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Students need to know basic capital budgeting techniques to value INFINITI and its competitors. Issues include how to: handle taxes in a discounted cash flow analysis when valuing an S Corp. where incentives depend on current (known) and future (unknown) tax provisions; value a firm using comparable multiples analysis and transactions data; assess the costs and benefits of acquiring a firm versus being acquired; and analyze an industry and perform a ratio and financial statement analysis.

The case information was obtained through interviews with co-founder Mark Schwaiger. In addition, the authors researched industry and comparable company data, along with current events relating to the professional employer organization (PEO). Financial data was obtained from the owners and competitor data was obtained from Thomson One and Bloomberg.

INFINITI HR was a PEO providing comprehensive human resources to their clients. Co-founders Scott Smrkovski and Mark Schwaiger were at a crossroads at the end of 2015 trying to determine the best course of action to take with their company to grow and prosper. One option was for INFINITI to be acquired by a larger company and the second option was for INFINITI acquire a smaller company. In this case, students have the opportunity to do a financial analysis and evaluation of INFINITI and its competitors to determine which option is the best.

This case is intended for an advanced undergraduate or an MBA corporate finance class.

In total, 90,000 of the 1.26 million people applying for asylum in the EU in 2015 were unaccompanied children. The Dublin III Regulations provided a unique legal situation where unaccompanied young people in the Calais Jungle potentially had the right to be reunited with family in the UK. The purpose of this paper is to explore the substantial challenges presented by carrying out medico-legal assessment of this group in the Calais Jungle.

The authors consider the refugee crisis from a mental health and legal perspective. The authors provide two case examples to contextualise and describe the work. The authors draw from the observations and the literature to discuss the impact of living in the Calais Jungle on young people, the challenges the authors overcame to carry out the assessments and the needs of refugees following settling in the UK.

The authors conclude that the Calais Jungle was a toxic environment not suitable for young refugees’ continued emotional development or recovery from trauma. The current legal process to relocate a young person to the UK is time consuming and labour intensive. The authors note that these concerns are not unique to the Jungle, nor have they ended with its demolition. The difficulties young refugees face with mental illness continues following their arrival to the UK.

This was the first successful attempt since the Dublin III Regulations to seek a legal route to bring unaccompanied refugee minors from France to the UK. This paper was co-written by both the legal and mental health professionals involved in the cases providing a broad opinion across both disciplines.

It is well known that culture is a catalyst for change, helping economies respond to societal problems and demands and that culture is where people turn to in moments of crisis. In this case study around designing and implementing evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, it is suggested that in English public policy and within publicly invested arts there is a maturation of thinking around recognising/measuring the public value of culture including its social value. The purpose of this paper is to chart the recent policy of justifying cultural expenditure with social value claims and highlight challenges for evaluating activity within Coventry UK CoC 2021 as a change in wider policy is taking place.

This paper provides creative insights into the design and implementation of the evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021. The authors of this paper as the collective team undertaking the evaluation of Coventry's year as UK City of Culture 2021 bring first-hand experiences of challenges faced and the need for a cultural mega-event to evidence its value.

The case study aims to address the concepts of measuring value within cultural events and argues that a paradigm shift is occurring in methods and concepts for evidencing the aforementioned value.

The case study within this paper focuses on the build-up period to the UK City of Culture 2021 year and the thinking and logic behind the creation of the evaluation/measurement framework and therefore does not include findings from the actual cultural year.

It is acknowledged that there are papers examining measuring and evidencing the “value” of cultural mega-events, the authors bring real-life first-hand experience of the concepts being utilised by them on the ground in the delivery and evaluation design of Coventry, UK City of Culture 2021.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of customer discomfort in service settings when employees and customers who share social incompatibilities, stemming from war, nationalism, religious differences or terrorism, work together in service settings.

The authors engage in triangulation research to understand how Israeli Arabs and Jews experience comfort/discomfort in services. Study 1 uses an experimental design to show how comfort differs when Israeli Jews work with Arabs and Jews in three different service settings. Study 2 employs survey methodology to explore how comfort differs among Israeli Arabs when they work with either an Arab or a Jewish employee. Study 3 uses grounded theory methodology to provide a theoretical framework that explains reasons for customer discomfort occurrence between Israel’s Arabs and Jews, its impact on customers’ attitudes and behaviors and suggestions for increasing comfort.

Israeli Arabs and Jews express various feelings of discomfort when working with each other, and Druze, in service settings. Israeli Jews express higher levels of discomfort when working with Arabs than vice versa, while Israeli Arabs express discomfort when working with Druze employees. Five strategies for increasing customer comfort are defined and developed.

Social incompatibilities prevent many consumers and employees from experiencing comfort during service exchanges; however, managers can alleviate some of the factors that exacerbate customer discomfort.

Managers need to realize that customer discomfort leads to place avoidance and thus should implement strategies to assuage it.

Unabated service situations that result in customer discomfort may lead to customer ill-being, including fear.

This study is the first to explore customer discomfort due to social incompatibilities in depth.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge service researchers to design for service inclusion, with an overall goal of achieving inclusion by 2050. The authors present service inclusion as an egalitarian system that provides customers with fair access to a service, fair treatment during a service and fair opportunity to exit a service.

Building on transformative service research, a transformative, human-centered approach to service design is proposed to foster service inclusion and to provide a platform for managerial action. This conceptual study explores the history of service exclusion and examines contemporary demographic trends that suggest the possibility of worsening service exclusion for consumers worldwide.

Service inclusion represents a paradigm shift to higher levels of understanding of service systems and their fundamental role in human well-being. The authors argue that focused design for service inclusion is necessary to make service systems more egalitarian.

The authors propose four pillars of service inclusion: enabling opportunity, offering choice, relieving suffering and fostering happiness.

Service organizations are encouraged to design their offerings in a manner that promotes inclusion and permits customers to realize value.

This comprehensive research agenda challenges service scholars to use design to create inclusive service systems worldwide by the year 2050. The authors establish the moral imperative of design for service inclusion.

This paper aims to define the term “socially unacceptable services” and call for novel research in these under-researched service industries.

Personal reflections.

Service offerings exist that, despite their ability to create value for customers, clients or partners, many in society at large deem to be offensive, inappropriate or harmful for a variety of reasons. Service researchers have ignored the existence and impact of socially unacceptable services on consumers and society for too long.

Given the expanding role of the transformative service research (TSR) paradigm in the services marketing domain, especially given its emphasis on exchanges that influence consumer and societal well-being and the reality that many socially unacceptable services profoundly influence consumer and societal welfare in both positive and negative manners, the time is opportune for service researchers to begin exploring socially unacceptable services from a TSR perspective.

Given that buyers and sellers who enter socially unacceptable exchanges often seem satisfied by doing so, the authors encourage researchers to unearth how consumers obtain value from these exchanges and to explore whether consumers enter these exchanges with full information to make informed decisions.

This viewpoint is one of the first to provide authors with an impetus to begin research program in socially unacceptable services and offers researchers a list of potential research topics in this new area. The authors believe that socially unacceptable service research may emerge as a separate research paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of disabled service providers on customers’ evaluations of service quality and behavioural intentions.

The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of online reviews from samples collected in a “dining-in-the-dark” restaurant, which employs blind waiters, and from a restaurant that employs deaf servers. The authors also put forth three quantitative analyses that use survey methodology.

Based on word clouds generated by online data, the findings show that customers treat the hiring of disabled service providers as the most prominent clue in their perceptions of organizational service quality. The quantitative results further illustrate that customers who hold more favourable attitudes towards disabled employees are more likely than other customers to spread positive word-of-mouth (WOM). Another analysis reveals that attitudes towards disabled employees are a separate construct from human compassion.

Customers’ attitudes towards disabled frontline service employees represent a service quality driver. The authors offer researchers an exploratory scale on consumer attitudes towards the hiring of disabled employees to further refine and develop for future validation.

Retail organizations may be able to obtain a competitive advantage by employing frontline disabled people through customer WOM communications. These communications are linked to positive organizational outcomes.

Retail and service researchers know considerably little about customers’ perceptions of interacting with disabled employees. This paper represents original research that encourages retail and service organization to employ disabled frontline employees.

This paper aims to represent a response to issues raised in the continuing quantitative-qualitative debate by Valtakoski (2020). Which appeared in a Journal of Services Marketing (JSM) special issue on qualitative research in service-oriented research.

The authors performed a content analysis of 1,268 papers that were published in JSM (1987-2019). In addition, the authors had data that is held in JSM’s manuscript central submission portal.

The analysis shows that while there is a dominance of quantitative methods in the journal, the proportion of qualitative papers is growing. During 2014-2019, 83.4 per cent of submitted papers to JSM represented quantitative research and 14 per cent represented qualitative research; however, 75 per cent of accepted papers were quantitative and 25 per cent were qualitative/mixed methods. Thus, the proportion of published qualitative studies are increasing and have a higher chance of receiving an acceptance decision compared to quantitative studies. Additionally, the largest percentage of qualitative papers published in JSM derive from corresponding authors outside of North America.

Service researchers who opt to use inductive research methods, which tend to use qualitative research, will not confront discrimination based solely upon the use of a research methodology among editors or reviewers at JSM.

JSM welcomes qualitative research that has rich practical implications.

This study is one of the first to provide authors with a detailed analysis and responses to the qualitative-quantitative debate in marketing.

This editorial aims to organise the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into seven ServCollab service research themes to provide a way forward for service research that improves human and planetary life.

A conceptual approach is used that draws on observations from the scholarly experience of the editors.

This editorial offers seven research themes for service researchers: services that enable the WELL-BEING of the human species; services that provide OPPORTUNITY for all humans; services that manage RESOURCES for all humans; ECONOMIC services for work and growth for all humans; services from INSTITUTIONS that offer fair and sustainable living for all humans; service ecosystems with the PLANET; and COLLABORATION services for sustainable development partnerships.

Service scholars are urged to pursue collaborative research that reduces suffering, improves well-being and enables well-becoming for the sustainability and prosperity of Planet Earth.

This editorial provides service scholars with a new framework synthesising the SDGs into research themes that help focus further service research.