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This paper aims to identify future research opportunities that address human–technology service interactions.

This editorial is based on the author’s personal reflections and conceptualizations of ideas from past previous research and theory.

The authors identify three opportunities for further research on technology and humanity: service technology and social interaction and service technology and societal prosperity.

Service researchers need to realize that topics such as technology, robots, artificial intelligence are not mutually exclusive from topics that seek to improve the human condition, such as transformative service research. We encourage service researchers to explore how digital technologies in service domains impacts consumers, communities, and even, global humanity.

Researchers have guidance on areas in which pioneering theoretical and methodological opportunities abound.

This editorial offers new perspectives on technology and humanity considering the effect of the global pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage service researchers to engage in “theoretical disruption” by purposefully adding variance to existing substantive theories, and conceptual frameworks, to construct formal theories of buyer–seller marketplace behaviors. The authors put forth an original four-stage process that illustrates the way substantive theories may be developed into formal theories.

The authors provide their opinions regarding theoretical creation and their interpretations of Grounded Theory methodological techniques that support the development of general theories within the social sciences.

In general, the services marketing discipline is based on a foundation of substantive theories, and proposed conceptual frameworks, which emerged from samples, contexts and conditions that ensue within industrialized, upper-income locales. Rather than seek to expand substantive theories by generating new categories and relationships between categories, most researchers limit their verification studies within the scope of original theoretical frameworks. Resultantly, the services marketing domain has not developed a set of formal theories.

The editors encourage researchers to reconsider the discipline’s substantive theories and to transform them into formal theories. Substantive theories expand into formal theories when researchers question original theoretical frameworks and show situations in which they require modification. Theoretical verification does not transform substantive theories into formal theories; rather, the discovery of negative cases suggests the need for theoretical modification.

This work suggests that researchers may be over-emphasizing the generalizability of their proposed theories in papers because of a lack of sample variance in empirical studies.

This editorial aims to discuss 11 trends that are driving changes in business education, especially for Master of Business Administration (MBA) curriculum programming.

The editorial provides introspection, personal reflections and conceptualization using current literature.

The authors discuss 11 drivers that are influencing graduate business education. These drivers include the demographic cliff, the K-shaped recovery, MBA degrees losing their allure, emergence of two pricing structures, the rise of online universities, certificates and micro-credentials, the massive open online course (MOOC) MBA programs, MOOCs and certification, Grow with Google, Outsourcing MBA instruction and business education relevancy.

Traditional university and college graduate business education providers must realize that the educational industry is experiencing a revolutionary disruption and that many universities will fail to meet learners’ expectations for relevant skills and organizational demands for employees who have specific skills for employability.

Learners will no longer rely on traditional four-year universities to obtain business skills.

This work synthesizes a disparate set of drivers that are affecting all graduate business educational providers.

The healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of understanding of the ever-increasing role of technology in blended human-technology healthcare interactions and the impacts on healthcare actors' well-being. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key mechanisms and influencing factors through which blended service realities affect engaged actors' well-being in a healthcare context.

This conceptual paper takes a human-centric perspective and a value co-creation lens and uses theory synthesis and adaptation to investigate blended human-technology service realities in healthcare services.

The authors conceptualize three blended human-technology service realities – human-dominant, balanced and technology-dominant – and identify two key mechanisms – shared control and emotional-social and cognitive complexity – and three influencing factors – meaningful human-technology experiences, agency and DART (dialogue, access, risk, transparency) – that affect the well-being outcome of engaged actors in these blended human-technology service realities.

Managerially, the framework provides a useful tool for the design and management of blended human-technology realities. The paper explains how healthcare services should pay attention to management and interventions of different services realities and their impact on engaged actors. Blended human-technology reality examples – telehealth, virtual reality (VR) and service robots in healthcare – are used to support and contextualize the study’s conceptual work. A future research agenda is provided.

This study contributes to service literature by developing a new conceptual framework that underpins the mechanisms and factors that influence the relationships between blended human-technology service realities and engaged actors' well-being.