Search results

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.

This paper aims to provide a starting point to discuss how social enterprises can drive systemic change in terms of social impact through operations and supply chain management.

This paper reviews existing literature and the four papers in this special issue and develops a conceptual framework of how social enterprises and their supply chains create social impact and further enable systematic change.

Our paper finds that social impact and systemic change can be shaped by social enterprises at three different levels of analysis (organization, supply chain and context) and through three enablers (cognitive shift, stakeholder collaboration and scalability). Such dimensions are used to position current literature and to highlight new research directions.

This paper proposes a novel understanding of operations and supply chain management in social enterprises intended as catalysts for systemic change. Based on this premise we distinguish different practices and stakeholders to be considered when studying social impact at different levels. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper provides a new pathway for future research and debate by scholars engaged at the intersection of social impact, sustainable operations and supply chain management.

This pathway paper offers research guidance for investigating illegal supply chains as they increasingly threaten societies, economies and ecosystems. There are implications for policy makers to consider incorporating supply chain expertise.

The authors’ work is informed by the team's previous and ongoing studies, research from fields such as criminology, investigative journalism and legal documents.

Illegality occurs in many supply chains and consists in multiple forms. Certain sectors, supply chain innovations, longer supply chains, and heterogeneous regulations and enforcement exacerbate illegal activities. But illegal activity may be necessary for humanitarian, religious or nationalistic reasons. These areas are under explored by supply chain researchers.

By encouraging supply chain academics to research in this area as well as form collaborative partnerships outside of the discipline, the authors hope to move the field forward in prevention as well as learning from illegal supply chains.

Practitioners seek to prevent issues like counterfeiting with their products as well as fraud for economic and reputational reasons.

Governments strive to minimise impacts on their economies and people, and both governments and NGOs attempt to minimise the negative social and environmental impacts. Policy makers need supply chain researchers to evaluate new laws to prevent enabling illegality in supply chains.

As an under-explored area, the authors suggest pathways such as partnering with other disciplines, exploring why these supply chains occur, considering other data sources and methodologies to interdict illegality and learning from illegal supply chains to improve legal supply chains.

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.

This article aims to investigate collaborative procurement as a sourcing strategy amongst competing small enterprises in an effort to reduce their material supply costs through increased efficiencies, bargaining power and economies of scale.

A case study approach is applied to a network of breweries that are regionally clustered. Interview data from producers, suppliers and industry experts is inductively interpreted to understand the viability, organisational impact and benefits/limitations of joint procurement activities.

The craft brewing industry follows a market place strategy of differentiation to achieve competitive advantage. This has supply chain implications that promote raw material diversity, which is in conflict with standardisation – a necessary factor for collective buying. Competition impacts information sharing and governance mechanism, while the structural factors of size asymmetry along and across the supply chain influence returns. These issues impact the potential economic benefits of collaborative procurement.

The research propositions have been developed in a specific industry but are generalisable to other companies with a differentiation strategy, especially in the consumer packaged goods sector.

Enabling conditions and constraints are captured in a framework and capability matrix, which can be used by practitioners to assess industry and product feasibility for collaborative procurement.

Previous studies of collaborative procurement have been in the public sector amongst large organisations. This work focusses on coopetition in the context of small businesses to identify the viability and cost-benefit of this strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the highlights of the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit, the Principles for Responsible Management Education Global Forum and the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative General Assembly held in New York and Boston in June 2010. It discusses the potential of the connections and collaborations between these organisations and others to lead to change.

The paper draws out key themes of these concurrent events; connections and collaborations between these initiatives and others; and considers the potential of further collaborations to facilitate change.

There is an acceptance on the part of business of the need to be more socially and environmentally responsible, but a lack of technical know‐how and leadership capacity. Universities generally, and business schools in particular, need to do more to develop graduates for a changing business context with specific reference to the overarching challenge of the twenty‐first century to achieve global environmental sustainability and social justice.

Further collaboration between these organisations is important to drive change through, e.g. sustainability performance management at universities; accreditation processes; and, partnerships between business schools, business and civil society organisations.

The originality and value of this paper is in summarising the highlights of three key interconnected events, the collaborations that led to them, the connections that are strengthening between the organisations and potential of those connections to facilitate change.

The purpose of this paper is to survey the research methods employed in the extant environmental accounting literature, finding few experimental studies. The need for more experimentation in the literature is discussed, as well as how experiments' unique methodological advantages can help address important environmental accounting issues. These issues culminate in a proposed model for conducting experimental environmental accounting research.

A synthesis of the environmental accounting literature emphasizes the research methods, and, advantages and disadvantages of each method, as well as why and how experimental designs can contribute to the environmental accounting literature. Finally, the paper proposes and analyzes a framework for conducting environmental accounting experiments.

Experiments can provide unique contributions to the environmental accounting literature. Relative to traditional accounting information, environmental accounting information comprises lower levels of user familiarity which may hinder effective processing of these non‐traditional data. These characteristics make the organizational display of these data, and their combination with non‐environmental metrics, a particular and unique concern. The proposed model considers the impact of environmental strategy on the implementation of environmental information systems, which in turn influences evaluation effectiveness of decisions based on environmental accounting information. Stakeholder influences, management communication of environmental issues, and evaluation scales also influence these relationships.

The model assumes environmental information generates from within the entity (i.e. private firms, public agencies, etc.). Future research can enhance and/or modify the framework to include information design and capture from non‐entity end‐users (e.g. stakeholders), as well as empirically test the model's relationships.

The framework provides factors to consider to design more effective environmental accounting information systems. Also, the model's factors should aid researchers in developing robust experimental designs for environmental accounting studies.

This is the first paper to propose a framework for conducting experimental environmental accounting research.

This paper develops an optimal service design model by combining a conjoint analysis‐based optimal product design model from marketing with capacity and demand management strategies from operations management to determine a profit maximizing service facility. It extends optimal product design models to services by specifically modeling the interactive relationship between potential attractiveness of a service, capacity and waiting times. Additionally it extends current capacity‐demand operations models by modeling the impacts of different capacity/demand matching strategies in a competitive market. Combining these two perspectives provides a more direct link between customer perceptions of various service attributes, including waiting time and profitability. An example is shown where the model is applied to an existing ski resort. Data are incorporated from resort management, existing customers, potential customers and industry experts to determine the profit maximizing mix of capacity and demand management strategies for an actual ski resort. The results show that important insights about profit maximization are gained from a model that captures the effects of capacity and demand management strategies.

This paper forwards a conceptual model identifying some of the key sources of judgment error in individual environmental sensemaking. Recommendations are offered to mitigate some of these biasing dysfunctions and thereby improve the effectiveness of environmentally related business policy.

Theories of cognitive and behavioral sciences are reviewed and applied to create a conceptual model describing some of the key influences on individual sensemaking in regard to environmental risk and opportunity.

It is found that the model presented in this paper contributes to the literature of corporate social responsibility in explaining some of the heuristic phenomena that can lead to denial of a firm's negative environmental impact, or conversely, recognition of emerging opportunities arising from increasing societal concern for environmental integrity. Many environmental scientists believe denial is omnipresent in modern business and governmental organizations. In addition, because the model is grounded in well‐established theories of problematic heuristic bias, it helps identify “leverage points” where well‐designed interventions can be deployed to promote learning and improved decision making. The model helps the decision maker better understand and potentially influence ethical judgment because ethical decision making is conceived within the frame of bounded ethicality versus a less potent theory of intervention based upon espoused moral prescriptions.

Some important influences on environmental sensemaking are not emphasized in the model to include dimensions of individual personality, early childhood experiences, gender, religious background, etc. Rather, the emphasis here is placed upon relatively ubiquitous cognitive heuristics and other cognitive phenomena likely to influence many organizational decision makers.

This analysis and resulting conceptual model should help change agents, students, policy makers and business practitioners avoid predictable biases and sensemaking distortions and, in so doing, improve the firm's social responsibility profile and recognition of emerging business opportunities growing out of sustainability imperatives.