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Secondary customers often experience secondary vulnerabilities that manifest in family-centred transformative services as other- and self-related customer needs. Yet, a relational perspective on primary and secondary customers’ needs is lacking. The study analyses secondary customers’ needs and their relationship to primary customers’ needs to enhance well-being in customer entities. The service inclusion lens is used to understand customers’ experiences of vulnerability.

The study uses an exploratory approach. The data consists of ethnographic observations and interviews of elderly residents (primary customers), their family members (secondary customers) and nurses in two nursing homes.

Primary and secondary customers’ needs are interrelated (or unrelated) in four ways: they are separate, congruent, intertwined or discrepant. The vulnerability experiences fluctuate in intensity and over time, individually reflecting on these need dimensions.

The study contributes to service research concerning customers’ experiences of vulnerability, secondary customers and their inclusion in services. Primary customers’ service inclusion may increase/decrease secondary customers’ service inclusion and their experience of vulnerability. Moreover, secondary customers’ inclusion is often necessary to foster primary customers’ inclusion and well-being.

Fostering service inclusion and well-being for primary and secondary customers requires balanced inclusion and acknowledging the needs of both groups. Service providers may need to act as moderators within customer entities if discrepant needs occur.

The study addresses the under-researched areas of family members’ customer needs, their relation to primary customers’ needs, experiences of secondary vulnerability and context-related vulnerability.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the status, vulnerability and needs of the health-care and nursing service customers’ (hereafter, care service customers’) loved ones.

The position and vulnerabilities of secondary customers of care services are studied and examples provided by reviewing empirical research reported in the care service literature. A conceptual discussion is developed on the “customer” concept in an extended sense, beyond the focal customers. The “primary customer” and “secondary customer” concepts are employed to supplement the extant discussion on customer units and ecosystems.

Secondary customers are exposed to secondary vulnerability and their well-being is affected by the services provided primarily to their loved ones. The most recurring needs of secondary customers concern psychosocial support, communication and information and cultural sensitivity.

New perspectives on understanding the “customer” concept in an extended sense. This assists in supporting the customers’ dynamic activities and processes within the customer ecosystems. To address care service customers’ loved ones’ vulnerabilities and needs and to support their well-being, they should also be recognised as customers – “secondary customers” – with patients being the “primary customers”.

The results are especially relevant when considering services’ influences on vulnerable customers’ ecosystems and on individuals within them. It is important to recognise that beyond a vulnerable customer, several secondary customers may be exposed to secondary vulnerability, needing support.

The paper is apparently the first to connect the constructs “primary” and “secondary customer” and customer vulnerability to the customer ecosystem discussion. Also, essential future research questions are provided.

The aim of this research is to provide insight into how organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of customers experiencing vulnerabilities, thereby paying attention to their organizational practices (i.e. recursive or routinized patterns of organizational actions and behaviors).

To investigate, this research relies upon a multiple case study in a group of nursing homes in Flanders that had the ambition to engage family members in service journeys of their loved ones while measuring their value perceptions as a performance indicator (here, satisfaction with nursing home services).

The case evidence shows that nursing homes co-create value with family members through caring practices that focus on their role as secondary customers (i.e. welcoming, connecting and embedding) and empowering practices that focus on their role as partial employees (i.e. teaming up, informing and listening practices). However, the way in which the different caring and empowering practices are enacted by the nursing home and its staff affects their value co-creation potential.

By focusing on the practices with which organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of their loved ones, this research bridges the service literature with its attention for value co-creation practices and the literature on customers experiencing vulnerabilities with its focus on extended customer entities.

In recent years, access to schooling for children orphaned and made vulnerable by AIDS has emerged as a major humanitarian concern, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. International discourse largely fails to define what “vulnerability” means, while also depicting “orphans and vulnerable children” as passive victims of complex social processes. This ethnographic study of a “typical” secondary school in semirural Lesotho investigates the research question: At the secondary level, how does “vulnerability” shape the educational participation and home life of young Basotho? Through extended observation, in-depth interviews, and student diaries, the study reveals that “vulnerable” children in Lesotho, who are locally defined as those without strong adult caregivers, actually exercise a high degree of autonomy that is often manifested through “stubbornness.” “Stubborn” students resist adult control and are closely associated with early sexual debut and high-risk behaviors. As a result of their resistance, they are often singled out by teachers for corporal punishment, increasing the likelihood that they will drop out of school. This chapter adds to the literature on youth agency by demonstrating that “acting stubborn” is one way in which “vulnerable” children can exercise control over their own lives and resist the status quo. In addition, the findings point to the failure of the school model, which is highly authoritarian, to retain “vulnerable” students and teach them valuable life skills, including HIV/AIDS prevention. Finally, this study demonstrates that local and culturally inflected definitions of “vulnerability” may not always align with international definitions and policy prescriptions.

The purpose of this study is to identify the role of mediators in supporting value co-creation for vulnerable consumers in a service context. The authors propose that in transformative services, the roles of actor mediators facilitate control and empowerment for the vulnerable consumer – labelling these transformative service mediators (TSMs).

The authors develop a theoretical framework for the activities of mediators in value co-creation considering the interrelationships of vulnerability, structure and agency. The authors then use Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s DART (Dialogue, Access, Risk Assessment and Transparency) model as the integrating framework to describe the TSM roles in the context of the foster care service ecosystem.

The authors introduce a future research agenda regarding TSM roles in transformational service experiences and value co-creation with vulnerable consumers. Service researchers and providers are encouraged to explore effective training and motivation of TSMs.

Understanding value co-creation for vulnerable consumers is an emerging area in service research. The TSM concept introduces a new approach to explore how value co-creation and transformative outcomes can be enhanced in service contexts where consumers experience vulnerability.

This paper presents an agenda for future research. The outcomes of future research based on TSM roles may help guide service providers in identifying opportunities for enhancing well-being and reducing vulnerability in service delivery.

This paper suggests that exploring the role of TSMs in the service process offers new insights into reducing vulnerability in service relationships.

The purpose of this study is to explore and identify the privacy concerns of smartphone app users pertinent to app usage.

Adopting a qualitative phenomenological approach, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with app users to explore the app users' privacy concerns.

Credibility concerns, unauthorised secondary use and vulnerability concerns are the three major privacy concerns of app users, under which these concerns have sub-concerns, i.e. popularity, privacy policy, stalking, data sharing, hacking and personal harm.

The findings are useful to app marketers, app developers and app stores. App marketers, app developers and app stores can use the findings to understand and properly address app users' privacy concerns, thereby increasing the apps usage.

By exploring the privacy concerns of app users, the authors' study extends the literature and provides a theoretical development of individuals' privacy concerns in the context of a widely used technology, i.e. smartphone applications. Accordingly, this study contributes to the consumer privacy literature.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a geospatial approach for buildings flood vulnerability assessment using an indicator-based method (IBM) to support flood risk assessment and mapping of physical elements at risk in Kota Bharu District, Kelantan, Malaysia.

The study developed an indicator-based approach to undertake physical flood vulnerability assessment of buildings. The approach takes into consideration flood hazard intensity, building characteristics and structures surrounding the environment as factors that influence flood vulnerability. The aggregation of the total flood vulnerability index is carried out in a geographic information system (GIS) environment.

The results provide a spatial representation of buildings flood vulnerability index in Kota Bharu Malaysia, and the degree of expected vulnerability is expressed on a scale between 0 to 1 (low damage to total damage). Mapping flood vulnerability index of buildings should be considered in future flood mitigation and evacuation planning.

Unlike other indicator-based methods (IBMs) developed for physical flood vulnerability assessment, in the current study, hazard intensity has been considered and incorporated in the physical flood vulnerability model.

This paper aims to investigate farmers’ vulnerability to climate change and variability in the northern region of Ghana.

The study assessed the vulnerability of male-headed and female-headed farming households to climate change and variability by using the livelihood vulnerability index (LVI) and tested for significant difference in their vulnerability levels by applying independent two-sample-student’s t-test based on gender by using a sample of 210 smallholder farming households.

The results revealed a significant difference in the vulnerability levels of female-headed and male-headed farming households. Female–headed households were more vulnerable to livelihood strategies, socio-demographic profile, social networks, water and food major components of the LVI, whereas male-headed households were more vulnerable to health. The vulnerability indices revealed that female–headed households were more sensitive to the impact of climate change and variability. However, female-headed households have the least adaptive capacities. In all, female-headed farming households are more vulnerable to climate change and variability than male-headed farming households.

The study recommends that female-headed households should be given priority in both on-going and new intervention projects in climate change and agriculture by empowering them through financial resource support to venture into other income-generating activities. This would enable them to diversify their sources of livelihoods to boost their resilience to climate change and variability.

This is the first study that examined the gender dimension of vulnerability of smallholder farmers in Ghana by using the livelihood vulnerability framework. Female subordination in northern region of Ghana has been profound to warrant a study on gender dimension in relation to climate change and variability, especially as it is a semi-arid region with unpredictable climatic conditions. This research revealed the comparative vulnerability of male- and female-headed households to climate change and variability.

Spoken service language is critical for service experiences and human welfare in many service settings. However, little is known about how spoken service language can enhance customer well-being in transformative service contexts. This paper explores spoken service language and well-being for customers experiencing vulnerability in a transformative service context, informed by an empirical account of the human welfare service of residential aged care.

Situated within transformative service research (TSR), this study was guided by a theoretical framework of service language and adopts a strengths-based approach to customer experiences of vulnerability. A qualitative multiple case study methodology was applied to explore carers’ perspectives on spoken service language and well-being from three residential aged care homes in Australia.

The findings demonstrate five spoken service language practices and four principles of spoken service language for well-being that co-create customer well-being and support the alleviation of customer experiences of vulnerability. Conceptualised as transformative spoken service language, the spoken service language practices and principles collectively recognise, support and leverage residents’ capabilities and uplift customer well-being, by enacting a process of mattering highly salient to transformative service contexts.

This study is the first to conceptualise how employee spoken service language can be used to support customer well-being and enhance transformative value for customers experiencing vulnerability to align with the goals of TSR. Practically, the study advocates for a greater awareness and more considered use of transformative spoken service language in human welfare and other transformative service contexts.

Some population groups face precarious health, reflecting their vulnerability, in terms of lack of agency or control. Smart technologies promise to transform people's lives from the enhanced connectedness, greater computational processing and more complex decision-making they can achieve. This study aims to investigate how smart technology can mitigate vulnerability and improve well-being.

The research group, of three scholars and three managers, pursued an action research methodology with an iterative process of planning, action and learning. The authors conducted three related action studies: (1) adopting smart technologies, (2) fostering patient engagement and (3) assessing well-being.

The adoption of sensors and wearable devices had positive impacts for both patients and caregivers. Technologies highlighted their meaning as resources to support actors' (caregivers' and vulnerable patients') activities. Smart devices as resources get integrated, stimulate change and enable new practices. For caregivers, such innovative solutions help improve their knowledge of patients and their ability to act efficiently; for vulnerable patients, they fostered engagement in daily activities to improve well-being.

The paper delineates an overall model (SEVP) that describes how the integration of high-tech and high touch enables patient engagement to mitigate vulnerability and improve well-being.