Forging ahead: Theorizing the market-shaping roles of community-based organizations in transformative services

Community-based organizations (CBOs) play a pivotal role in transformative services, bridging the worlds of service delivery and community engagement (Blocker and Barrios, 2015; Minkler et al., 2008). For instance, Australian Schools Plus and The Smith Family are CBOs working with central government to facilitate value co-creation for children experiencing vulnerability. Prior marketing and social work research (e.g., Beaulieu et al., 2018; Davey et al., 2021; Islam, 2017; Nehls, 2021) demonstrates the significance of grass-root CBOs’ contribution to individual and collective well-being. Government and private funding agencies leverage CBOs for mobilization of resources to alleviate experiences of vulnerability. However, CBOs often struggle to articulate the differences they make within a service ecosystem and how their role performances catalyse market-shaping efforts toward transformative service outcomes. CBOs transform the lives of their service users by contesting and altering the resources and schemas that define service users’ reality and the broader social structures (Blocker and Barrios, 2015). Yet interestingly, service research does not specifically delineate CBO roles as value co-creators nor market-shaper catalysts (Nenonen and Storbacka, 2021; Windahl et al., 2020). To address these knowledge gaps, we ask: what are the roles CBOs enact as catalysts for improving wellbeing outcomes of market-shaping efforts, and how does catalysing market-shaping efforts alleviate experiences of vulnerability within a service ecosystem?