Non-voluntary service interaction from a service logic perspective: children and value co-creation

ABSTRACT

Public sector services are complex in relation to many private sector services. For example, public sector services contain non-voluntary service interaction. This area of practice has not been extensively researched to date. In this article, we explore and discuss service interaction in public non-voluntary services targeting children, in order to understand what elements go into value co-creation. We use a conceptual model of value co-creation in service developed by Christian Grönroos, and propose elaborations of the model to better reflect the complexities of public sector services.

KEYWORDS:

• Service logic
• co-creation
• public services
• non-voluntary services
• service interaction

Introduction

In the public sector, co-production of services and co-creation of value have become buzz words along with a client oriented doctrine for increased citizen and user focus in service provision (Parks et al. 1981; Boyle and Harris 2009; Bekkers, Edelenbos, and Steijn 2011; Bovaird and Loeffler 2012; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Radnor et al. 2014; Voorberg, Bekkers, and Tummers 2015; Eriksson 2018). The theoretical concepts of service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch 2004; Lusch and Vargo 2014) and service logic (Grönroos 2008; Grönroos and Voima 2013; Grönroos and Gummerus 2014) have become popular approaches among public sector service researchers (Jos and Tompkins 2009; Osborne, Radnor, and Strokosch 2016; Simmons and Brennan 2017; Verleye et al. 2017; Osborne 2018; Westrup 2018). Compared to the private service sector, where these doctrines were first formulated (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004; Vargo and Lusch 2004; Grönroos 2008; Payne, Storbacka, and Frow 2008), the public service sector also entails services for individuals unable, or with restricted ability or intention, to interact with service providers (Jung 2010; Radnor and Osborne 2013; Vamstad 2016). There are even situations where non-voluntary service interaction occurs (Alford 2016; Osborne, Radnor, and Strokosch 2016; Skålén 2018). In non-voluntary service interaction, the simultaneously present bureaucratic logic on one hand, and a customer logic on the other become particularly palpable. Non-voluntary (as well as voluntary public) service interaction can therefore be quite pressing for front-line employees and have an impact on service performance (Korczynski 2008; Fossestøl et al. 2015; Vito 2017; Greve, Lægreid, and Rykkja 2018; Jaspers and Steen 2018; Kaluza 2018).

To date, there have been few empirical studies conducted on public services based on a service-dominant or service logic (Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi 2013; Osborne et al. 2015; Högström et al. 2016; Strokosch and Osborne 2016; Westrup 2016). This might be because of the challenges in adapting models developed for the private sector to the public sector, as public sector services overall are more complex than private sector services (Fotaki 2009; Benington and Moore 2011; Murdock 2011; Alford 2016; Vamstad 2016; Higson 2017; Grönroos 2019). Researchers emphasize the need for adapting theoretical models from the private sector when implementing them to the public sector (Alford 2016; Grönroos 2019; Osborne 2018). Issues have been raised as to how the circumstances in the public sector affect the usability of a service logic as an approach for understanding, explaining and improving public sector services (Osborne et al. 2015).

As yet, co-production processes of public sector services have been more researched than value co-creation processes (Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Radnor et al. 2014; Osborne, Radnor, and Strokosch 2016; Eriksson 2018). This is perhaps because co-creation focuses on the notion of value, which has proved to be challenging to operationalize in empirical studies compared with the concept of co-production of services (Brandsen and Honingh 2015; Voorberg, Bekkers, and Tummers 2015). It is therefore interesting to explore public sector service delivery processes in more detail to understand how value creation takes (or does not take) place (McGuire 2002). Developed for private sector services, the service logic (Grönroos 2008; Grönroos and Gummerus 2014) states that the service user controls the value creation process, and may invite a service provider to join the service user’s value creation through interaction, directly or indirectly. But how does this translate to public and, in particular, non-voluntary contexts? In order to explore this important question, we use the service logic as an analytical perspective on public sector practice.

The aim of this article is to investigate whether a service logic perspective can be used for analysis of non-voluntary public service situations as value co-creation processes. We do this through a case study of service interaction in non-voluntary welfare services targeting children. This is an area previously and contemporaneously subject to social work research (James and Prout 1990; Fish, Munro, and Bairstow 2009; Bolin 2016). This research emphasizes children as active agents rather than passive recipients of social service (Archard 2004; Bolin 2016; Fattore, Mason, and Watson 2016; Hilppö et al. 2016; Tisdall 2017; Warming and Farnøe 2017). Nevertheless, such research has repeatedly shown that children are far from always allowed agency in everyday social work targeting children (Lewis and Lindsay 2000; Hallett and Prout 2003; Sandin and Halldén 2003; Mason 2008; Archard and Skivenes 2009; Jelicic et al. 2013; O’Reilly and Dolan 2016; Muench, Diaz, and Wright 2017; Urek 2017).

It is this specific situation that we are interested in exploring. We see interesting parallels between a service logic approach to non-voluntary public service situations and the role of children in welfare services as described in social work research. The agency of children is a challenging issue in welfare services. Agency can be described as a child’s ability to construct meaning out of their social contexts, its ability to act intentionally in relation its context, and its self-efficacy, meaning an ability to reflect on itself as an effective agent in its context, as experiencing power to control personal outcomes (Kuczynski, Harach, and Bernardini 1999). Since children are formally granted agency, the child’s own wishes and opinions should be taken into consideration when making decisions for the child, but legal, structural, and other factors tend to effectively restrict the enactment of this agency (Mason 2008; Backlund et al. 2012; Gustafsson, Fioretos, and Norström 2012; van Bijleveld, Dedding, and Bunders-Aelen 2015; Vervliet et al. 2015; Hultman, Pergert, and Forinder 2017; Kaukko and Wernesjö 2017; Seim and Slettebø 2017). For example, studies of European migrant reception systems highlight the complexity of service interaction in the life situation of migrant children (Hagström 2018; Herz and Lalander 2019; Verdasco 2019). The tension that we find described in social work research related to children in non-voluntary services, and the issue of a service logic approach to non-voluntary services, and what it can contribute within the study and improvement of such services, is the focus of our empirical study.

In order to study a service logic approach to the understanding and explanation of service interaction, we will use a model of the service interaction process developed by Grönroos (2012) on a case of non-voluntary services targeting children. Choosing an extreme form of public service helps us to clearly point at factors that condition all public services, namely a substantial legal framework. The service that we will analyse in this article is a two-step introductory programme to Swedish upper secondary education that is offered to unaccompanied refugee children who arrived during the large migrant wave in 2015. As stated, the service was non-voluntary, as the children were aged 16–17 at the time of their arrival. The service studied by us is not a compulsory service for the children in a strictly legal sense. However, the service is in practice the only option for them to learn Swedish through the formal education system and thereby access national upper secondary training and related paths into Swedish society. This is why we choose to see this as a non-voluntary service.

In the following section, we present our theoretical framework. We introduce a service-dominant logic and service logic view on public sector services. In particular, we focus on the central role of the service user in these views. Thereafter, we present a model of service interaction developed by Grönroos (2012) that we argue enables us to study resources and activities in service interaction processes in detail better than a service-dominant logic can. We then use Grönroos’ model to analyse the empirical data of our case. In particular, we describe resources and activities of children, front-line employees and additional actors and factors. In the concluding section of the article, we discuss the results of our empirical study and draw some conclusions. These include a proposition on ways in which Grönroos (2012) service interaction model can be improved to better accommodate the characteristics of public sector services. We also indicate areas for further research.

Theoretical framework

The service logic

Both the service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2018; Lusch and Vargo 2014) and the service logic (Grönroos and Voima 2013) ascribe the service user a vital role in value co-creation. In fact, Vargo and Lusch (2004) partly base their writing on the ideas of the Nordic school of marketing, emphasizing relationship marketing rather than transactional marketing (Grönroos 1994; Gummesson 1994). Whereas Grönroos has explored marketing management in depth, Vargo and Lusch (2004) describe a macro-level development of marketing thought of as theories of economic exchange on a market. They describe an historical development of economic exchange evolving from a focus on goods to a focus on services, and try to lay out the effects of this development. Vargo and Lusch (2004; Lusch and Vargo 2014) describe the core of the service-dominant logic of markets today as (among others) based on exchange of specialized skills and competence between service providers and customers and on recognition of the customer as a co-producer of services. Vargo and Lusch (2018, 740) define value as ‘an emergent, positively or negatively valenced change in well-being or viability of a particular system/actor’. For sure, Vargo and Lusch have inspired many scholars and studies. Yet, the notion of value has not been further elaborated on by these authors themselves but by others such as Hilton, Hughes, and Chalcraft (2012), who state that ‘value is realised by the individual as an evaluative judgement of the benefit or worth against criteria derived from personal values (plural)’. Although having had international success, the service-dominant logic has encountered critique for being metaphorical and difficult to use in empirical studies by other scholars (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2009; Grönroos 2019; Grönroos and Gummerus 2014; Grönroos and Voima 2013; Osborne 2018). Even if much has been written on value co-creation (Ramaswamy and Ozcan 2018), the value concept remains one of the most complex in this field of research.

At the core of the service logic as conceptualized by Grönroos (2008; Grönroos 2019; Grönroos and Gummerus 2014; Grönroos and Voima 2013) is the prerequisite that for a service interaction to take place, the service user needs to perceive some value to be the outcome of the service interaction. This value is linked to the goals, needs and demands of the service user. According to service logic, the service user defines and judges the value of a service offering made by an organization (Grönroos 2008). From the providing organization’s perspective, a service ‘is to help someone’s relevant processes, such that his or her goal achievement is enabled in a way that is valuable to him or her’ (Grönroos 2019, 4). Value is assessed by the service user during and after interactive service processes through an internal reflective and comparative process (Grönroos and Voima 2013; Grönroos and Gummerus 2014). The service user’s assessment of whether and to what extent value has been the outcome of the service interaction process is the basis of Grönroos’ (2012) model of service interaction, which will be presented next.

Grönroos’ model of the service interaction process

For Grönroos (2012), the starting point for service interaction is the service concept. The service concept ‘should include a statement of benefits for customers’ (Grönroos 2012, 1528). This starting point indicates the origin of the service logic in the private sector. The service concept forms a framework of resources used in the service interaction process by the actors involved. According to the model from 2012, the resources used in activities of a service are physical resources, contact employees, focal customers, and fellow customers, presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Conceptual model of service interaction for value co-creation according to a service logic. Elaborated from Grönroos (2012, 1528).

According to Grönroos (2012), service interaction evolves at a value co-creation platform from activities based on resources of various kinds, including service employees, service users and other actors. More specifically, contact employees apply physical resources to generate an accessibility effect, in other words, the actual access to a service for the focal customer. The combination of physical and virtual resources and the mental resources of contact employees using these, generate the accessibility effect. In addition, the accessibility effect depends on, for example, number and skills of staff, office hours and time used on various tasks, physical settings, available tools, and the number and knowledge of consumers simultaneously involved in the process (Grönroos 2012, 1526). Grönroos also points out that the customer must have the knowledge, skills and insight to perform their part as service user. Interactive communication takes place between contact employees and focal customers, and peer communication finally occurs between the focal customer and fellow customers.

The resources (physical and contact employees) offer support for the value creation of the service user (focal customer) through their accessibility, and it is through interaction between these that the value for the service user emerges (or does not emerge). The service user also actively draws on her or his resources (or is unable to do this due to lack of necessary resources) in order to be an active part in the service interaction.

Empirical study and methods of research

Our case study of a non-voluntary service is a two-step introductory programme to Swedish upper secondary education aimed at newly arrived children, most of them from Afghanistan, with no or low skills in the Swedish language. The children in the study were unaccompanied refugee children arriving in Sweden in the large migrant wave in 2015. The empirical data we draw on in this article are taken from a three-year research project (2016–2018) on development of non-voluntary welfare services in a medium-sized municipality in Sweden. In the autumn of 2016, there were almost 200 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children aged 16–17; the absolute majority were boys, enrolled in the upper secondary language introduction programme of our studied municipality. Municipalities have a responsibility to offer these children a language introduction programme as long as they are under 18 years of age. After the language introduction programme, several of these children continue their studies enrolled at an introductory programme to school subjects needed to qualify for the Swedish national upper secondary programme of education. As will be evident in our account of the empirical data, Swedish schooling is a big challenge for many of these children, since they tend to have very limited schooling from their home country, and in many cases none whatsoever.

Yin (2014) describes a case study as an empirically based investigation where the researcher studies phenomena in their natural context. Case studies are a research design primarily suited to situations where the events cannot be separated from the context, and they thereby generate rich descriptions (Eisenhardt and Graebner 2007). Our case study contains the collection of material from two groups in a first phase (2016–2017): 20 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (boys aged 16–17), and 10 frontline staff (schoolteachers, coaches at their accommodation, and social workers). There were no girls accommodated in the municipality of our study, during 2015 the average ratio of boys to girls arriving was 10:1 according to Swedish Migration Board statistics. During the first phase of the study, focus was on service interaction related to the language introduction programme (to learn to write and read in Swedish). In the second phase (2017–2018), we retrieved material from professionals who participate in a development group for educational issues related to upper secondary education in the municipality. This group focuses on the step after the language introduction programme, an introduction programme needed to qualify for the Swedish national upper secondary programme of education.

The material was collected through focus group interviews. Focus group interviewing is ‘a research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic determined by the researcher’ (Morgan 1996, 130), and, in comparison to individual interviews, provides access to descriptions or group interaction that may be difficult to capture during individual interviews (Morgan and Krueger 1993). During focus group interviews, group dynamics arise between the participants that influence the discussions so that researchers can study and understand a particular topic from the group participants themselves (Victoria, Dahlgren, and Öberg. 2007).

The focus groups with the children were conducted with five to eight boys at a time, depending on their mother tongue (Arabic or Dari). Each group participated in interviews three times, each lasting an hour including interpretation. In addition, there was a feedback session one to two weeks after each interview. The entire focus group interview process lasted for three months. Questions asked regarded the boys’ views on learning to read and write, on learning Swedish, on their views on their social situation and available support networks, and on any articulate strategies for their future. Throughout the process, the researchers acknowledged that the participants were in a vulnerable life situation, and therefore sought to undertake the interviews with respect and consideration for the children, for example, by being patient and by formulating questions in an easily accessible manner, and by using interpreters known to the children. The children were already well known to each other, and thereby perceived by the researchers as safe with each other during interviews.

The focus groups with the frontline workers were conducted with three schoolteachers, three coaches at the boys’ accommodation, and four social workers. A total of six focus group interviews were undertaken with these employees. Each focus group interview lasted for two hours, and was undertaken in a room at a school. The focus of the questions asked was on how day-to-day work was carried out in order to provide services to the minors.

The focus group interviews with the development group for educational issues were conducted on six occasions. The development group consisted of the director of upper secondary schools, six headmasters or assistant headmasters, one project manager, two coordinators, and four teachers. This was an existing group (meeting regularly once a month), led by the director of upper secondary schools. Each focus group interview lasted for two hours and was undertaken in a room at a specialist centre for pedagogy. The interviews had a focus on new work methods and forms of cooperation to better use children’s previous experiences and competencies to achieve their goals, and to make learning meaningful for children within the introductory programme.

All the focus group interviews were documented using a voice recorder, and a summary of answers and of reflections of the researchers was written after each interview, based on notes taken by the researchers during the interviews. All the voice recordings were made with the consent of the participants. As researchers, we initiated the focus group interviews by starting up the discussion, directing the dialogue, and summarizing the discussion at the end of each interview. In this way, we had an impact on the participants. However, we did not participate in practical and operational discussion without formulating and asking questions during the interviews. Results from the study with a different focus than that of this article have been published in Swedish in Nilsson et al. (2017).

We have analysed the material from the case overall and the 15 focus group interviews in particular through the framework of Grönroos (2012) model of value co-creation interaction resources and activities. The analysis has been carried out in several stages (Eisenhardt 1989). The first step was to identify the resource categories involved in the delivery and interaction of the services in question, based on the question: what resources are needed in order to deliver the services studied? The second step of analysis was to identify activities undertaken interactively in the service process, using the question: what do physical resources, customer contact staff, focus customers and co-customers do as part of service interaction? The third step was to search for influence on the focus customer supported by the question: what affects the focus customer in terms of accessibility effect, interactive communication and communication between focus customer and fellow customer? We also analysed the interview material through a question about whether value was created, by looking for positive and negative evaluative statements from the service users, as well as the service producers. This led us to a fourth and final step in the analysis, one of exploring whether Grönroos’ model is sufficient for analysing public sector services, or would need elaboration to be suitable. Our final question when analysing the empirical data was therefore: are there aspects that are essential in co-creation of value that the model does not capture or clarify?

Findings

The service concept and resources

According to Grönroos (2012), service interaction starts with a service concept; a statement of the service offered as a way to solve the service user’s needs. The service concept we identified in this case is about creating conditions for unaccompanied refugee children to complete their schooling, starting in a language induction programme. The children will then proceed to the introductory programme to study compulsory subjects to become eligible for a national upper secondary programme as a basis for the possibility of self-sufficient work. In order to allow for this service concept, and the related value for involved children, the service concept needs resources. In Grönroos (2012) model, these resources include physical resources, contact employees, focal customer and fellow customers.

The municipal employees (schoolteachers, coaches at their accommodation, and social workers, etc.) with their skills, various physical resources such as classrooms, teaching materials, pedagogical methods, schoolyard, accommodation with more physical resources, and frontline staff (contact employees), the children themselves (focal customer) and other children and adults (fellow customers) are major resources of the service concept. This section examines show the children themselves, contact employees, and the participants in the development group perceive that the resources are used or not used for the co-creation of value in order to facilitate the child in its development process. In the analysis, we use the three service interaction activities, according to Grönroos (2012) model, to understand and explain what hinders and enables co-creation of value: accessibility effect, interactive communication, and peer communication.

Accessibility effect

Service accessibility is made up of physical resources and the resources of contact employees. Accessibility is dependent both on the quality and quantity of resources, some of which are tangible and some of which are intangible. The service concept has to be manifested through the physical resources and contact employees’ resources as a service offer (although non-voluntary in our case) for the service user. Our empirical data give the following picture of accessibility of the services offered.

Goals and resources of children

We find that the children have clearly formulated goals for their future: that of being able to support themselves through work in the future in Sweden. Several children mentioned that their goal was to find a job as car mechanic, carpenter, actor or singer, even as policeman, engineer or doctor. In the interviews, many of the children mention the importance of perseverance both as regards to overall life goals as well as in relation to learning the Swedish language. One of the children said: ‘If you try to learn something yourself, it may be easier to learn. If you do not want to, it will be more difficult’. The children emphasize that they see the language as a first step on the way towards achieving their long-term goals; as one child put it: ‘the language is the key’. Another boy said: ‘If you command the language you can solve all your problems. You can continue on to more advanced study levels. You can achieve your goal’.

Limitations of children’s resources

The children say on repeated occasions that Sweden is very different from their country of origin. This makes it challenging to understand Swedish society. The children argue that they encounter very different demands in Sweden, but also experience very different types of support than they have previous experience of. These children therefore struggle to understand and try to learn what municipal aid actually consists of, as their knowledge and experience from Sweden is still very limited. The children we encountered in our study learned to read and write at the same time as learning a new language at an age of between 16 and 17. Teachers and coaches are the professional groups who meet these children on a daily basis; they described in our interviews how language learning for children in this age group is slower than for children aged 6 or 7. The view of these professionals is that it is not reasonable to believe that they will achieve universal compulsory school competence before they turn 20.

Limitations in physical resources

The contact employees all claim that there could be better ways of combining the resources available within the municipal structures in order to offer the children better ways to achieve the curriculum knowledge objectives. Closer contact between teachers and coaches at the children’s accommodation, for example, would allow coaches to be able to better help the children with their homework. At the same time, the professionals interviewed experience difficulties in striking a balance between what teachers, coaches or social workers can be expected to do to help the children. They believe that often better support for the children would be achieved if school-teachers, study and vocational counsellors or student health staff could be more in contact with each other regarding individual students. As one of the participants expressed: ‘If a child wants something that is not at all my profession, the advantage is then if I know who to call’. At the same time, interviewees state that there is a risk that if the children meet too many professions that they end up being sent around in circles, with no one taking responsibility and nothing being done: ‘We need to create a common understanding that our students are community citizens and thus a joint responsibility for the entire municipality’. Another interviewee says that in conversations with the children she often hears: ‘I would rather not tell my story 17 times for a lot of different people’.

Reflections on the accessibility effect

The physical resources in a public service concept are conditioned by laws and regulations, organizational structures and norms, as well as political priorities. Accessibility of services is also dependent on the contact employee’s professional skills, personal ability, range of action within laws and regulations, and individual condition. Due to the general high knowledge objectives of Swedish school and the slow language learning pace of the teenagers in the group we studied, the teachers interviewed perceive that these children are still far from the goals of the language introduction programme when they turn 18, although language development varies between individuals within the group. Here we can see how the legal framework of the service concept, together with the resources required from the children, generate a situation where service interaction is less than optimal and there is a clear risk that value co-created remains low. It is clear here that the knowledge goals and the structures of the organization make it difficult to achieve an accessibility effect of the service concept. In agency terms, the legal framework that should ideally support the agency of children instead becomes a limiting factor, as the levels of flexibility related to school curricula in aiming to offer the children access to Swedish upper secondary and higher education simultaneously hampers their agency due to the relatively high age at which they have arrived in Sweden compared to many other migrant children who have more years to attend Swedish school. Other legislation also limits the integrity of contact employees as they interact with children. Political concern about the quality of child protection practices lead to more regulation and less flexibility for professionals (van Bijleveld, Dedding, and Bunders-Aelen 2015). The good intentions of legislation leaves several children with contradictory feelings of empowerment and powerlessness (Gustafsson, Fioretos, and Norström 2012).

Interactive communication

Service interaction, interactive communication in Grönroos (2012) model is dependent on the resources of contact employees and the resources of the service user. We have seen in our study (as reported in the previous section) that children are able to formulate goals, needs, and value assessments, and that they have abilities and resources. We have also seen that these tend to be disregarded or unrecognized in service concepts as enacted in service interactions. We have already touched on important factors impacting on the interaction between contact employees and service users. As resources and interaction in practice are inseparable, we will here list those factors that are more evidently linked to the interaction element as compared to the resource factors presented in the previous section.

One important theme emerging in our interviews was that of overall goals and the service concept, in relation to how these were operationalized into concrete (non-voluntary) service offers. On repeated occasions, the children described that they received help from various contact employees, such as teachers, accommodation coaches and other professionals, with schoolwork and everyday issues. Yet the children describe the professionals as talking about what was important for them rather than doing anything essential to help them. The children compared this new experience in Sweden with their previous experiences in their home countries, where jobs and opportunities are generally found through contacts. Apparently, this is what they hoped the Swedish professionals would also do. A typical comment was: ‘There must certainly be an organization that can show us what types of jobs there are in Sweden and what kind of job fits me’.

The contact employees state that they understand that the Swedish welfare system is perceived as abstract by the children, and that several of them react with frustration over what they do not understand, for example, how they are treated in the school, at their accommodation, by other organizations, and by other community members. It is clear from our interviews with the contact employees that these children are not given the opportunity to use their resources because they lack knowledge of how Swedish society works.

In the conversation, the participants pointed out that there are problems with getting the child to feel significant. The children who do not develop at school, they say, carry a feeling that they do not make sense, that they do not see a direct connection between what they learn and how they can use it. The fact that the child feels that it is moving forward and making progress means that the group is the foundation. One of the participants commented: ‘To get the feeling of progression, if only in small steps’. For coherence in the group, the school must enable the children to see more opportunities and paths to their goal. It is stated that the school has cemented perceptions of education and therefore the children’s perception does not always agree with that of the school. The idea is that the school must be better at catching up with these children when the pathways the child knows do not work for the individual, take too long, or that they have unrealistic expectations, otherwise it can easily lead to the feeling of exclusion, which has a critical effect on the child’s development. In order to bridge the difference between the school’s goals and the children’s capacity, it is also important to satisfy the children’s desires; for instance, having somebody to help them understand what jobs they could have in the future and how they should get there. Here, it also becomes clear how important it is to support the children’s agency through their ability to construct meaning from their social context, their ability to act intentionally in relation to their context, and experience power to control their personal results.

Our reflection regarding interactive communication is that the children are able to utilize their resources to a limited extent in interactive communication with contact employees, but that important dimensions of what the children demand cannot be delivered through the service concept. In other words, the available services are unable to match the formulated needs and goals of the children, and thereby value cannot be co-created or only to a limited degree. In terms of agency, the testimonies of both the children and the professionals within the study indicate the importance of the feeling of significance and participation reflecting those of other studies (Gustafsson, Fioretos, and Norström 2012). The skills and abilities of the children beyond those used in contact with public service professionals were not mentioned as important by contact employees, something which delimits the agency of the child (Kaukko and Wernesjö 2017; Herz and Lalander 2019). This might not have to do with a limitation of the mental resources of contact employees in Grönroos’s terminology, but rather with the rigid framework of laws and regulations of the Swedish educational system, that does not allow for individual solutions.

Peer communication

Peer communication is based on the resources of the service user and on the resources of fellow service users and other individuals. In our study, the children all stay in special accommodation with others in the same situation, and they can exchange information and experiences with them. Nevertheless, other social contact is what these children desire. In particular, what they ask for is more contact with Swedes, to enable them to practice and improve their language. The children say that it is important to build up social relationships that make it possible to practice Swedish and understand Swedish society better. They describe their opportunities to meet Swedes in general, outside their normal professional contact employees, as limited, and establishing contact as difficult. One of the children tells us: ‘When I go to the local high street, no Swedish people come near me. I feel they are afraid of me. They do not like to talk to me in Swedish’.

They also mention that they want to participate in leisure activities but say that it is difficult to know, for example, which sports associations exist and how to get in touch with them. The need of social relationships is confirmed by the contact employees in our study for the children’s learning and goal achievement. They emphasize how important it is to expand the children’s network, to give them a context in which to practice their Swedish, and to give them meaningful free time by participating in organized leisure activities, buddy networking, or to practice language in a language café as a way to learn about Swedish society. They also recognize the advantage of internships during their education, both in order to practice language skills and to learn about Swedish society, but also to allow the children to make use of competences and previous experiences.

Our reflection on peer communication is that it does not only entail communication with other children in the same situation (for example, the same class or accommodation), but also professionals and adults who meet them, such as interpreters, individuals involved in leisure-time activities within associations and similar, who may become important for the child as links to Swedish society. Ordinary Swedes are a group that the children want to communicate with, but seldom get contact with, as it is not part of the available services. Research on unaccompanied refugee children highlights the importance of social relationships as anchoring points for development of strong ties that are central to well-being (Eide et al. 2018; Verdasco 2019). These anchoring points are important for the child to succeed in moving from a state of liminality to one of belonging, and the children in our interviews clearly formulate this need. However, in this matter the children need to be helped by people other than professionals.

Discussion and conclusions

In this study, we have explored whether a service logic perspective on non-voluntary public services can help analyse such services as value creation processes. We have used Grönroos (2012) conceptual model of value co-creation in service. The service we have studied is a non-voluntary service, a two-step introductory programme to Swedish upper secondary education aimed at newly arrived refugee children with no or low Swedish language skills.

Our first conclusion is that the use of a service logic model for the investigation of a concrete service interaction process helps us to partially understand and describe concrete resources and activities in service situations in the public sector. The model also partially helps us to identify sources of value co-creation (or non-value co-creation). Both the children and the professionals in our study identify insufficiencies in the service concept they are all involved in. This is, according to them, due to the strong bureaucratic systems of curriculum knowledge objectives and related organizational structures that penetrate the concrete service interaction, which also clarify the difficulty of supporting agency of children.

As researchers, we have identified legislation, organizational structures and norms, as well as political priorities as elements that condition the service concept offered to the children in our study. In our material, we have identified legislation as an overall framework that both children and professionals need to adapt to in their service interaction. Organizational structures and norms as well as political priorities play a similar role in framing the actual possibilities of interaction of all involved actors in this non-voluntary service. A higher level of coordination of resources is needed in order to achieve a change in the service concept.

We argue that legislation, political priorities and organizational structures and norms need to be included in a model of service interaction and value creation in the public sector, in order to reflect the actual framework of service interaction. Physical resources on their own do not suffice to reflect the complexity of public sector service contexts. We argue that legislation, structures and norms, and political priorities adhere to a different resource group than physical resources, and can be referred to as contextual resources. Based on our application of Grönroos (2012) model of service interaction, we therefore propose that these elements be added to his original model to improve its usability for analyses of service interaction processes in the public sector, see Figure 2.

Figure 2. An elaborated conceptual model of service interaction for value co-creation in the public sector, based on Grönroos (2012).

Furthermore, we have seen that children can and do formulate their goals and needs, and can assess the value of a service for them. But it is also clear from our study that the frontline employees are not in a position to deliver services that match the children’s needs and goals. Therefore, the value generated is less than optimal. An example of this is the request by the children to meet and communicate with ordinary Swedes, which is a service that the service concept does not contain. This means that the children need to develop other social ties, in particular during their leisure time, and require the help of the civil sector.

To summarize, in this article we have addressed the question of the usability of a service logic model of co-creation of value in concrete service interaction processes. By our elaboration of how the service logic model of service interaction can be further developed to be more usable in public sector service contexts, we provide a contribution to research and debate on the potential of a service logic approach in public sector services. In addition, the analysis of our data both in relation to a service logic and social work research contributes to enrich the understanding of both perspectives. In particular, it highlights the complexity of professionality in such specific situations as non-voluntary public sector services that substantially influence the inner and outer lives of children such as learning Swedish and becoming part of Swedish society.

Our study has limitations. One of them is that few previous empirical studies of service interaction processes in the public sector have been undertaken, something which has made it difficult to build on and relate to previous research. Our research has therefore been explorative to a certain extent. Secondly, our study of a non-voluntary public service has been of a very complex character. This has led to challenges in describing the case in the short format of an article, by necessity leading us to make simplifications in descriptions of service interaction processes and the service context. Finally, we would have liked to follow the children over a longer period of time in order to get richer data for our study. Unfortunately, this was not feasible within the frame of our research project.

This study has indicated that there are several issues to be further researched in relation to service interaction with children, in particular in non-voluntary contexts. One such issue is the role of frontline employees in the broader context of the services described in our study. Our study shows that the responsibility of adults surrounding the children is a professional one, whereas what the children ask for is more holistic support to achieve their goals. Finally, there is still a need for more empirical research on how a service logic can be implemented in public sector service contexts for development and innovation.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on our text, thereby helping us to make our arguments more distinct.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by research grants from the City of Helsingborg and VINNOVA [2016-03196].

Notes on contributors

Katja Lindqvist

Katja Lindqvist, PhD, is associate professor in Business Administration. Her research interests are management and governance of the public and non-profit sectors, in particular relating to arts and culture. Her recent research focuses on innovation in welfare services and competence management in the museum sector.

Ulrika Westrup

Ulrika Westrup is PhD of Business Administration and an associate professor of Service Studies. Her research interests are service management and public management, specifically in human service organizations.