The Rose and Its Hidden Thorn: Patterning and Evolution of Consumer Vulnerability in Transformative Service Initiatives

Transformative Service Initiatives (TSIs) aim to reduce consumer vulnerability (CV), yet they can reproduce the harm they seek to address. We investigate this paradox in TSIs offering entrepreneurship support to refugees. Study 1, drawing on interviews with forty-two managers from thirty-three TSIs, identifies three service models (access-dominant, balanced-constrained and control-dominant) that organise consumers’ access to resources and control over their use. Each model positions consumers differently, as passive recipients, conditional agents or autonomous strivers, and sustaining each position makes a distinct CV pattern likely: a recurrent form of constrained agency or unmet need. Study 2, a three-year ethnography of a TSI provider (70 interviews, 144 observational sessions), shows how consumers contest their assigned positions within the service relationship: testimonial repositioning (making the lived costs of service participation visible) and prefigurative repositioning (demonstrating what greater enabling resources could make possible). It then traces how these acts contributed to service-model reconfiguration under particular organisational and institutional conditions. Theoretically, findings explain how service models can recurrently pattern vulnerability through consumer positioning and how consumers’ within-relationship responses may contribute to service-model reconfiguration. Managerially, the typology enables managers to diagnose CV risks in their service models and develop organisational capacity for service reconfiguration.