Recognising the importance of value-creating systems in action is vital for understanding how value is co-created through resource integration and mutual service provision. Value-creating systems are inherently dynamic and grounded in on-going human action. This article adopts structuration and enactment theory to enhance insights into how complex systems enable value co-creation. The concept of embeddedness (structural, cultural, political and cognitive) clarifies the duality of complex service system structures, in which behaviour and structure are intertwined through a process of socialisation. Actors in a complex service system act on the surrounding context and interpret the contextual responses of their actions through a sense-making process. The sense-making process then influences an actor’s mental models of the value that has been co-created, which implies a complex service system that has been socially constructed through negotiation and consensually validated through its own enactment. This study applies the framework to a case setting focused on fear of crime in the London Borough of Sutton.

Although brands are acknowledged as significant assets in a firm's value creation and differentiation process, branding literature often describes opposing perspectives and contradictory demands. This article develops a framework of three strategic brand management archetypes that provide new insights into the complexity and often paradoxical ambiguity of branding. By combining an empirical qualitative study with extant brand management and relational exchange theory, the authors suggests that firms create, reinforce, switch, or allow certain brand management archetypes to coexist to optimize specific effects and manage paradoxes. From a managerial perspective, the article suggests that understanding strategic brand management and related paradoxes is fundamental for organizations to achieve desired effects with their value creation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved.

When public service success is dependent upon creating value that attracts users, public managers can benefit from adopting private sector principles. This article draws on the theory of attractive quality and strategic management research to focus on the theoretical and managerial implications of how organizations' resource allocations affect user experiences. The present study shows how public transit organizations' achievement of twenty-five different service requirements affected their offerings' relevance and preference among 930 users. This article increases the understanding of how strategic choices and prioritization between various service requirements affect both the effectiveness and efficiency of (public) service offerings.