Value co-creation in services for animal companions

Purpose As other actors in the service ecosystem often have a pivotal role in value creation for actors experiencing vulnerability, this paper aims to explore caregiving customer value co-creation in services for animal companions. Design/methodology/approach Study 1 follows a two-step procedure, using two different qualitative approaches (interviews and observations) to identify caregiving customer value co-creation activities. Study 2 serves to empirically test a higher-order structure of caregiving customer participation behaviour in value co-creation and test for differences regarding customer and service characteristics (questionnaire survey; n = 680). Findings The results reveal the existence of various value co-creation activities towards the service provider (e.g. cooperation under consideration of the animal companion’s needs) and animal companion (e.g. emotional support). Significant differences in individual caregiving customers’ activities were found regarding gender, age, type of service and animal companion. Caregiving customer value co-creation is influenced by emotional attachment and has a positive effect on value outcomes for both the caregiving customer and the animal companion. Originality/value This study extends and enriches customer value co-creation literature by providing innovative findings on various such caregiving activities and value outcomes in services for (non-human) actors experiencing vulnerability. It also adds knowledge by showing differences in customer value co-creation behaviour regarding specific customer and service characteristics.

Love and Horror in Grief: An Autopsychography on the Loss of a Beloved Animal Companion

Using an autopsychographic approach as advocated by Yuan and Hickman, this article demonstrates the ways in which love and horror are implicated in one another during the experience of grief at the loss of a companion animal. The relationship between the human and the companion animal is explored through Lacan’s understanding of love premised on lack and an ethical relationship to the lack in the other. When that other dies, horror may be an intrusive emotion premised on a feeling of the uncanny with the familiar becoming unfamiliar. These experiences are then rearticulated in the context of the human–animal relationship through psychoanalytic and existential themes, arguing that the loss of such a relationship needs to be appreciated in theorizations about grief and meaning within the humanistic tradition.

“Forever in Our Hearts” Online: Virtual Deathscapes Maintain Companion Animal Presence

Embodying companion animals as part of ourselves obliges a similar grief, when they die, to the anguish that follows the death of a human partner, relative, or close friend. Individual mourning may fail to assuage pain that is further intensified when the bereaved human lacks society’s recognition not only of their grief but also of the intrinsic worth of their deceased animal companion. Such disenfranchised grief may lead to isolation and to withdrawal from social integration. However, diverse memorials recorded online, and reasons for their inclusion in cyberspace, are enabling validation of the lives of nonhuman animal companions by both isolated and more sociable pet-bereaved mourners.

Emotion Work of Coping with the Death of a Companion Animal

This study uses qualitative data to explore how guardians cope with the death of animal companions. Respondents struggle with the expectations of a speciesist emotion culture that mediates bereavement following the death of a non-human animal. This struggle reveals four key aspects of emotion work: 1) justifying grief to themselves and others; 2) accepting that the companion animal has died at the “right time”; 3) using rituals, religion, or spirituality to cope; and 4) adopting a new animal companion.

The Oedipal Animal? Companion Species and Becoming

This chapter raises the issue of Deleuze and Guattari’s tendency to perpetuate the anthropocentric limitations of philosophy. Does Capitalism and Schizophrenia provides us with tools for dismantling anthropocentrism or is it another majoritarian philosophical work centering on the human being? What is the position of empirical, ‘molar’ nonhuman animals in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy? When answering these questions, the chapter focuses on the category of becoming-animal, and juxtaposes it with Donna Haraway’s concepts of ‘co-evolution’, ‘becoming-with’ and ‘companion species.’ Haraway’s critique of the wolf-dog opposition in A Thousand Plateaus shows that its authors do little more there than employ conventional imagery of domestic and wild animals. Using Haraway’s term, becoming could be modified into becoming-with in order to stress the reality of a molar dimension of the minor term of becoming as well as the connection between molecular transformations occurring in the process of becoming and their effect on the molar being of the minor term. From this perspective, the history of humans’ and dogs’ co-evolution may be viewed as a space in which becoming-with can take place.