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The purpose of this paper is to present exciting and innovative research questions in service operations that are aligned with eight key themes and related topics determined by the Journal of Service Management (JOSM) Service Operations Expert Research Panel. By offering a good number of such research questions, this paper provides a broad range of ideas to spur conceptual and empirical research related to service operations and encourage the continued creation of deep knowledge within the field, as well as collaborative research across disciplines that develops and incorporates insights from service operations.

Based on a Delphi study, described in the companion article, “Service Operations: What Have We Learned?,” the panel identified eight key research themes in service operations where leading-edge research is being done or has yet to be done (Victorino et al., 2018). In this paper, three or four topics within each theme are selected and multiple questions for each topic are proposed to guide research efforts. The topics and questions, while wide-ranging, are only representative of the many ongoing research opportunities related to service operations.

The field of service operations has many interesting research topics and questions that are largely unexplored. Furthermore, these research areas are not only increasingly integrative across multiple themes within operations but often transcend functional disciplines. This creates opportunities for ever more impactful research with a greater reach throughout the service system and suggests that service researchers, regardless of functional affiliation, can contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of service operations in value creation.

Leveraging the collective knowledge of the JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel to expand on the research themes generated from the Delphi study, novel questions for future study are put forward. Recognizing that the number of potential research questions is virtually unlimited, summary questions by theme and topic are also provided. These questions represent a synopsis of the individual questions and can serve as a quick reference guide for researchers interested in pursuing new directions in conceptual and empirical research in service operations. This summary also serves as a framework to facilitate the formulation of additional research topics and questions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify research themes in service operations that have great potential for exciting and innovative conceptual and empirical work. To frame these research themes, the paper provides a systematic literature review of operations articles published in the Journal of Service Management (JOSM). The thorough review of published work in JOSM and proposed research themes are presented in hopes that they will inspire impactful research on service operations. These themes are further developed in a companion paper, “Service operations: what’s next?” (Field et al., 2018).

The JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel conducted a Delphi study to generate research themes where leading-edge research on service operations is being done or has yet to be done. Nearly 700 articles published in JOSM from its inception through 2016 were reviewed and classified by discipline focus. The subset of service operations articles was then further categorized according to the eight identified research themes plus an additional category that primarily represented traditional manufacturing approaches applied in service settings.

From the Delphi study, the following key themes emerged: service supply networks, evaluating and measuring service operations performance, understanding customer and employee behavior in service operations, managing servitization, managing knowledge-based service contexts, managing participation roles and responsibilities in service operations, addressing society’s challenges through service operations, and the operational implications of the sharing economy. Based on the literature review, approximately 20 percent of the published work in JOSM is operations focused, with earlier articles predominantly applying traditional manufacturing approaches in service settings. However, the percentage of these traditional types of articles has been steadily decreasing, suggesting a trend toward dedicated research frameworks and themes that are unique to the design and management of services operations.

The paper presents key research themes for advancing conceptual and empirical research on service operations. Additionally, a review of the past and current landscape of operations articles published in JOSM offers an understanding of the scholarly conversation so far and sets a foundation from which to build future research.

The online retail industry is enormous, covering a great assortment of products and services. Yet, little research has examined whether determinants of success in online retailing are similar or differ by industry sector. The purpose of this study is to examine industry sectors separately to distinguish drivers associated with overall satisfaction for the online consumers in those sectors.

The paper uses ridge regression to examine how e‐service quality dimensions are associated with overall customer satisfaction for several e‐retailing sectors.

While several e‐service quality dimensions exhibit a similar impact across all sectors, several other dimensions exhibited sector‐by‐sector differences. The drivers that frequently differ across sectors include price perceptions, ease of returns and refunds, and privacy experience.

As an exploratory study, research opportunities and limitations derive from the public source of data, sample sizes within some of the sectors, and the ridge regression methodology.

Related prior research examined individual e‐retailing sectors, leading to scattered sets of findings that cannot be triangulated. The research allows for comparison by the manager, and presents empirical insights for managers in several e‐retail sectors.

This paper is one of only a few studies to examine a consistent set of e‐service quality measures on a sector‐by‐sector basis. The paper is also unique in that it uses publicly available data sources to examine these relationships, providing managers with insights on how they might analyze such public data sets for their own usage.

This paper aims to empirically test the relationship between supplier relations and satisfaction with overall supplier performance in a services context at a process level of analysis.

Two hypotheses are developed, one predicting a positive relationship between a multi‐dimensional construct of supplier relations and satisfaction with overall supplier performance, and one five‐part hypothesis predicting positive relationships between the underlying components of supplier relations and satisfaction with overall supplier performance. Using a sample of 108 financial services processes, the first hypothesis is tested using regression analysis, and the second hypothesis is tested using correlation analysis.

After controlling for supplier efficiency and responsiveness, use of information technology, electronic information‐sharing, supplier type, and firm size, better supplier relations are associated with satisfaction with overall supplier performance. However, while the “partnering” components of the relationship (i.e. cooperation and long‐term commitment) are correlated with satisfaction with overall supplier performance, the “operational” components of the relationship (i.e. high degree of coordination, information‐sharing, and feedback) are not.

Limited informant population, primarily single respondents, some single‐item variables.

The research results suggest not only the importance of improving overall supplier relations, but also the particular benefits of building partnerships within the service supply chain through co‐operation and long‐term commitment in order to increase satisfaction with overall supplier performance.

Unlike most empirical supply chain management studies, which use data from manufacturers at the strategic business unit or firm level, and recognizing that services and manufacturers differ in certain respects that are salient for supply chain management, this study uses data from a services industry (i.e. financial services) collected at the process level and provides unique insights into services and process level supply chain management.

The purpose of this study is use a bibliometric analysis to explore the relational nature of knowledge creation in WFM in operations. Companies live under constant pressure to find the best ways to plan their workforce, and the workforce emangement (WFM) is one of the biggest challenges faced by managers. Relevant research on WFM in operations has been published in a several range of journals that vary in their scope and readership, and thus the academic contribution to the topic remains largely fragmented.

To address this gap, this review aims to map research on WFM in operations to understand where it comes from and where it is going and, therefore, provides opportunities for future work. This study combined two bibliometric approaches with manual document coding to examine the literature corpus of WFM in operations to draw a holistic picture of its different aspects.

Content and thematic analysis of the seminal studies resulted in the extraction of three key research themes: workforce cross-training, planning workforce mixed methods and individual workforce characteristics. The findings of this study further highlight the gaps in the WFM in operations literature and raise some research questions that warrant further academic investigation in the future.

Likewise, this study has important implications for practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of WFM in operations.

This chapter proposes a conceptualization of joyful leadership as a unique leadership style and identifies a future research agenda to further explore the concept. While the concept of joyful leadership appears repeatedly in the nonacademic literature, including in blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, there is limited reference to joyful leadership in the academic literature highlighting a lack of academic rigor around the concept. Joyful leadership is proposed as a unique leadership style with specific patterns of behavior demonstrated by the leader. This research draws on understandings of emotion, positive affect, and leadership in the academic literature to develop a conceptualization of joyful leadership.

The proposed conceptualization is based on an extensive literature review drawing from both the leadership field and the study of emotions including various theoretical perspectives from these diverse fields.

Based on discrete emotion theory a conceptualization of joyful leadership as a unique leadership style is presented, identifying key patterns of behavior associated with joyful leadership including discrete autonomic patterns, actions, nonverbal signals, and identified feelings.

This research outlines a conceptual model to provide an understanding of the concept of joyful leadership as a unique leadership style. It draws on the current study of emotion, positive affect, and leadership and more specifically examines the concept of joyful leadership aligned to discrete emotion theory. This particular theory of emotion, when examined in relation to leadership, provides a basis for the concept of joyful leadership as a leadership style and the basis for its proposed characteristics and outcomes.

The information presented in this case was gathered through interviews and observations carried out during the time Ms Joy attended the Initiative for A Competitive Inner City business support program in 2017. In addition, focus groups that took place after the program provided important information and insights into her decision-making process and business goals. Additional interviews were conducted in 2018 and 2019 after the business program ended to gain in-depth knowledge of Ms Joy’s entrepreneurial journey.

This case details the experiences of Winsome Joy in recognizing market opportunities in the child care industry and then expanding into the educational materials industry. The case focuses on challenges related to founding and sustaining her business and the ways in which Ms Joy engaged in “opportunity recognition” and “effectuation” to become a successful entrepreneur. The case points out the challenges of the child care and early education field in terms of professional training, hiring practices and retaining qualified staff. It provides an aspirational role model who has overcome these challenges by finding and recognizing new market opportunities.

This case is relevant for undergraduate and graduate courses in entrepreneurship.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Drawing upon theories of conservation of resources (COR), broaden-and-build (BnB), self-determination, and the job demands- resources (JD-R) model, this study uniquely tries to understand the mechanisms that contribute to happiness at work by proposing a model of the effects of emotional culture of joy on happiness at work, where psychological safety and relational attachments serve as intervening mechanisms among the aforesaid relationship.

A three-wave time-lagged study with 340 employees from Pakistani organizations was conducted. Data were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modelling.

The results indicate that emotional culture of joy significantly predicts happiness at work. Furthermore, emotional culture of joy significantly and positively influences both psychological safety and relational attachment. Finally, the relationship between emotional culture of joy and happiness at work is found to be mediated by both relational attachment and psychological safety.

The results are of utmost importance as they provide insights to policy makers and organizations administrators on the value of emotional culture of joy and its contribution to employees’ wellbeing, and indeed its role in fostering important psychological and emotional resources such as psychological safety and relational attachment.

This study is unique for the following reasons. First, it addresses and bridges a gap pertaining to the drivers of happiness at work. Second, this is the first study that considers emotional culture of joy as an antecedent to happiness at work. Third, the employment of both psychological safety and relational attachment as intervening mechanisms in the relationship between emotional culture of joy and happiness at work has not been previously addressed in the management and wellbeing literature. Finally, the study shifts direction from studying organizational drivers (i.e. HR, organization support, etc.) of happiness at work to the examination of psychological and emotional resources that may influence happiness at work.

This paper offers a conceptual discussion of repetition and joy in the context of information and their relation to the good life.

Joy is defined as an integrative element of the good life which can be achieved through repetition. This may be surprising, given that our most ready-to-hand associations with “repetition” are negative in tenor rather than positive. Building on the work of repetition theorists Søren Kierkegaard and Gertrude Stein, we can discern three different forms of repetition: that looking backwards (e.g. rereading), that looking forwards (e.g. art-making) and that looking inwards (e.g. chiasmus). Throughout this paper, information-related examples are given and discussed as vignettes that move the conversation forward.

These examples lead to a nascent theory of why the repetition of information can spark joy and not just tedium. First, its stability and predictability that instill comfort in us. Second, its unifying force that brings us to experience wholeness. Third, its invitation to keep the repetition going through creation, further helping us feel part of the world. And finally, its paradoxicality—as strict repetition is impossible—which requires change, paving the way for satisfying surprises and delights.

Repetition is a ubiquitous and theoretically interesting phenomenon when it comes to information, and though it is implicit in some information science research, it has not yet been theorized directly. Moreover, this paper connects this issue to an emerging “positive” orientation in information studies.