Marketing theory and practice highlight the significance of co-creation among market actors (e.g. firms and/or consumers) for mutually beneficial valued outcomes. The essence of such collaborations is the social relationships that facilitate opportunities for resource exchange. The significance of social contexts for value creation is emphasized within the marketing literature. Despite its importance, the nature of social constellations—particularly the concept of embeddedness—is rarely discussed in the context of service-dominant (S-D) logic, the most influential school of thought in marketing.This significantly confines the extant understanding of factors that influence value co-creation amongst actors in service systems. Grounded in its sociological foundations, the concept of embeddedness has the potential to provide meaningful insights into the dynamics of value co-creation processes. Against this background, the present thesis develops a comprehensive conceptual framework to establish the importance of embeddedness as a powerful construct, and for understanding actors’ resource integration processes in service systems. This research develops a rich theoretical and empirical understanding of embeddedness by way of three dimensions (structural, relational and cultural), and investigates its implications for actors’ value co-creation behaviours and value-in-context outcomes. In addition, the research refines co-creation perspectives by examining a central boundary condition of co-creation processes. The data was collected in an online service environment and was analysed using structural equation modelling techniques. The findings support a significant impact of embeddedness on consumers’ co-creation behaviours and their value outcomes. Overall, the study contributes by foregrounding conceptual and empirical insights into embeddedness, and advances S-D logic research by clarifying how actors’ value perceptions are socially constructed, adapted and consumed to co-create meaningful service experiences.
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