The Transformative Service Research (TSR) movement has focused a growing number of service researchers on the topic of improving human well-being in service experiences and service systems. Recently, ServCollab (a human services nonprofit based on the logic of TSR) expanded its mission: “to serve humanity through research collaborations that catalyze reducing suffering, improving well-being, and enabling well-becoming” (servcollab.org). Well-becoming is the process of becoming prepared to experience well-being in the future. A recent Journal of Service Research Service Research Priorities article selected “Services for disadvantaged consumers and communities” as one of its research priorities (#7) and proposed the sub-themes of “addressing inequities in service provision and outcomes” and “putting humans first.” In this paper, we propose the new concept of “enabling marketplaces” to enumerate transformative aspects of marketplaces that actively work with consumers to enable well-becoming and inclusion; that put humans first. 

Consumer vulnerability has been a frequent research topic. The prevailing perspective on consumer vulnerability is deficits-based. Such a perspective focuses on what a person lacks instead of focusing on the marketplace circumstances that create vulnerability. Adopting a strengths-based approach to vulnerability, we choose instead to “consider the strengths that consumers bring to an experience of vulnerability” focusing on the embodied resources consumers use to deal with such situations. We will outline these embodied resources as a key part of enabling marketplaces. Previous research argues consumers who experience vulnerability are not just passive recipients of the bad things that come their way. They may be just as well active, instrumentally acting in relation to different forms of vulnerability. Forthcoming TSR inspired research on digital inclusion also takes a strengths-based perspective. 

Based on an extensive dataset, gathered from multiple mobility service contexts for disabled consumers, using different qualitative and semi-ethnographical methods, our study makes several contributions to our current understanding of a strengths-based perspective for enabling marketplaces. In particular, we identify three forms of embodied resources consumers bring to an experience of vulnerability. First, we identify re-framing as consumers’ action complexes taken in relation to changes in service provision. Second, relating, centers on consumers’ modes of activities concerning their interdependence with service provides. Third, consumers’ modes of activities taken to manage their emotions is defined as regulating. All three forms of embodied resources indicate agency, an ability to handle the situation in a way that enables well-becoming; to become prepared to experience well-being again. In addition, our study also provides managerial implications related to providers’ opportunity to co-create services with consumers; processes that adopt a strengths-based perspective for enabling marketplaces and thereby consumers’ well-becoming.