Emotions as Catalysts in Service System Care: Evolving the VSA Framework to Meet Future Challenges

The context in which nowadays service systems take place increasingly demands 'caring' practices that imply an engagement that cannot be simply driven by the actors' interests in the pursuing of their own goals. Harmonising actors' values to be synergistically engaged toward the achievement of a common goal becomes imperative. In such harmonization contexts, sharing information and knowledge to increase actors' awareness and engage in responsible behavior is a key element. Despite the ever wider and easy access to information for all actors in any service systems' context, an irreducible level of information asymmetry always affects interaction and understanding. How then can service systems' caring practices be successful when interaction is affected by information asymmetry? To address this question, this paper digs deep into the role of value categories in service systems' caring practices to understand how they act to increase actors' engagement toward achieving a common goal.