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The collaborative economy (CE), and within it, collaborative consumption (CC) has become a central element of the global economy and has substantially disrupted service markets (e.g. accommodation and individual transportation). The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends and develop future scenarios for market structures in the CE. This allows service providers and public policy makers to better prepare for potential future disruption.

Thought experiments – theoretically grounded in population ecology (PE) – are used to extrapolate future scenarios beyond the boundaries of existing observations.

The patterns suggested by PE forecast developmental trajectories of CE leading to one of the following three future scenarios of market structures: the centrally orchestrated CE, the social bubbles CE, and the decentralized autonomous CE.

The purpose of this research was to create CE future scenarios in 2050 to stretch one’s consideration of possible futures. What unfolds in the next decade and beyond could be similar, a variation of or entirely different than those described.

Public policy makers need to consider how regulations – often designed for a time when existing technologies were inconceivable – can remain relevant for the developing CE. This research reveals challenges including distribution of power, insularity, and social compensation mechanisms that need consideration across states and national borders.

This research tests the robustness of assumptions used today for significant, plausible market changes in the future. It provides considerable value in exploring challenges for public policy given the broad societal, economic, and political implications of the present market predictions.

The purpose of this paper is to make two main contributions: first, showcase the diversity of service research in terms of the variety of used theories and methods, and second, explain (post-publication) success of articles operationalized as interest in an article (downloads), usage (citations), and awards (best paper nomination). From there, three sub-contributions are derived: stimulate a dialogue about existing norms and practices in the service field, enable and encourage openness amongst service scholars, and motivate scholars to join the field.

A mixed method approach is used in combining quantitative and qualitative research methods while analyzing 158 Journal of Service Management (JOSM) articles on several criteria such as their theory, methodology, and main descriptive elements (e.g. number of authors or references) and then using automated text analysis (e.g. investigating the readability of articles, etc.).

The results show that the JOSM publishes a large variety of articles with regard to theories, methods of data collection, and types of data analysis. For example, JOSM has published a mixture of qualitative and quantitative articles and papers containing firm-level and customer-level data. Further, the results show that even though conceptual articles create the same amount of interest (downloads), they are used more (citations).

This paper presents many descriptive results which do not allow for making inferences toward the entire service research discipline. Further, it is only based on one service research journal (JOSM) through a five-year span of publication.

The results have a number of implications for the discipline that are presented and discussed. Amongst them are that: the discipline should be more open toward conceptual articles, service research shows an imbalance toward theory testing, there is more potential to work with transactional data, and writing style should be more accessible (i.e. readable).

This paper is the first to conduct an in-depth analysis of service research articles to stimulate dialogue about common publishing practices in the JOSM and to increase the openness of the field.

Organizations (data gatherers in the context) drown in data while at the same time seeking managerially relevant insights. Academics (data hunters) have to deal with decreasing respondent participation and escalating costs of data collection while at the same time seeking to increase the managerial relevance of their research. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework on how, managers and academics can collaborate better to leverage each other’s resources.

This research synthesizes the academic and the managerial literature on the realities and priorities of practitioners and academics with regard to data. Based on the literature, reflections from the world’s leading service research centers, and the authors’ own experiences, the authors develop recommendations on how to collaborate in research.

Four dimensions of different data realities and priorities were identified: research problem, research resources, research process and research outcome. In total, 26 recommendations are presented that aim to equip academics to leverage the potential of corporate data for research purposes and to help managers to leverage research results for their business.

This paper argues that both practitioners and academics have a lot to gain from collaborating by exchanging corporate data for scientific approaches and insights. However, the gap between different realities and priorities needs to be bridged when doing so. The paper first identifies data realities and priorities and then develops recommendations on how to best collaborate given these differences.

This research has the potential to contribute to managerial practice by informing academics on how to better collaborate with the managerial world and thereby facilitate collaboration and the dissemination of academic research for the benefit of both parties.

Whereas the previous literature has primarily examined practitioner–academic collaboration in general, this study is the first to focus specifically on the aspects related to sharing corporate data and to elaborate on academic and corporate objectives with regard to data and insights.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers fear for their health when interacting with service providers. To mitigate this fear service providers are using safety signals directed to consumers and other stakeholders who make organizational assessments. The purpose of this article is to synthesize the range of safety signals in a framework that integrates signaling theory with servicescape elements so as to provide guidance for service providers to assist in their recovery.

The authors extracted examples of how service providers signal safety to their consumers that the risk of infection is low in exchanging with their service. These examples were taken from secondary data sources in the form of trade publications resulting from a systematic search and supplemented by an organic search.

In total 53 unique safety signals were identified and assigned to 24 different categories in our framework. Most of the signals fell into the default and sale independent category, followed by the default contingent revenue risking category.

This study builds on signaling theory and service literature to develop a framework of the range of safety signals currently in use by service providers and offers suggestions as to which are likely to be most effective. Further, a future research inquiry of safety signals is presented, which the authors believe has promise in assisting recovery in a post-pandemic world.

Demand for service convenience, defined as a consumer’s perception of minimized time and effort spent to obtain a service, has increased in conjunction with certain sociocultural and demographic changes. Previous research notes the significance of service convenience, but the importance of different dimensions of service convenience and the role of key moderators affecting the link between convenience and satisfaction (like customer psychographic and sociodemographic characteristics) remain unaddressed. Thus, the purpose of this research is to identify those customer groups for which offering convenience will have the highest leverage to increase satisfaction.

Two models are developed and tested: a multidimensional model of service convenience with a formative measure of five service convenience dimensions, namely, decision, access, search, transaction and after-sales convenience, and a moderator model hypothesizing different customer psychographic and sociodemographic characteristics (time pressure, shopping enjoyment, age, household size and income) that affect the link between service convenience and satisfaction.

This study reveals that search convenience, followed by transaction and decision convenience, exerts the greatest influence on the perception of overall service convenience. In addition, those who value service convenience most are high-income, time-pressed consumers in smaller households who experience low shopping enjoyment.

Providers have limited budgets for enhancing their services. Thus, it is important to identify which dimension has the greatest influence on the perception of service convenience and the customer segments for which service convenience is most critical.

The needs of CMOs to utilize a firm's data productively in order to support decision-making combined with the reported benefits of enterprise feedback management solutions has resulted in a rapid rise in usage and valuation of EFM providers. The explicit promise of EFM providers is improved financial performance, whereas there is no scientific research investigating this link. To investigate the link between EFM usage and financial performance is core of this research.

To gain insight into this link survey data from 127 US-based firms on their usage of EFM platforms was linked to their stock market performance over several years.

This research did not find any significant positive relationships between different aspects of EFM usage investigated and stock returns. It is important to note that these results should not be taken as validation that EFM systems do not result in positive financial outcomes for firms. It may be that superior market performance as measured through stock returns is difficult to observe through a cross-sectional analysis. Instead these results indicate that superior market performance as measured through stock market performance is not an obvious, generalizable outcome for firms that have adopted EFM systems.

EFM has rapidly grown across many consumer facing industries, with EFM platform providers receiving very high market valuations on relatively small revenue streams. This is one of the first scientific papers to study the usage and impact of these EFM systems.

This research aims to better understand customer experience, as it relates to customer commitment and provides a framework for future research into the intersection of these emerging streams of research.

This research contributes to theoretical and practical perspectives on customer experience and its measurement by integrating extant literature with customer commitment and customer satisfaction literature.

The breadth of the domains that encompass customer experience – cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial and social – makes simplistic metrics impossible for gauging the entirety of customers’ experiences. These findings provide strong support of the need for new research into customer experience and customer commitment.

Given the complexity of customer experience, managers are unlikely to track and manage all relevant elements of the concept. This research provides a framework identifying empirically the most salient attributes of customer experience with particular emphasis on those elements that enhance commitment. This offers insight into service design to correspond with specific commitment and experience dimensions.

This research is the first to examine the customer experience as it relates to customer commitment – a key factor in customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and other desired outcomes for managers and marketers. This paper provides a framework for future research into these emerging topics.

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize platforms for members to exchange information by information-based online communities (IBOCs, like LinkedIn or Facebook). Because member participation is vital for IBOCs, this research aims to identify and validate factors that drive member participation.

With reference to social exchange theory the authors developed a model of antecedents of participation in IBOCs that was tested with survey data using PLS. Because some of the results contradicted the theory, the authors examined those results in a mainly qualitative study with online community providers. These experts offered explanations that inform the discussion and managerial implications.

Role clarity, provider’s responsiveness, and enjoyment all influence member participation. Contrary to theory, the cooperation of other members affects member participation negatively while a member’s ability shows no effect.

This research has several implications for IBOC providers. Because ability does not affect participation directly, providers do not need to worry about lacking ability and can effectively target all potential members. The importance of provider responsiveness signals that IBOC providers should proactively monitor members’ compliance with social norms to lower the social risk for members. The impact of community-specific knowledge and enjoyment on participation puts emphasis on careful community design and the thoughtful implementation of new features that might enhance enjoyment, but reduce role clarity.

Whereas most of the participation literature focusses on a dyadic relationship, the research investigates the triadic relationship in which the provider is only an enabler of exchange. Furthermore, the authors bring together two streams of the literature: the participation literature, which tends to focus on offline participation; and the online community literature, which has not yet investigated participation. This is also the first paper to investigate nonlinear effects on participation.

This paper aims to outline the purpose, planning, development and delivery of the “1st Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact workshop: Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Big Data” held at Alliance Manchester Business School on 18th and 19th January 2016, at which four subsequent papers were initially developed.

The paper sets out a summary of the importance and significance of the four papers developed at the workshop and how the co-creative dialogue between managerial practitioners, presenting key problems and issues that they face, and carefully selected teams of academics was facilitated.

To develop richer and more impactful understanding of current problems challenging customer-focused managers, there is a need for more dialogue and engagement between academics and practitioners.

The paper serves as a guideline for developing future workshops that aim at strengthening the links between academia and the business world.

This paper highlights the value of academic–practitioner workshops for focusing academic research on areas of importance for practitioners to generate impact. The innovative format of the workshop and the resulting impactful papers should serve as a call and motivation for future academic–practitioner workshop development.

Unacceptable behaviour in retailing – negative customer deviance (NCD) is rising, damaging retailers financially. Current research investigates forms of NCD by addressing its impact on employees but overlooks its effects on bystander-customers and their retail channel preferences. As channel switching within retailing is increasing unprecedentedly, this research investigates its correspondence with NCD encounters.

This research uses structural equation modelling, based on data collection administered through a web-based survey of 1,008 customers of at least 16 years of age, to analyse the research model.

The findings reveal unexplored forms of NCD perceived by bystander-customers in retailing and their consequences, linking it to bystander-customers' ill-being, dissatisfaction with the shopping experience, a decrease in store commitment and an increase in their retail channel-switching intentions. Additionally, the research uncovers moderating variables.

This research tests NCD dimensions and effects on bystander-customers, which indicate the need for retailers to address shopping values, attitudes and commitment through corrective, proactive and long-term strategic actions.

As one of the first studies to investigate the impact of NCD on bystander-customers' intentions to switch from store-based to online shopping, strategies for retailers are developed to help diminish and control NCD-induced threats to bystander-customers.