Editorial

Citation

Evardsson, B. (2008), "Editorial", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 19 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijsim.2008.08519aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Service Industry Management, Volume 19, Issue 1.

International Journal of Service Industry Management (IJSIM) is an ISI-rated, international journal that brings together scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds. The journal covers a wide range of topics in the area of service management research. This issue is the first in Volume 19 and includes six articles. This issue clearly reflects the journal's wide range of research topics, theoretical perspectives, empirical contexts and author backgrounds. The authors come from Cyprus, Finland, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and USA.

In the first paper, a conceptual model is developed and tested to examine the effects of work-family conflict, family-work conflict and emotional exhaustion on job performance and turnover intentions. The empirical context is frontline employees in Turkey. The role of gender as a moderator of the posited relationships is investigated. The results show that employees facing conflicts originating from their work and family roles become emotionally exhausted and will affect the frontline employees' turnover intentions. The results show that gender moderates several of the proposed relationships in the study.

The second paper provides insights into quality in a business-to-business relationship context. Relationship quality studies are reviewed to put forward first a definition and then a model of perceived business-to-business relationship quality and afterwards illustrate and deepen the model with empirical data from a typical business-to-business relationship. The model is based on theoretical insights from service management research combined with IMP literature together with empirical findings in an abductive manner.

The third paper is a literature review that highlights findings from empirical research examining the impact of music within various real and simulated service environments. The studies focus on a range of dependent variables including evaluation of the environment, perceived wait and stay duration, consumption speed, affective response, and spending. A variety of studies reveal the positive influence of musical congruity on desired outcomes.

The fourth paper analyses asset specificity in make or buy decisions for service operations from the transaction cost economics perspective and the resource-based view of the firm. The aim is to analyse the extent to which the presumptions of the two theories are valid in the service sector in terms of specific assets. The empirical context is hotels in Scotland. The results indicate that the relationship between asset specificity and operation performance is weaker when the operations are executed in-house. The factors determining an increase in outsourcing would be those related to the quality of the operation and non-financial performance. Previous studies have not considered the relationship between specificity and business performance, which gives extra incentive to complement and expand the literature on service operations.

The fifth paper investigates, based on an analysis at the individual publication level the core themes of service research by analysing citations in this journal and discusses changes in the discipline's sub-fields and identifies emerging topics. Two core themes are identified; service quality and customer satisfaction. The last paper also analyses articles in services marketing journals. The title is: “Scientific identity in top journals in services marketing: review and evaluation”. The objective is to describe the “scientific identity” of “top” journals in services marketing by reviewing and evaluating the methodological approaches and the geographical affiliations of authors published in IJSIM, Journal of Services Marketing (JSM), Journal of Service Research (JSR), Managing Service Quality (MSQ) and The Service Industry Journal (SIJ). According to the findings IJSIM is based on a mix of empirical and research designs and a mix of European and North American research values.

Bo EvardssonEditor, Professor and DirectorCTF-Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Sweden