How New Digital-Based Service Offers Change Consumer Practices: A Theory of Social Practise (TSP) Approach

Scientific research analyzing the impact of new service offers in recent years has predominantly employed three conceptual frameworks for examining service processes and value creation: (1) the “service-dominant logic” (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2015) and “value in use” (Grönroos et al., 2015) principles applied to the interpretation and implementation of such research, (2) concepts applied to the interpretation and study of innovations (Sinek, 2010; Luckman & Hegene 2013; Norman & Verganti 2014) and (3) the Theory of Social Practices (Reckwitz 2002a; Warde 2005, 2014) – the latter being a framework that has recently been gaining in importance. These three frameworks all concur that the creation of value within service offers should be analyzed in the context of the social practices in which they are embedded. In other words, the broad approach shared by these frameworks argues that examining value purely through individual assessments, supplier-consumer relationships, or solely through supplier actions is inadequate.

The Theory of Social Practices (TSP) (Reckwitz 2002a; Warde 2005, 2014; Shove & Pantzar 2005; Spotswood et al. 2015; Shove & Walker 2005, 2010) conceptualizes social practice as a configuration of meanings that reflects the rules (what is “right” or “inappropriate” for a given practice) and values of activities and resources used in a specific way (i.e., according to the rules, to derive value) for that practice. Practices exist only when they are performed, they are reproduced only in the activities that perform them. The Theory of Social Practices interprets each particular act of consumption or use as a “moment” of a specific collective, routine practice. In these social practices, repeated actions thus embody an understanding of mutually recognized rules and knowledge about the use of resources. However, this understanding of rules and knowledge exists only to the extent that it manifests itself in actions. Resources enable, but simultaneously limit, the performance of practices.

Changes in practices involve reconfigurations of these elements and extend beyond mere shifts in the principles whereby those practices are performed (Reckwitz 2002a; Warde 2005, 2014). Rather, TSP posits that research should focus on the practices themselves and their interconnections to understand value creation processes, and that transformations of these practices are crucial areas of concern in such research. Different practices may influence or inhibit one another and should not be studied in isolation (Spurling et al. 2013; Welch 2017). Table 1 presents a comparison of the individualistic interpretation vs the kind of interpretation posited by the Theory of Social Practice regarding consumer decisions.

Changes in practices involve reconfigurations of these elements and extend beyond mere shifts in the principles whereby those practices are performed (Reckwitz 2002a; Warde 2005, 2014). Rather, TSP posits that research on value creation processes should focus on practices themselves and their interconnections, and that transformations of these practices shold be crucial areas of concern in value creation research. Different practices may influence or inhibit each other and should not be studied in isolation (Spurling et al., 2013; Welch, 2017). Table 1 presents a comparison of the elements of the individualistic interpretation of consumer decisions vs the kind of interpretation posited by the Theory of Social Practice.

The Theory of Social Practices (TSP) proposes a “cultural turn” in understanding consumption processes, providing an alternative to theories grounded in individualistic assumptions (Reckwitz, 2002a; Warde, 2005; 2014). Schwanen et al. (2012) advocate for using cultural explanations in researching and designing new solutions for digital-based service offerings, such as urban transport in urban transport. This perspective encourages a synthesis of insights from various fields of science, fostering more interdisciplinary research and new directions of knowledge development. As noted above, we identified a certain research gap in terms of the possible application of the Theory of Social Practices to understanding how new digital-based service offerings precipitate changes in existing consumer practices and the emergence of new practices. This gap, therefore, is an incentive to look towards the Theory of Social Practices as a new research approach for management sciences.

The advancement of technology enables consumers to differentiate their modes of activity on the market and to choose among the alternative services on offer. New digital technologies change the modalities, increasing multimodal options, but also transform consumers’ practices. This transformation occurs as consumers improvise with the technology, integrating it with other assets, and as other stakeholders adapt related practices.

Today, digital transformation solutions harness technology to generate new customer experiences, cultural norms, and business practices. This entails utilizing cutting-edge technological advances to modify corporate strategies and offers for the digital era. For instance, with the rise of 3G, 4G, and now 5G, clients can book by-the-minute car rental services (“carsharing” services) swiftly and easily without any human interaction, making it a seamless process from start to end without even minimal human assistance – the process has become more streamlined, faster, easier, and efficient for customers as well as very productive and efficient for the provider company to handle (Autorent, 2020). Customers are smarter nowadays, investigating and researching even minute decisions as information has become easily accessible. They also – for instance – look for car rental services integrated with a complete service value package (Autorent, 2020).

Researchers also point to limitations in interpreting the role of the Internet as a tool for coordinating urban mobility. Farag and Lyons (2010) empirically confirmed, in a quantitative study, the assumption that the intention to use information services in travel planning is a consequence of users’ consideration of modality options, and not the other way around.

Glenn (2018) argues that the Internet is not only a means of coordinating transport modalities but also an alternative to people and goods physically traveling distances (e.g., delivery of digital products). Therefore, urban mobility challenges and solutions should not be limited to physical transport modalities. In other words, by influencing how we communicate via the Internet, we can reduce the scale of physical transport, not just coordinate its modalities.

Papa and Lauwers (2015) point out that urban mobility research and design, which has so far been based on the recognition that technology is a tool for improving and optimizing transport planning, should also include the social behavior of users as a critical element of the above-mentioned research and projects.

The achievements of research on urban mobility are based on (1) contextual analysis of values, (2) the category of routine social practices as the subject of research, and (3) the transformation of these practices as a research problem. In this section present the two most critical studies relevant to this topic.

One crucial paper, Echeverri and Skålén (2011) – a qualitative study of value co-creation in public transport journeys in Gothenburg, Sweden – showed that the actions of bus and tram drivers contribute to the joint value creation of public transport journeys when passengers adequately understand the principles of their practice and, consequently, the actions of drivers and passengers converge in creating the value of the trip. The scholars found that (1) informing users about the rules (institutions) for implementing rides inspires a more convergent understanding of procedures and activities between providers and users, (2) helping to address difficulties in implementing the practice increases users’ participation in the practice. The main theoretical contribution of this study is the suggestion that the creation of trip value is a matter of the intersubjective alignment of how suppliers (here: drivers) and users understand the procedures and how they work in a given process, and not just a matter of the suppliers’ intentions and users’ perceptions of value considered separately. In their study, Echeverri and Skålén (2011) applied the framwork of the Theory of Social Practices (or “practice theory” – assessing principles, actions, tools, and the relationships between them) for qualitative analysis of the formation – i.e., co-creation, co-reduction, co-destruction – of the value of public transport trips. One limitation of this study is that the authors recognized one practice of the status quo of urban mobility (public transport trips, i.e., the context of a single practice) and not consider its transformation. Understanding the principles and skillful acting is not achieved automatically; instead, they are attained via repetitive interactions between service providers and users. Positive and negative valuations are based on the practice principles.

Incremental changes improve the practice from the point of view of the principles. Torkkeli et al. (2018) have contributed to the current understanding of practice elements. Despite the insights that can be gleaned from studies of a single practice (alongside Echeverri & Skålén, 2011, these include Heidenstrøm 2021; Medberg & Heinonen, 2014; Torkkeli et al., 2018; Magaudda, 2011), studying a single practice does not demonstrate that the main principle of the practice is challengeable and transformable.

In the second critical study, Spotswood et al. (2015) suggest, based on qualitative research conducted in two British cities, that cycling remains a marginal urban mobility practice (accounting for 2% of urban trips) until users gain access to new resources/tools (separate car and bicycle lanes, facilities for cyclists at destinations) that in turn inspire new practice. Despite the introduction of restrictions on entry, parking, and fees for entering city centers, the dominant practice remains using cars for daily commuting. The current information and motivational activities (information campaigns) about the possibilities of replacing commuting by car with commuting by bicycle are an insufficient mechanism to trigger such a transformation. Other stakeholders need to provide additional infrastructure tools and, as a result, to facilitate their competent use – the competencies needed for driving in separate lanes are lower than those for cycling in car lanes. The authors also suggest that incremental interventions in one practice (introducing car speed limits and increased parking fees) cause changes in other practices. Therefore, actions in the sphere of regulation (speed limits, higher parking fees at workplaces) and infrastructure (separating bicycle traffic from car lanes, providing showers and changing rooms) are the appropriate ones to be taken in seeking to transform the practices of everyday urban commuting.

Taken together, these two key studies show that the TSP framework can be used to represent both the interaction of practices in one urban modality (Echeverri & Skålén, 2011) and the transformation of urban mobility practices, understood as replacing the current practice of urban commuting by car with commuting by bicycle and, as a result, increasing the value of sustainable development (Spotswood et al., 2015).

Summarizing our literature review, we can say that previous studies on practices, such as these, exhibit several limitations. First, TSP-based studies are generally limited in scope to considering value formation in one particular practice. Second, the transformation is conceptualized as a traditional practice coming to be replaced by a newer one, as the achievement of certain predetermined values. Third, the practices being investigated were themselves predetermined in those studies. The researchers studied intuitively identified practices, assumed to be unchanging from the starting point of their research to their results. The call to identify the practices themselves as part of the findings of the studies, rather than assuming them a priori (Smagacz-Poziemska et al., 2020), here remains unfulfilled. Thus, in opposition to the focus on such technology-driven new modalities, practice theory scholars instead recommend exploring the practices (Shove & Walker, 2014; Smagacz-Poziemska et al., 2020) and focusing on how the demand for them is inspired by other practices (Shove et al., 2015).

This is how we arrived at the research questions considered in the present study: RQ(1) How do new service offers (in our case: short-term car rental or “carsharing”) transform current practices (in our case: commuting practice)? RQ(2) What are the resultant practices?

To address these research questions, we carried out an exploratory study involving a contextual analysis of two services offered in commuting modalities: public transport (PT) and digitally-accessed short-term car rental (STCR). Our analysis focused on identifying the elements of the practices – contextual principles, (in)congruent skilled actions of stakeholders, and assets used – and their changes, as suggested by TSP (Reckwitz, 2002a, 2002b; Holtz, 2014; Spotswood et al., 2015; Warde, 2005, 2014).

We applied TSP as the theoretical framework for our study, selecting two modalities performed by the same informants, commuting by PT (1) and by STCR (2). This choice was driven by our aim to study practices without assuming that newer practices should replace older ones, counter to the assumptions made in previous studies. Our decision was also influenced by emerging trends in mobility, such as sustainability, electric mobility, and shared mobility, all of which harness digital technologies as potential solutions to urban transportation challenges.

To understand value formation (co-creation or co-destruction) as the output of (in)congruence between the providers’ and beneficiaries’ actions (Echeverri & Skålén, 2011), we focused on how stakeholders interact within these practices. We gathered the data and coded it in line with TSP guidelines.

Our study was exploratory and qualitative, with interviews chosen as the primary data collection method. These interviews were structured around a scenario, with questions constructed to probe various categories of social practices (policies/institutions, activities, tools, and interactions between stakeholders). We followed the guidelines that a typical TSP project requires 15–25 participants in research on generating new constructs and relations between them, and that participants should be selected for their knowledge about the questions/issues and their willingness to share their knowledge and experiences with the researcher (Zeithaml et al. 2020). The study population consisted of people using publicly accessible transport (PT and/or STCR) in three cities in Poland, who do not have their own cars and who commute to work or school.

Data was collected from 33 individual interviews with users of PT and/or STCR. The interviewees were aged from 19 to 25 (23 men and 10 women), who were either university students or had jobs and who did not use their own cars on city journeys. The interviews were conducted using a mixed-method approach: they partly consisted of in-depth interviews (IDIs) carried out both face-to-face and via teleconference, and were partly supplemented via online surveys (CAWI). Each session lasted approximately 40 minutes. In addition to responses to the interview questions, our respondents provided four self-taken photographs depicting key elements of the two practices they participated in, along with written explanations regarding Social Practice Theory. Data was collected in three cities in Poland with over 500,000 inhabitants (Warsaw, Gdansk and Wroclaw) from February to March, 2020. The interviews were conducted with the participation of the research firm IMAS International Sp. z o.o. Institute for Market and Social Opinion Research from Wroclaw, which has many years of research experience in both domestic and foreign markets. The generated data (respondents’ answers) were organized in an Excel database. Interpretations of the data were made from the standpoint of the categories of social practice theory and the logic of interactive co-creation (or co-destruction) of values within individual consumer practices.

We statistically analyzed the reported travel time using PT and STCR, initially treating them as observable, intuitive commuting practices. The use of STCR accounted for a small proportion of the interviewees’ city trips, with study participants generally having used this service 2–4 times in the previous eight weeks. However, four of them had used the STCR more than five times. The duration of car journeys was shorter (average = 28.2 minutes, median = 20 minutes) than for journeys by public transport (average = 32.3 minutes, median = 25 minutes), though with more significant variability (standard deviation = 18.3) than public transport (standard deviation = 16.88). The time taken to walk to a public transport stop was shorter (average = 4.09 minutes, median = 3 minutes) than that required to walk to a parked rental car (average = 5.34 minutes, median = 5 minutes), and was also less variable (standard deviation = 2.73 for PT, 4.40 for STCR). We interpret these total travel times (walking and journey) as measures of difficulty in getting to the places where our informants performed their target practices (studying, working) and, consequently, as difficulties in accessing these practices.

Initially, we interpreted the data assuming that commuting by PT and STCR are distinct practices. However, further analysis of interviews revealed insights about the use of dedicated bus lanes in both PT and STCR. Based on this, we re-interpreted the data and instead identified two other practices in our findings: first, commuting by fully electric short time-rented cars in bus lanes during rush hours, and second, commuting by short time-rented cars with combustion engines during off-peak hours. Commuters themselves shaped these two practices after a period of improvisation with available short-term rental cars (new assets of a new practice). This illustrates how commuters actively shape and transform their practices, rather than just adopting available offers.

In the following sections, we discuss these empirical findings in more detail, highlighting how they contribute to our understanding of commuter activities and service usage.

Durng the course of our study, we identified the following commuting practices: (1) commuting by fully electric cars and direct connections of public transport in bus lanes, passing through traffic jams during peak periods, and (2) commuting by non-fully electric cars (without permission to use bus lanes) and non-direct connections of public transport in off-peak periods. Note that these practices are different than merely the use of PT vs. the use of STCR.

Our findings (Fig. 1) indicate that using a new means of transport (STCR) as a digital-based service offer is not the same as mobility practices, in which consumers avail themselves of the offer as an asset.

Figure 1.

Users can make use of the same offer in two different practices they perform. Users combine the new offer with other assets (dedicated and regular traffic lanes) to perform their commuting practices. Our findings show that STCR operators have, in fact, provided new assets to existing practices.

Although our study has focused on commuting, we can report an additional finding not visible in Figure 1. The data analysis revealed other practices, where the commuters need to be on time. As a consequence, we can state that the two mobility practices mediate other practices (living in a defined place, working, studying), which also have their own “timetables” (i.e., to perform these practices, commuters must be in a specific place at a certain time). The informants found themselves in a hurry, arrived on time, or were late because study and work schedules are rigid and distant from where users live. Commuters are over-mobile because they have to commute between time and space strict practices. Consequently, the elimination of rigid timetables in working and studying practices reduces the scale of “rushing” and “being late” in the performance of commuting. It also reduces the intensity of performing mobility practices.

It seems evident that other digital-based offers, like online work and studies, reduce mobility. However, a live online lecture every Friday at 8:00 AM is an example of time rigidity. Transferring a traditional oral exam to an online setting exemplifies cultural rigidity. Studies of the rigidities of these relatively new online practices are rare. The traffic jams during rush hours should be reduced by projects pertaining to dwelling, commuting, studying, and working practices, implemented by relevant interdisciplinary teams, rather than by mobility specialists focusing only on mobility-related data. The complexity of transforming mobility practices is not about changing the assets within those practices but about initiating interdisciplinary research and projects of a sort that typically do not emerge due to the siloed organization of city government departments.

Based on the insights from our research, we developed a model (Table 4) that facilitates a critical analyses of how technological advancements in new consumer offers transform consumer practices. This model embeds practical and policy implications throughout the research agenda, to guide companies and policymakers when making consumer mobility-related decisions.

This model positions consumer practices as units of research, in which consumers improvise and form their own practices independently of the providers, combining the assets the latter provide. It offers a new perspective compared to previous research, which often views consumer practices as predefined. Our approach encourages exploration of how consumers adapt and innovate in response to new offerings, providing insights into the dynamic nature of consumer activities.