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CHANGING, COPING AND COUNTERING: HOW SERVICE PROVIDERS PRESENT WELL-BEING CAPABILITIES TO THE RESPONSIBILIZED CONSUMER
A wide consensus of research points to an increasing responsibilization of individuals, as consumers engage in self-improvement through services and products (Giesler & Veresiu, 2014). Self-tracking services, with which consumers can monitor physiological and cognitive attributes such as breathing, pulse or mood, are a common manifestation of this change. This responsibilization means that solving structural well-being problems is left to individual consumers (Anderson et al., 2016). However, how this takes place in practice, and how service providers construct their service in this context of responsibilization has not yet been studied within Transformative Service Research. Through qualitatively analyzing text content from the websites of eleven different wearable devices and applications for self-tracking, this paper shows a novel conceptualization of how service providers present well-being capabilities to responsibilized consumers. The findings show that while well-being is in almost all cases concerned with managing a stressful work life, or enhancing the presentation of a healthy self, service providers present consumers with differing types of capabilities for tackling these issues. The first type refers to changing, which implies actively conforming to norms by changing one’s appearance or physique. The second type entails coping, i.e. more passively withstanding and learning to live with stress or pressure. The third type of capability, countering, refers to an active, non-conformist stance towards external norms, instead advocating well-being through self-knowledge. This study contributes to Transformative Service Research by responding to calls for research on well-being as a socio-culturally constructed phenomenon (Anderson & Ostrom, 2015). The findings show how “consumer capabilization” (Giesler & Veresiu, 2014) takes place in practice through services. In addition, it extends discussions on service providers’ abilities to transform or reproduce structures (Edvardsson, Tronvoll & Gruber, 2011; Blocker & Barrios, 2015) and how this can affect well-being.
