Editorial

Citation

Bo Edvardsson, P. (2006), "Editorial", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijsim.2006.08517aaa.001

Editorial

This issue of International Journal of Service Industry Management contains five interesting, different and thought provoking contributions encompassing:

1. 1.

   Measuring customer loyalty with multi-item scales: a case for caution. The findings indicate that repatronage intentions and word-of-moth intentions can be seen as two discrete constructs. The author calls for caution when the investigator is measuring customer loyalty with multi-item measures.

2. 2.

   Structural relationships between organizational service orientation (OCB), contact employee job satisfaction and citizenship behaviour. The results indicate that managers must use service communicative leadership and service encounter practices to influence directly on employee OCB and human resource management to improve employee job satisfaction and OCB.

3. 3.

   The effects of satisfaction, opportunism, and asset specificity on consumers' loyalty intention toward internet portal sites. The results show that attributive satisfaction is very important in affecting consumers' overall satisfaction toward an internet portal, which in turn affects consumers' loyalty intention toward an internet portal.

4. 4.

   Hotel networks and social capital in destination marketing. The results suggest that a drive for action, both planned and improvised, is more decisive for success than plans and expressed intentions; that networking is facilitated when local competitors build social capital through trust and commitment in action; and that competitors have to adhere to certain basic principles, strike a balance between seemingly contradictory strategies, and live by an agreed code of conduct.

5. 5.

   Research note: re-examining the link between employee satisfaction and store performance in a retail environment. Based on a study of six stores, Silvestro (2000) and Silvestro and Cross's (2000) (S&SC) found employee satisfaction to be strongly and negatively correlated to performance. The findings in this study based on data from 38.518 employee surveys from 107 stores suggest a positive correlation between employee satisfaction and store profitability when controlling for the size of store.

The five articles reflect the complexity when it comes to studying, measuring and understanding services and how to interpret and use results in managing service organizations. The papers cover issues related to measuring customer loyalty, the key role of human resource management and what managers should focus on in order to increase job satisfaction, the role of technology in services and especially the antecedents of consumer loyalty toward an internet portal, the creative use of resources in external networks and social capital in creating the prerequisites for quality service. Finally, we are reminded of how different ways of designing studies and analyse data may lead to completely different results which is put forward in the research note.

Do we capture the complex nature of services and the real challenges when managing service organizations or do we tend to delimit our studies and articles too much and reduce complexity in a way that may be misleading rather than contribute to new knowledge and a “deeper” understanding? What should we focus on in service research in the future? Do we need more state-of-the-art overviews covering different areas in service research in which results from different studies are not only summarized but also used to build new theoretical frameworks helping both scholars and managers to understand a bit more about the complexity and dynamics of services and service management? Or, do we need more in-depth empirical studies, using different methods to both to collect and analyze data including data on customers' actual behaviours and service organizations' performance over time?

Professor Bo EdvardssonService Research Center, Karlstad University, Sweden