Connected Friction—Collectively Designing Service Ecosystems Through Reflexive Relations

Designing service ecosystems is a collective endeavor in which interdependent actors intentionally reconfigure the social structures coordinating their value cocreation. Because actors experience structures differently, however, they often disagree about how to reconfigure them. Although reflexivity has been identified as a key enabler for service ecosystem design, research has primarily treated it as an individual capacity. Yet transformation guided only by reflexive individuals risks unintended consequences for others and rupturing the relations on which value cocreation depends. In response, we examine how reflexive relations can be stewarded to support service ecosystem design in pursuit of desirable collective outcomes. We define reflexive relations as a form of interaction in which differently positioned actors jointly render the institutionalized social structures coordinating their value cocreation observable, contestable, and open to reconfiguration. Through a two-year cooperative inquiry in Norwegian child welfare, we explicate connected friction as the core dialectic dynamic through which reflexive relations emerge, with uniformity and rupture as hindering dynamics. We also identify four situated conditions—practical distance, actor perspectives, emotional effort, and institutional legitimacy—that require continual attunement to steward reflexive relations in practice. This research reconceptualizes reflexivity as emerging through actors’ relations and shows how ongoing stewardship can leverage conflicting interdependencies as a generative resource for designing service ecosystems.