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The purpose of this paper is to identify and delineate research directions that guide future empirical studies exploring how engagement platforms facilitate value co-creation and actor engagement in the context of the sharing economy.

The authors adopt a midrange theorizing approach with service-dominant logic as the integrating meta-theoretical perspective to develop a theoretical framework about service platforms, engagement platforms, and actor engagement in information communication technology (ICT) mediated environments. The authors then contextualize the framework for the sharing economy.

The authors introduce 20 unique research questions to guide future studies related to service ecosystems, engagement platforms, and actor engagement practices in the context of the sharing economy.

The sharing economy is an emerging phenomenon that is driven by the development and proliferation of engagement platforms. The engagement platform concept therefore provides a novel perspective for exploration of how ICT can be utilized to facilitate value co-creation and engagement amongst interdependent economic actors in a service ecosystem.

The purpose of this paper is to guide future academic research, rather than managerial practice. Future research based on the framework can help guide decision-makers to implement and use engagement platforms more effectively.

This paper offers new insight into the important intersection of ICT and service research, and guides future studies exploring the role of engagement platforms in the context of the sharing economy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that occupational stereotypes held by customers have on value co-creation processes in human-centered service systems (HCSSs) like hospitals. Specifically, by exploring if and how customers’ (i.e. patients’) stereotypes toward frontline employees (e.g. nurses) affect their satisfaction as co-creators of value, this study responds to current service research priorities attempting to understand value co-creation in collaborative contexts like healthcare, and addresses calls to investigate the changing role of health care customers therein.

A field study was conducted in the context of German hospitals, which provides unique empirical evidence into the relationship between patients’ stereotypes toward healthcare professionals and their satisfaction with health services as well as the mediating mechanisms through which such stereotypes affect patient satisfaction.

Negative (positive) stereotypes patients hold toward healthcare occupations decrease (increase) their satisfaction and are associated with perceptions of reduced (improved) patient orientation and patient participation in co-creation. However, only perceived patient orientation partially mediates the link between occupational stereotypes and patient satisfaction.

This study develops and tests new hypotheses related to occupational stereotyping in complex HCSSs, and extends previous research on stereotypes in service by exploring the previously unknown mediating mechanisms through which these impact value co-creation processes overall. It furthermore provides important guidance for future research about stereotyping in general, and its impact on value co-creation and HCSS, in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to delineate a research agenda to guide future service research investigating the digital transformation of financial service systems through Fintech – disruptive innovations by new market entrants that challenge the position of mainstream financial institutions.

Rooted in the philosophical foundations of “use-inspired research,” this paper addresses the managerially and societally relevant phenomenon of Fintech by identifying, and responding to, the individual challenges and problems associated with the digital transformation of financial services. This is accomplished through a computational text-mining approach to analyze the corpus of 1,545 published practitioner articles associated with Fintech, identification of managerial challenges therein and subsequent delineation of a novel research agenda.

By connecting managerial challenges relating to Fintech with the service literature, this paper develops a use-inspired research agenda that provides scholarly and managerially relevant research directions (RDs). These pertain to the complexity of digital financial service systems (micro level), orchestration of value co-creation with Fintech (meso level), and the development of elastic infrastructures, models and markets (macro level).

Fintech is an emerging phenomenon associated with the digital transformation of financial services. However, actual guidelines on how service research related to Fintech could be advanced from a theoretically as well as managerially relevant angle are unavailable to date. Here, the authors address this challenge and provide the field with 18 tangible RDs to advance service theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to guide future academic research addressing managerial challenges associated with Fintech and the digital transformation of financial service. Due to the explicit use-inspired nature of the work, the future research stemming from the agenda that the authors put forward here will be of benefit to decision makers and society more broadly.

This empirical research contributes to the discourse regarding the role of information and communication technologies in service in general, and the digital transformation on financial services in particular. The in-depth computational text-mining analysis is unbiased, replicable and provides the foundation for a use-inspired research agenda that is subsequently delineated.

The purpose of this study is to identify, analyze and explain the ethical implications that can result from the datafication of service.

This study uses a midrange theorizing approach to integrate currently disconnected perspectives on technology-enabled service, data-driven business models, data ethics and business ethics to introduce a novel analytical framework centered on data-driven business models as the general metatheoretical unit of analysis. The authors then contextualize the framework using data-intensive insurance services.

The resulting midrange theory offers new insights into how using machine learning, AI and big data sets can lead to unethical implications. Centered around 13 ethical challenges, this work outlines how data-driven business models redefine the value network, alter the roles of individual actors as cocreators of value, lead to the emergence of new data-driven value propositions, as well as novel revenue and cost models.

Future research based on the framework can help guide practitioners to implement and use advanced analytics more effectively and ethically.

At a time when future technological developments related to AI, machine learning or other forms of advanced data analytics are unpredictable, this study instigates a critical and timely discourse within the service research community about the ethical implications that can arise from the datafication of service by introducing much-needed theory and terminology.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why some service ecosystems are more resilient and, consequently, more sustainable than others during turbulent times, and how resilience can be cultivated to enable pathways to service ecosystem sustainability.

This work integrates disparate literature from multiple service and sustainability literature streams, iterating through constant comparison with findings from 44 semistructured interviews conducted in the context of primary health care clinic service ecosystems.

The authors offer a novel conceptual framework comprising pillars (shared worldview, individual actor well-being and multiactor interactions), changing practices to cultivate resilience through resilience levers (orchestrators, individual actor effort, actor inclusivity and digitaltech–humanness approach), and pathways to service ecosystem sustainability (volume vs value, volume to value, volume and value). The authors demonstrate that service ecosystems need to change practices, integrating resources differently in response to the turbulent environment, emphasizing the importance of a shared worldview across the ecosystem and assessing different pathways to sustainability.

This paper offers new insights into the important intersection of service marketing, sustainability and health care. The authors provide guidance to practitioners aiming to cultivate resilience in service ecosystems to achieve pathways to sustainability in primary health care clinics. Finally, implications for theory are discussed, and directions to guide future service research offered.

Understanding the role and implications of information and communication technology (ICT) in service is the key research priority for service science and the management of service quality. The purpose of this paper is to address this priority by providing insights into the role of “engagement platforms” (EPs), physical or virtual customer touch points where actors exchange resources and co-create value. Despite an emerging body of literature that emphasizes the fit between engagement and technology-enabled service contexts, EPs remain ill-defined. Specifically, little is known about the particular types of EPs, their characteristics, and implications for the performance of service ecosystems and managing service quality.

By drawing on two illustrative case studies, the authors investigate and theorize about the characteristics and dynamics of EPs in virtual/physical contexts, and identify if, how and to what extent configurations of EPs may enhance resource exchange within and across service ecosystems.

By building on emerging research at the service/engagement interface, the paper introduces the notion of the “engagement ecosystem,” as a configuration of individual, mutually dependent EPs that represent specific interactivity-facilitative loci. The paper explicates the relevance of the model and highlight opportunities for future research in this emerging field of inquiry.

The work addresses the call for research at the intersection of ICT and service science through development and application of the engagement ecosystem concept. The theorizing process draws on two illustrative case studies, and thereby provides a theoretical contribution and foundation for future research in this emerging area.

The authors guide managerial decision-making regarding the implementation, adoption, and utilization of engagement ecosystems. Furthermore, the nature of “engagement” as a bridging concept implies that the work can help managers to operationalize service-centric thinking.

By showing how individual EPs form engagement ecosystems, the paper bridges theory and practice, and offers new insight in the realm of practical application of the S-D logic.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the history and future of service operations, with the goal to identify key theoretical and technological advances, as well as fundamental themes that can help to imagine the future of service operations in 2050.

A review of the service operations literature was undertaken to inform a discussion regarding the role that technology will play in the future of service operations.

The future of service operations is framed in terms of three key themes – complexity, orchestration, and elasticity. The paper makes three contributions to the service science literature by: reviewing key themes underpinning extant service operations research to frame future trajectories of service operations research; elaborating a vision of service operations in 2050 based on history and technology; and outlining a research agenda for future service operations.

The case of service automation is used to provide an illustration of how the three themes converge to define future service operations, and in particular, to show how technology is recasting the role of the firm.

Service operations in the next 30 years will be very different from what it was in the past 30 years. This paper differs from other review papers by identifying three key themes that will characterize and instill new insights into the future of service operations research.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contact-intensive services (CIS) – such as education, healthcare and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of CIS – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling CIS to support ICT-enabled service innovation.

The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three CIS to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling.

The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic.

While the findings reveal that the scalability of CIS is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in CIS.

The insights into the practices enable service providers of CIS to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service.

This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of CIS as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.