Doing Institutional Work in Service Ecosystems through Design
Josina Vink1, Bård Tronvoll2, Bo Edvardsson3, & Katarina Wetter-Edman4
1
CTF - Service Research Center, Karlstad University & Experio Lab, County Council of Värmland
Hedmark University of Applied Sciences and CTF - Service Research Center, Karlstad University
3
CTF - Service Research Center, Karlstad University
4
County Council of Sörmland & Örebro University, Sweden
2
Many of our service ecosystems, like western health care and education, were constructed within
the industrial machine age. As these systems are failing to satisfy the evolving realities of our current
era, re-design is desperately needed (Bathany, 1996). To address such major societal challenges, an
updated, expanded understanding of service design is needed that moves beyond seeing design as a
window dressing for services, toward recognizing design as a core human activity for reshaping
service ecosystems. Looking back, we can see that the understanding of service design has evolved
from the “design of services” to “design for service” through increased integration of servicedominant logic (Kimbell, 2011; Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). As such, the focus of service design has
shifted from expert designers who create value-in-exchange by forming tangible artifacts and
interfaces to a co-design process with service providers and service users that aims to create the
conditions for value-in-use. While service-dominant logic has continued its own development toward
an emphasis on service ecosystems (Lusch & Vargo, 2014; Vargo & Lusch, 2015; 2016), this
perspective has not yet been fully reflected in the understanding of service design. As research on
service design is a clear priority within the service research community (Ostrom et al., 2015), there is
a pressing need to advance some of underlying assumptions within this discussion.
Thus, the purpose of this conceptual paper is to support the continued evolution of service design
through the integration of a service ecosystem perspective that draws on research from institutional
work, systems thinking, and design. In doing so, this research proposes “service ecosystem design” as
the next iteration in the evolution of service design. Service ecosystem design is a process of
collective designing that involves all actors in doing institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006;
Lawrence et al., 2009) to enable desired forms of value-in-context. By building on research related to
design in complex social systems (Bethany, 1996; Jones, 2013; Thackara, 2005) and institutional work
in service ecosystems (Koskela-Huotari et al., 2016; Vargo et al., 2015), this perspective suggests that
actors can design, albeit not control, the emergent, self-organization of service ecosystems by
making, breaking and maintaining institutional arrangements to enable their desired future. In order
to overcome institutional determinism to do institutional work, actors require reflexivity – a “general
awareness of the constraints and opportunities created by the norms, values, beliefs and
expectations of the social structures that surround them” (Suddaby et al., 2016; 5). The authors of
this research suggest that participatory service design methods can help to build actors’ reflexivity to
support the re-design of outdated service ecosystems. This paper contributes to the evolving
discussion on service design within service research through the development of a conceptual
framework for service ecosystem design and outlining four propositions for re-conceptualizing
service design through a service ecosystem perspective, supported by an empirical illustration from
the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.