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Some organisations are becoming more concerned with delighting their customers than simply satisfying them. Yet despite an extensive literature on service quality and satisfaction little has been written about service excellence and how organisations can achieve delighted customers. The purpose of this exploratory but empirically based paper is to provide a definition of service excellence to help marketers and managers, where appropriate, design and deliver it. This paper is based on over 400 statements of excellent and poor service gathered from around 150 respondents. After categorising them, using a grounded theory approach, it is suggested that service excellence is about being “easy to do business with”. This has four key elements: delivering the promise, providing a personal touch, going the extra mile and resolving problems well. Further analysis of the frequencies of mention revealed the overarching importance of dealing well with problems and queries.

An attempt is made to define productivity in the context of service operations. In so doing some of the difficulties in relating this term to service are explored. The main part of the article takes a strategic approach and identifies three key strategic determinants of service productivity; volume, variety and variation. These terms are explained and their impact on productivity is illustrated in three short case studies.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize and discuss the collaborative network formed by researchers that published about services in the top journals in Operations, Marketing, and Human Resources Management, and provide further comparison with major Service journals.

The method used was designed documentary research using papers published in the top three relevant international journals specific to Operations, Marketing, and Human Resources from 1995 to 2010. Papers were selected using a search of the ABI/Inform Global (Proquest) database on the word “service” in the title, abstract, or keywords. Additionally, it included two major Service journals. A total of 1,481 papers and 2,457 authors composed the Social Network Analysis (SNA).

The co‐authorship network revealed that the social structure is highly fragmented. However, its main component can be classified as “small world”, indicating that authors are connected to others outside their group through a small number of intermediaries. This type of structure is favorable both to knowledge flow and development.

The results may be valuable to the community of researchers interested in the theme of Services, as well as in the fields of Operations, Marketing, and Human Resources to identify researchers and research groups. Thus, it can serve as guidance for publishers, colleges, and companies in the search for scholars in the service subject.

The paper uses SNA to investigate the interaction/collaboration of co‐authors using authorship as the unit of analysis.

Increasing competition in the service sector provides an opportunity for firms to differentiate their services from the competition by providing and improving service quality. The development of a quality strategy to improve service quality is presented and the critical points in customer processing are identified.

This paper aims to examine the differences in epistemological underpinnings of conventional information systems analysis and design (ISAD) approaches (such as structured system and analysis design methodologies) and a recently developed situated ISAD approach.

This empirical investigation involved constructing a simulated field situation to allow a conventionally trained IS analyst to analyse the same case as had been previously analysed by applying the situated ISAD methodology.

While the conventional approach focuses on articulated knowledge and observes the system under study with a detached stance, the situated approach includes tacit knowledge and recognises the importance of the environment. The situated analyst is immersed in the system, attempting to take the subject position of an actor in the system, while also maintaining some analytical distance.

The research method and framework presented is a novel way to compare the epistemological underpinnings of other systems analysis and design methodologies. Validity issues are explicitly addressed in the paper; although it is based on a single case, the fact that it is a real‐world problem gives it high external validity.

The investigation is based on an actual system design case and shows that, in analysis and design, the different epistemological underpinnings affect what is identified as a problem and hence the type of solution proposed.

There has been little previous work comparing epistemological commitments of alternative ISAD methodologies as they are played out in actual application. This paper makes a significant contribution to the theoretical foundations of IS.

To provide training exercises that will help tourism planners and analysts better understand the fundamentals of tourism sustainability and dynamics.

The paper is organized as a presentation of tools and conceptual models, followed by associated training exercises and answers. The first exercise addresses basic concepts of sustainability as applied to tourism development. The second addresses the use of phase diagrams to illustrate the dynamic behavior and change of tourism‐related economic and environmental conditions over time.

Operational definitions of sustainable tourism generally are consistent with a wide variety of outcomes for a tourist destination. Exercises demonstrate that operational definitions of tourism sustainability require numerous choices and tradeoffs, and are more complex than is suggested by common discourse.

Given that the most desirable sustainable outcomes for tourism differ across groups, the search for sustainable tourism outcomes must combine environmentally sustainable outcomes (which are often many) with socially acceptable compromise solutions that lie somewhere between the optima for each distinct group. No amount of searching, bargaining, or stakeholder education will reveal a universal sustainable solution that maximizes benefits to all affected groups. In the vast majority of cases no optimal solution exists.

The paper provides tools and conceptual frameworks that characterize potential conflicts, hazards, and tradeoffs implicit in the choice among different sustainable or non‐sustainable outcomes for tourism.

A few years ago the concept of the employee as a customer was treated as a novel breakthrough. Here the process has taken the ultimate step of reversal and the customer as employee in service organisations is seriously examined. The customer must be selected, trained, motivated and even dismissed if necessary. As such he is no longer a passive recipient of services, to be humoured at all times, but an active participant on equal terms with the official staff, thus giving rise to a new dimension – the design and management of the role of the customer.

The debate about whether any difference exists between manufacturing and service operations is discussed. There is no difference per se between the two types of operation and that debate about differences between them is spurious. There are significant differences between operating systems which process materials and those which deal directly with customers. These differences are sufficient to require different treatment for material processing operations and customer processing operations. The similarities and differences between the two types of system are demonstrated, and strategies for managing customer processing operations are outlined. If an appropriate strategy is adopted, customer processing operations are very similar to material processing operations, but other strategies exist which make customer processing operations very different from material processing operations.