This paper aims to develop a more-than-human approach to transformative service systems by examining how service is constituted as a relational and material accomplishment within evolving configurations of human actors, technologies, bodies, spaces, materials and institutional conditions.
The study combines relational ontology, abductive qualitative reasoning and microhistorical analysis. Drawing on embedded participation, project documents and interviews within the Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) initiative, five microhistories are reconstructed and compared to trace how service systems are composed, adjusted and evaluated in practice.
The analysis develops a framework comprising three interdependent dimensions: service arrangements, which explain how service-system capacity is relationally composed; service-in-the-making, which captures its situated realisation through ongoing adjustment; and value-in-enactment, which explains how service consequences become recognisable, interpretable and accountable. Across the microhistories, transformative capacity emerges through relational configurations that sustain care, inclusion, dignity, well-being and well-becoming.
The paper extends Transformative Service Research beyond analytically human-centred accounts while retaining its commitment to human well-being. It introduces relational configuration as the concept explaining how transformative service-system capacity is composed, realised and evaluated through human and more-than-human relations.
