Creating or destroying value for users? Lessons about activation from qualitative studies in Norway and Denmark

This article contributes to a growing stream of research on service co-creation and users' experiences and use of activation services. In public management research, the idea of a public service logic has gained increasing prominence. A key point is that a better understanding of what a service genuinely is, has implications for how to develop more user-centric and efficient services. This article applies a public service logic in a critical interpretive synthesis of qualitative research findings regarding users' experiences with activation services in Denmark and Norway. It shows that activation services are necessarily co-created, as users contribute resources to co-create services. Only users can transform these services into individual value, helping them in their process towards work. Services made by utilizing users' resources but not answering to users' needs may destroy individual value. Some activation services tend to contribute more to individual value creation than other services, but most services can contribute to both value creation and destruction, depending on users' needs and circumstances. Public services must also create public value. Services users are obliged to participate in co-creating and which give priority to the creation of public value, such as clarifying eligibility for long term benefits often lead to the destruction of individual value. Taking users' co-creation of service as a starting point in the design of and research on activation services will contribute to provide more user-centric services, increase the priority given to creation of individual over public value and thereby improve the outcome of activation policy.