This paper investigates how educational services can serve as transformative mechanisms in addressing illiteracy and chronic poverty among street children in urban areas of Pakistan. Drawing on the Capability Approach and using Kleine's (2013) Choice Framework as an analytical lens, the study examines how free educational tuition delivered in informal park-based settings contributes to expanding children's substantive freedoms and empowerment. The research is grounded in a qualitative case study that combines semi-structured interviews with ethnographic observations, including participatory involvement by the researcher. The findings highlight two key contributions. First, the study demonstrates how free-of-cost and flexible educational services, coupled with strong mentorship roles, create the necessary conditions for capability expansion - removing barriers related to time, financial resources, and social constraints. Second, the analysis shows how such interventions influence both the intrinsic and instrumental dimensions of well-being, enabling children to re-enter formal education systems, build psychological resilience, and access improved socioeconomic opportunities. By capturing how agency and structure interact across the four dimensions of choice - existence, sense, use, and achievement - the paper offers a context-sensitive analysis of how educational services may create pathways that contribute to disrupting intergenerational poverty under specific structural conditions. The study contributes to both Transformative Service Research and development literature by offering a context-sensitive understanding of how education, when designed around real-life constraints, can promote social inclusion, structural change, and longterm empowerment in marginalized communities.

This thesis explores how services shape human capabilities and well-being by integrating the Choice Framework (Kleine, 2013) into Transformative Service Research (TSR). While TSR promotes the capability approach as a means to assess how services influence well-being, it often lacks practical analytical tools. To address this gap, this thesis adopts and adapts the Choice Framework as a structured method for analyzing how services influence individual agency and structural conditions, ultimately enabling or constraining people’s capabilities. Drawing on two empirical studies - one focusing on hedonic well-being in the digital transformation of the Swedish music market (hedonic well-being) and the other on eudaimonic well-being through free educational services for marginalized children in Pakistan (eudaimonic well-being) - this research demonstrates how service characteristics interact with contextual conditions to influence varying degrees of empowerment. The thesis employs a qualitative research design, using semi-structured interviews in both studies, complemented by ethnographic observations in the second. The findings contribute to both theory and practice by offering a capability-oriented analytical framework for TSR and providing nuanced insights into how service characteristics such as accessibility, affordability, flexibility, and mentorship influence well-being. In doing so, the thesis proposes a rigorous yet adaptable model for evaluating how services operate as mechanisms for transformative value, offering guidance for both scholars and practitioners in designing inclusive and empowering services.

This paper focuses on how digitalisation has influenced actors’ value determination and value creation in the Swedish music market. It draws on the service-dominant logic (SDL) and the service ecosystem perspective to conceptualise value as co-created through the integration of resources by multiple actors in service exchange, enabled and constrained by institutions and institutional arrangements. Empirically, we draw on a qualitative study of the digitalisation of the Swedish music market that consists of fifty-two interviews with various actors. The findings suggest that digitalisation has influenced service engagement and consequently value creation and determination for various actors, and especially for consumers and producers. This paper contributes by integrating SDL and the service ecosystem perspective into music business research in a novel way to promote a deeper understanding of value, value determination, and value co-creation. This paper also contributes to SDL by suggesting that both value-in-exchange and value-in-use are important aspects of value determination and value co-creation.