatial layouts of a work place leads to novel spatial practices, which require new personnel competencies. For example, employees' more intimate interactions with customers entail new demands on employees' interpersonal skills and competence. By the same token, new metrics are required for measuring the performance and efficiency of employees.

Highlights the relationship among new technologies, changes in the nature of face‐to‐face services, spatial layouts, and change in time orientation, namely a change from time effectiveness towards interaction effectiveness.

In the long term, all organisations may be temporary. Some, however, are more temporary than others. Temporary organisations are designed not so much with an eye on enduring as on accomplishing a specific task. In this chapter, the authors explore paradoxes, understood as persistent mutually defining oppositions that occur at the intersection of ‘the temporary’ and ‘the enduring’. To do so, the authors discuss the concept of memory, which we use to explore the process of preserving and reproducing memories of people and events as a bridge between the temporalities of organising that are past and were never intended to endure, and those that are ongoing. By reconstructing one case of the European Capital of Culture initiative, the authors discuss memory as critical to temporary organisations in the sense that temporary organisations always have a memory that affords continuity: hence are enduring. The authors argue that there is endurance in the temporary and temporariness in endurance: expressing the paradoxical essence of organising.