Citation
Heinonen, K., Holmlund, M. and Strandvik, T. (2013), "Stimulating innovative service research", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 24 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-06-2013-0149
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Stimulating innovative service research
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Service Management, Volume 24, Issue 5
About the Guest Editors
Dr Tore Martin Strandvik is a Professor of Marketing at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. His research interests are service, relationships and marketing communication in business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. His work has been published in, for example, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of Service Management.
Dr Kristina Heinonen is Hanken Foundation Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the Department of Marketing at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland. She is also the Director of Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS), a Knowledge and Research Centre associated at Hanken. Heinonens research interests include service value, social media, dynamics of customer relationships, and marketing communication. Her work has been published in, for example, Journal of Service Management, Management Decision, Managing Service Quality, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, and European Business Review.
Dr Maria Holmlund is a Professor of Marketing at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include methodological and conceptual issues related to service and customer-oriented management in business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. Her publications have appeared in, for example, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Marketing Management, and International Small Business Journal.
Over the last decade, service research has experienced a new coming, partly inspired by newly-proposed logics (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Grönroos, 2006; Heinonen et al., 2010). Simultaneously there have been many shifts related to service in the business community, such as the infusion of service in manufacturing companies offerings as well as the rapid expansion of information technology (IT) infrastructure and use, social media, and consumers concern for quality of life and well-being. For service researchers, these trends have opened numerous new avenues for research and brought forward debate and discussion regarding the future of service research.
Many reviews of service research have been published (Pilkington and Chai, 2008; Kunz and Hogreve, 2011; Lages et al., 2013) as well as agendas for future research proposed (Ostrom et al., 2010). This opens up reflection on what would be innovative and interesting service research, i.e. what is relevant, thought-provoking and exciting in service. What constitutes interesting research is not a new question; sociologist Davis (1971) proposed that a theorist is considered great, not because his theories are right, but because they are interesting, or in the extreme, fascinating. What makes scholarly work interesting is that it disconfirms some, but not all, assumptions held by its audience and engages readers attention by standing out “in contrast to the web of routinely taken-for-granted propositions which make up the structure of their everyday life (Davis, 1971, p. 311). While Davis (1971) suggestions primarily address how researchers can and should challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions, a more recent piece by Jaworski (2011) deals with how to conduct managerially-interesting research in marketing. He offers many recommendations that would broaden the scope for service researchers; for example, focus research on contextual variables, such as industry norms and competitive dynamics, craft research and recommendations to specific tasks and positions in a company, and aim for deep exposure in order to grasp the managers perspective.
Another category of studies calls for more attention to conceptual contributions since conceptual advances, critical to the vitality of any discipline, seem to be declining (MacInnis, 2011; Yadav, 2010). MacInnis (2011) systematically discusses different types of conceptual contributions such as revising, delineating, differentiating, summarizing, and integrating, using Davis (1971) interestingness as a criterion. To advance future conceptual advances, she recommends valuing conceptualizations, addressing underrepresentation of certain types of conceptualizations, developing a beginners mind, and fostering training in conceptual skills development. To expand the context of discovery Yadav (2010) recommends using analogies, switching the level of analysis to explore focal phenomena, and combining previously unconnected fields or bodies of knowledge.
Overall, generating research questions through problematization by identifying and challenging the assumptions underlying existing theories appears to be a central element in developing more interesting and influential theories. Despite this, Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) find that the formulation of research questions typically is based on “gap-spotting, identifying or constructing gaps in existing literature that need to be filled with three basic modes, i.e. confusion, neglect, and application, which means that the assumptions underlying existing literature for the most part remain unchallenged; thus, already-influential theories are reinforced rather than challenged. Instead, they (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011; Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011) recommend a more reflective scholarship, namely the problematization methodology. This is a set of specific principles for how assumptions in existing theory can be problematized and generate novel research questions through the following:
identifying a domain of literature for assumption-challenging investigations;
identifying its assumptions (in-house, root metaphor, paradigm, ideology, and field assumptions);
assessing them, pointing out shortcomings and oversights;
developing new assumptions and formulating research questions;
relating the alternative assumption to an identified audience and assessing the audiences potential resistance and responsiveness to it; and
evaluating whether the alternative assumptions are likely to generate a theory that will be seen as interesting and crafting the alternative line of inquiry so that readers will respond positively to it.
A whole range of other factors, such as creativity, imagination, reflexivity, range of knowledge mastered, and a broad understanding of different metatheoretical standpoints is also critical.
In line with the above researchers, this issue presents a selection of papers that offer innovative ideas or, using Davis (1971) notion, interesting and even fascinating viewpoints and findings. Innovative papers add insight; they are not merely new, but offer different perspectives that alter others thinking and doing.
This special issue contains six articles that represent innovative and topical aspects of service research. They were presented at the 7th Biannual AMA SERVSIG International Service Research Conference held in Helsinki on June 7-9, 2012. This conference, initiated by Liam Glynn and Ray Fisk in 1998, is held each time in a different country, with the goal of drawing the service marketing community together in an open, flexible, and fun atmosphere (Fisk and Patrício, 2011). The 2012 conference was hosted by the Department of Marketing and CERS, the Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management at the Hanken School of Economics. CERS was founded in 1994 to inspire research in service and relationship marketing (http://www.cers.fi). The conference, Chaired by Kristina Heinonen and Co-chaired by Anu Helkkula, Maria Holmlund, Tore Strandvik, Christian Grönroos, and Peter Björk, attracted more than 270 participants representing 31 countries from six continents – Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia.
The conference theme was Innovative Service Perspectives, and the articles in this special issue are both exemplars of the theme and of interest for academics and practitioners. Each paper takes a step beyond the current understanding, breaking new grounds for further service research. This corresponds to the research ideals for the Nordic School of Service Research, which has a home base at CERS (Grönroos, 1991; Gummesson and Grönroos, 2012).
The articles included in this issue were chosen based on a multi-stage review process. Initially, the organizing committee reviewed more than 230 submissions and 200 of the selected were included as presentations in the parallel sessions of the conference. Presenting authors were invited to submit papers for consideration for publication in this special issue, which resulted in 26 submissions. Each submitted article was first desk reviewed and then further reviewed by two additional reviewers in a blind review. Several rounds of revisions finally resulted in six papers being accepted by the guest editors. To avoid conflict of interest, the review process by the two guest editors was kept at arms length, meaning that Maria Holmlund was responsible for including the paper in the short list, assigning reviewers to the paper, evaluating the revisions, and making the final decision in co-operation with the reviewers.
Three articles represent examples of different types of innovative service research in terms of approach and core topic. Heiko Gebauer and Javier Reynoso, in their article titled “An agenda for service research at the base of the pyramid (BoP), demonstrate with a bibliographic analysis how BoP research is linked to current service research priorities. They deal with an emerging topic within service research outside the traditional scope: the issue of service for low-income customers in developing countries. Service research on these markets is exceptionally important and relevant, because established service theories and empirical generalizations derived from data gathered in the developed world are not necessarily applicable to BoP markets. One of their conclusions is that research priorities such as technology-enabled services, service innovation, service systems, service-dominant logic, and transformative services could play a vital role in BoP research. Another conclusion addresses the need to understand the managerial aspects of BoP initiatives as service research on the BoP could provide new ideas for practitioners interested in learning about these markets, strategies, and entrepreneurial initiatives.
Tore Martin Strandvik and Kristina Heinonen, in “Diagnosing service brand strength: customer-dominant brand relationship mapping, extend service research to corporate brand issues and develop an approach for monitoring service brand strength from a customer perspective. They combine ideas from branding, service, and relationship management literature through a customer-dominant-logic lens and use findings from an exploratory empirical study to illustrate the use of a new diagnostic tool. Their approach is unique because it includes behavior with a relational perspective, includes negative responses including negative attitudes and behavior that reduce overall brand strength, and fundamentally takes a customer-dominant perspective on brand strength.
Lars Witell and Martin Löfgren, in their article “From service for free to service for fee: business model innovation in manufacturing firms, explore how business model innovation can be used to make the transition from free service-to-service collecting a fee. This transition from free to fee can aid a manufacturing firm in increasing service revenues when infusing services in their business. The choice of topic deals with a scarcely-covered service research topic, how to generate revenue from services, and is also managerially highly relevant. Their results provide a range of transition strategies to pursue changes in the business model, incremental business model innovation, and radical business model innovation. They specifically identify and discuss eight strategies for transitioning from service for free to service for a fee. Contrary to previous research that puts an emphasis on bundling products and services into solutions, they find that transition strategies from free to a fee and unbundling of services seem to be key ingredients in building a profitable service business.
Three articles share a different but complementing interest in customer activities. Karl-Jacob Mickelsson, in his article “Customer activity in service, goes beyond the boundaries of interactions with service providers to focus on the customers independent activity, of which interaction is only a part. He defines customer activities as discrete sequences of behavior that aim to create or support some type of value in the customers life or business. His findings from online gaming suggest that customers can be grouped into profiles based on different activity patterns. The empirical study showed that this is possible by revealing three distinct customer groups with very different activity combinations, which can have practical implications in service design and communication, for example. The article is innovative in that it exposes customers activities that are invisible to service providers but belong to the same system of value-creating activities as those facilitated by the provider.
In the article “Social layers of customer-to-customer value co-creation, Ivana Rihova, Dimitrios Buhalis, Miguel Moital, and Mary-Beth Gouthro use customer-dominant logic as a perspective to extend current value co-creation discussions by providing conceptual insights into co-creation within customers social spheres. They bridge current thinking on value within the customer-dominant logic with service management perspectives on customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions and social science concepts on consumer communities. They develop a conceptual framework for co-creation within customers social spheres and find that value emerges in four distinctive social layers: “detached customers, “social bubble, “temporary communitas, and “ongoing neo-tribes. They contribute to service research by introducing a C2C co-creation perspective, conceptualizing the social layers within which value is formed, and providing specific propositions to service managers with regards to servicescape structuring and other strategies that facilitate C2C co-creation.
Carla Martins and Lia Patricio, in their article “Understanding participation in company social networks, take another approach on understanding customer activity by exploring how customers participate in company social networks. They adopt a grounded theory approach involving an exploratory study of the page stream of a large retailer company for an extended time period, followed by a qualitative study with in-depth individual interviews and focus groups including a substantial number of members of the same social network. The in-depth understanding of the new phenomenon reveals it to be multi-faceted following analysis with the rich data collected. Their study contributes an in-depth understanding of factors of participation in company social networks to advance research in this area and to help companies define their strategies in this new context.
We would like to express our gratitude to Jay Kandampully (Editor of the Journal of Service Management) for giving us the opportunity to guest edit this special issue. We especially want to thank the reviewers of this issue: Steve Baron, Sergio Biggeman, Bo Enquist, Thorsten Gruber, Jens Hogreve, Carol Kelleher, Tore Mysen, Gaby Odekerken-Schröder, Line Olsen, Stefano Pace, Linda Peters, Francesco Polese, Minna Pihlström, SailaSaraniemi, Sven Tuzovic, Jaana Tähtinen, Ute Walter, and Charlotta Windahl.
Our gratitude also goes to the members of the 2012 AMA SERVSIG International Research Conference Committee:
Steve Baron, University of Liverpool, UK
Tom DeWitt, University of Hawaii-Hilo, USA
Bo Edvardsson, Karlstad University, Sweden
Raymond P. Fisk, Texas State University, USA
Dwayne Gremler, Bowling Green University, USA
Lia Patrício, University of Porto, Portugal
Javier Reynoso, EGADE Business School, Tecnológico de Monterrey, México
Jochen Wirtz, National University of Singapore, Singapore
We would finally like to thank all of those who were involved in the conference, such as the conference co-chairs, session chairs, conference participants, and all the people at CERS who – with their engaged and positive attitudes – made the conference a huge success.
And finally, we invite you to participate in the 8th AMA SERVSIG International Service Research Conference with the theme of “Services Marketing in the New Economic and Social Landscape. The conference will be from June 13 to 15, 2014, in Thessaloniki, Greece, and hosted by the Departments of Marketing and Operations Management and Business Administration of the University of Macedonia. Rodoula H. Tsiotsou will be the conference chair, and Yannis Hajidimitriou, Maria Vlachopoulou, Chris Vassiliadis, and Andreas Andronikidis will be co-chairs. Additional conference details are available at: http://www.servsig2014.uom.gr/
References
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Kristina Heinonen, Maria Holmlund, Tore Strandvik
Guest Editors