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The purpose of this study is to examine how servicescapes impact well-being and satisfaction of both hospital customers (patients) and health care professional service providers.

The study investigates how a hospital servicescape impacts two critical outcomes – well-being and satisfaction – of both hospital patients (customers) and health care professionals, who are immersed in that environment.

The hospital servicescape had a greater impact on physical, psychological and existential well-being for professionals than for patients. However, the reverse was true for satisfaction. The new servicescape enhanced the satisfaction and physical and psychological well-being of professionals but only the satisfaction of customers.

The study implications for health care policy suggest that investment in health care-built environments should balance the needs of health care professionals with those of customers to benefit their collective well-being and satisfaction.

Based on the findings, the authors propose that servicescape investments should focus on satisfying the physical needs of patients while also placing emphasis on the psychological needs of professionals.

Health care spending on physical facilities should incorporate careful cost-benefit analysis, ensuring that beneficial features for both user groups are included in new hospital designs, omitting features that are less supportive of well-being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to compare the impact of the same real-life servicescape on the satisfaction of both customers and service providers (professionals) and considers the critical health outcome of well-being.

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.

Emerging transformative service research (TSR) studies adopt a service system lens to conceptualise well-being across the micro, meso and macro levels of aggregation, typically within an organisation. No TSR has yet examined well-being across multiple interconnected organisations at the highest level of aggregation, the meta or service ecosystem level. This study aims to explore how value co-creation and, critically, co-destruction among different actors across interacting organisations enhances or destroys multiple levels of well-being.

This study uses semi-structured, in-depth interviews to collect data from five types of key actors (n = 35): players, team owners, tournament operations managers, casters and viewers, across 29 interconnected organisations in the oceanic esports industry. The interviews were coded using NVivo 12 and thematically analysed.

Resource integration on each level of aggregation within a service ecosystem (micro, meso, macro and meta) can co-create and co-destroy value, which leads to the enhancement and destruction of multiple levels of well-being (individual, collective, service system and service ecosystem). Value co-creation and co-destruction, as well as the resultant well-being outcomes, were interconnected across the different levels within the service ecosystem.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to incorporate a multi-actor perspective on the well-being consequences of value co-creation and value co-destruction within a service ecosystem as opposed to service system. Thus, this research also contributes to the minimal research which examines the outcomes of value co-destruction, rather than value co-creation, at multiple levels of aggregation.

Despite the prevalence of technology in health care, marketing research on social media in the birthspace is limited. The purpose of this paper is to explore how birthing women leverage social media for transformative well-being in the liminal context of birth.

A qualitative study of women who had recently experienced birth was undertaken. Thematic analysis of data from in-depth interviews reveals birthing women’s digital practices and social media capabilities for well-being in a liminal space.

Within the birthspace, women use social media and digital platforms in an effortful and goal-directed way for role transitions and transformation, curating self and other history, goal striving and normalizing experience. These digital practice styles facilitate consumer integration of the liminal digital birthspace and in situ service encounter enabling diverse value outcomes. Drawing on liminality and social presence theories, the authors interpret these practices as demonstrating three interactive liminal stages of suspending, comprehending and transforming. Multi-modality and rapid connection afforded by digital devices and social media platforms provide social presence (according to perceived immediacy and intimacy) enabling transformative well-being outcomes.

This study is unique, as it provides insights into the traditionally private health service experience of birth. Further, the authors extend the understanding of liminal spaces and use of digital technology, specifically for transformative outcomes, by proposing a framework of consumers’ digital practice styles for well-being in liminal spaces.

Growing attention has been paid to bricolage as a strategic means to overcome resource constraints in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the industrial market, a bricolage strategy and ambidextrous action may help firms to remain competitive by responding quickly to the business-to-business marketing. Despite its paramount importance, questions as to how bricolage is strengthened and how bricolage improves innovation ambidexterity have remained unanswered. This study aims to develop an integrated model for the relationships among environmental turbulence, learning orientation, ambidexterity and performance, with a particular focus on the mediation of bricolage.

Building on the literature review regarding the key constructs, hypotheses were developed. Data were collected using questionnaires from 229 SMEs in South Korea. To test hypothesis, structural equation modeling and Monte Carlo method for assessing mediation were performed.

Results reveal that environmental turbulence and learning orientation are positively associated with bricolage, which sequentially affects ambidextrous action as a driver of performance. The findings also indicate that bricolage significantly mediates the relationship between its antecedents and ambidexterity.

This research contributes to advancing our understanding of the role of a bricolage strategy for innovation ambidexterity and performance in SMEs. This study is the first to examine the mediation of bricolage between environmental factors and ambidexterity for improved performance.

Disruptive shocks significantly compromise service contexts, challenging multidimensional value (co)creation. Recent focus has been on consumers experiencing vulnerability in service contexts. However, the susceptibility of service firms, employees and other actors to the impacts of disruptive shocks has received little attention. Since resource scarcity from disruptive shocks heightens tensions around balancing different needs in the service system, this paper aims to propose a framework of balanced centricity and service system resilience for service sustainability.

Adopting a conceptual model process, the paper integrates resilience and balanced centricity (method theories) with customer/consumer vulnerability (domain theory) resulting in a definition of multiactor vulnerability and related theoretical propositions.

Depleted, unavailable, or competed over resources among multiple actors constrain resource integration. Disruptive shocks nevertheless have upside potential. The interdependencies of actors in the service system call for deeper examination of multiple parties’ susceptibility to disruptive resource scarcity. The conceptual framework integrates multiactor vulnerability (when multiactor susceptibility to resource scarcity challenges value exchange) with processes of service system resilience, developing three research propositions. Emerging research questions and strategies for balanced centricity provide a research agenda.

A multiactor, balanced centricity perspective extends understanding of value cocreation, service resilience and service sustainability. Strategies for anticipating, coping with and adapting to disruptions in service systems are suggested by using the balanced centricity perspective, offering the potential to maintain (or enhance) the six types of value.

This research defines multiactor vulnerability, extending work on experienced vulnerabilities; describes the multilevel and multiactor perspective on experienced vulnerability in service relationships; and conceptualizes how balanced centricity can decrease multiactor vulnerability and increase service system resilience when mega disruptions occur.

This editorial introduces a special issue of the Journal of Services Marketing, dedicated to the concept of resilience in the services sector. This editorial aims to identify how service organizations, networks and systems are resilient in the face of or wake of marketplace disruptions.

Drawing on available literature in service research, the authors illustrate how service scholars can better understand the processes, relationships and outcomes that are a crucial part of resilience in service organizations.

This editorial presents a theoretical framework illustrating interactive, linked and interdependent resource-based resilience practices that enable service organizations and individuals to develop and grow resilience. The special issue papers identified six themes to guide future research: conceptual complexity and challenges of operationalization; culture, context and resilience; antecedents to resilience and outcomes; resilience and the complex world of artificial intelligence and technology; value co-creation; and service ecosystems.

This editorial presents service researchers with an overview of research examining the concept of resilience. It also demonstrates diversity in how the concept is defined and operationalized. Our theoretical framework illustrates a new way of conceptualizing service resilience by identifying three resource-based resilience practices in an increasingly ambiguous, dynamic and complex service world. Together these underpin the six themes for further research.

Servicescape is well recognized by marketing scholars as a key influence in transformative service outcomes. However, the concept of enabling transformative health outcomes through physical servicescape design is often overlooked. The purpose of this study is to integrate marketing's servicescape research with birth territory theory and the enabling places framework, conceptualizing a Co-Curated Transformative Place (CCTP) framework.

This cross-disciplinary conceptual paper uses three places of birth (POB) servicescapes for low-risk birthing women to ground the CCTP framework.

Positioned within transformative service research, this study shows how POB servicescapes are CCTPs. The organizing framework of CCTP comprises four key steps founded on agile and adaptive co-curation of physical place resources.

This study extends the servicescape conceptualization to incorporate the continuum of terrain, introducing adaptive and agile co-curation of places.

The materiality of place and physical resources in CCTP are usefully understood in terms of co-curated substantive staging according to service actor needs. The CCTP servicescape maximizes desired value outcomes and quality experience by adaptive response to service demands and service actors’ needs.

Theoretical discourse of health servicescapes is expanded to focus on the material components of place and their foundational role in generating resources and capabilities that facilitate the realization of service value. In the CCTP, service actors flexibly select, present and adapt physical artifacts and material resources of the service terrain according to dynamic actor needs and service responsibilities, enabling transformative outcomes. Co-curation facilitates reciprocal synergy between other dimensions of place and servicescape.

Service marketers are increasingly aware of inequalities triggered by service systems and the need to prioritize practical strategies for reducing inequalities. A priority area for the Australian Government is reducing university education inequities for Indigenous Australians. This paper aims to examine how Indigenous Australian university students build and leverage their capabilities and strengths, harnessing service providers’ efforts towards enhancing participation (and completion) in university education – an essential transformative outcome for reducing inequalities.

A three-stage qualitative research process explored student retention/completion and capability building among a sample of Indigenous Australian university students, typically under-represented in the higher education sector.

Applying a manual thematic analysis, the findings reveal Indigenous students’ value co-creating capabilities (summarized in three dimensions) harness multi-actor processes extending beyond the service provider. Five dimensions summarize the service provider’s transformative service activities that strengthen capabilities for Indigenous Australian university students. Networks of place (a structured Indigenous Centre); processes (university systems); and people (social support), including peer-to-peer networks, are important service assemblages.

The authors present implications for supporting Indigenous students in persisting with and completing higher education. More broadly, the authors provide recommendations for service marketers to resolve barriers to service equality and enhance strengths-based approaches to value co-creation.

Underpinned by a strengths-based approach, the authors contribute towards an agenda of sustainable transformative services. Although considerable research reviews the experiences of Indigenous students, little research has taken a transformative service research perspective. Addressing this, the authors propose a conceptual framework linking consumers’ agentic capabilities with transformative service mediator practices.

“The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on service innovation during the past two decades and provide an analysis of sources of publication, citations and authorship using bibliometric analysis techniques (VOSviewer).” This paper aims to assesses the important trends, enhance the academic debate, identify research gaps and propose future directions and a research agenda.

This paper examines 176 articles in English language published from 2002 to 2022 from the Scopus database by adopting the bibliometric technique using VOSviewer software. This paper analyzes the different levels and boundaries of service innovation using bibliometric analysis of “service innovation research” using VOSviewer software. The methodology analyzes the number of citations, co-citations, keywords, authors, journals and countries.

The review of the past 20 years indicates a substantial growth in the number of good research publications on service innovation. The UK, the USA, Sweden and Australia dominate this research area with the most articles published to date under the subject area of “Business management.” The review highlighted that most of the studies on service innovation focused on products, companies and processes in the services industry. The most critical factors behind service innovation failure are improper management and lack of knowledge. The citation analysis revealed various research implications and directions for the future.

This study focuses only on service innovation and excludes research on performance management and control. Thus, future studies may explore this area of research in future studies. Only research articles were analyzed; conference papers, reports, manuals and white papers from practice were excluded. Research implications indicate that future studies on service innovation would be essential for organizational excellence, not process excellence.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and essential trends of research on service innovation. This study identifies the research gaps and provides a clear research agenda for understanding the various elements of service innovation.