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Strategic literature has focused on how economies of scale in a firm offering outsourcing may generate incentives for clients to increase the outsourced services, but there has been limited research on how the clients’ features may influence the scope of services that they hire with an outsourcing provider. This study analyzes whether a client’s efficiency motivates it to increase ties with a specific provider of knowledge-intensive services in the context of business process outsourcing (BPO). We further explore whether industry conditions moderate the relationship.

A research framework is developed consisting of three main hypotheses. We combine industry data and proprietary and financial data from a longitudinal sample of 107 client firms of a multinational outsourcing service provider to test our hypotheses.

We find that more efficient firms hire more services from an outsourcing provider and that the munificence of the client firm’s industry positively moderates this relationship. Our results suggest that efficient clients can better keep transaction costs under control when accessing, assimilating, and exploiting the knowledge embedded in an expanded set of services provided by an outsourcing supplier.

This study extends the absorptive capacity perspective by showing that a client’s efficiency reinforces its opportunities to absorb knowledge-intensive services from a supplier when expanding the range of operations in the context of BPO.

The purpose of this paper is to extend conceptually the context of service beyond service encounters and servicescapes by applying a service-ecosystem approach to context and experiential view on value.

We develop a conceptual framework of an extended service context that is based on an S-D logic, service-ecosystems view.

The service ecosystem approach proposed here contributes to the advancement of “services” marketing research by extending the context of service in two ways: its emphasis on service as the basis of all exchange allows the consideration of all instances of value-in-use, in-context, to be considered as a service experience; its conceptualization of context broadens the time/place dimensions that conventionally restrain research in service encounters and servicescapes beyond physical, social, symbolic and relational dimensions to consider the multiplicity of institutions across a wider socio-historic space.

This paper offers a broad conceptual framework for considering an extended view of service context. Future research is needed, both conceptual and empirical, to identify more specific components of service context and how they influence evaluations of experience.

Extending the scope of service context draws attention to the participation of customers and other actors in the co-creation of the service context, as well as the experience. This points toward the need to consider the competences and skills of customers as well as their socio-historic perspective in the design and development of a servicescape or more specific service encounter.

We offer a dynamic perspective of service context to help further the reach of services marketing research by extending the context of service across a variety of exchange encounters and pointing toward institutions as a central influence on phenomenological views of experience.

Over the past two and a half decades services marketing has emerged as a well established area of inquiry in the marketing discipline. In many ways, its growth and acceptance in the academic arena are indeed noteworthy. A question arises, however, concerning the direction that services marketing as a field of study should take in the future. This article reports and content‐analyzes the insights of ten leading services scholars regarding that question. That group comprises Leonard Berry, Mary Jo Bitner, David Bowen, Stephen W. Brown, Christian Gro¨nroos, Evert Gummesson, Christopher Lovelock, Parsu Parasuraman, Benjamin Schneider, and Valarie Zeithaml. Recurring themes and provocative observations among the services experts’ comments are related and discussed. Concluding remarks are offered.

The recently published Inventory of abstracting and indexing services produced in the UK provides a considerable amount of both ‘hard’ and indicative data from which some general trends in the development of abstracting and indexing services can be deduced. A study of these trends was undertaken and the findings have just been published in the BLRDD report series. This paper presents, in a summary of those findings, information about the size, longevity, ownership and scope of such services.

Pervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regulated services, and how they should be designed, and implemented.

The paper presents a detailed design, and prototype implementation of the system, called mobile hanging services (MHS), that provides the ability to execute mobile code (service application) on demand and control entities' behaviours in accessing services in pervasive computing environments. Extensive evaluation of this prototype is also provided.

The framework presented in this paper enables a novel contextual services infrastructure that allows services to be described at a high level of abstraction and to be regulated by contextual policies. This contextual policy governs the visibility and execution of contextual services in the environment. In addition, a range of contextual services is developed to illustrate different types of services used in the framework.

The main contribution of this paper is a high‐level model of a system for context‐aware regulated services, which consists of environments (domains and spaces), contextual software components, entities and computing devices.

Introduces a strategic typology of services (generic, specialized and customized services). Discusses their implications for international marketing strategies. Presented as tools for strategic thinking, the strategic types of services are developed in the process of differentiating a service from its competitors and focusing it on the particular market segment(s). The typology is not mutually exclusive but can be used to combine elements in order to achieve a differential advantage in service competition. Discusses the core competences of a service firm and the choices in international marketing strategies in the case of each type of service.

This paper responds to concerns raised by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and scholars over the rapid growth of Big 4 consulting practices. This paper aims to explores the question: Does the regrowth of sizable consulting practices by the Big 4 influence audit reporting lag and restatement rates?

A population of the SEC-registered US audit clients of the Big 4 was used in this study. Longitudinal data on Big 4 audit clients from 2000 through 2009 were analyzed to determine the impact of consulting practice size on the clients’ audit reporting lag and restatement rate.

This paper finds that consulting practice size has a positive and statistically significant influence on audit reporting lag and restatement rate. The results are robust to alternative specifications of the sample and controlling for the level of non-audit services provided to audit clients.

The findings contribute to the discussion of the scope-of-services issue. They provide empirical support for Zeff’s (2003) and Wyatt’s (2004) intuition that the loss of Big 4 professional focus – not simply conflicts of interests – is a major factor affecting the audit quality.

The uniqueness of this paper is in how it counts restatements. Each year this paper counts that annual financial statements are restated as opposed to each disclosure of a restatement. This paper’s contribution is to examine the association between the regrowth of Big 4 accounting firm consulting practices with audit reporting lag and restatements.

The provision of information and advice for older people arranging their own care is a policy objective. The purpose of this paper is to explore the range and scope of web-based information about care coordination activities for older people in the non-statutory sector in England.

Non-statutory organisations were identified through a structured internet search. Services were screened to identify those providing at least one care coordination activity. A postal survey of services was conducted in 2014 and results compared with the initial findings of the web search.

Almost 300 services were identified, most of which were provided by three organisations: Age UK; Alzheimer’s Society; and the British Red Cross. Brokerage was the most frequently reported care coordination activity; the majority of services focussed on help to stay at home; and carers and older people (including those with dementia) were the target groups most often identified. Comparison of the two information sources revealed a significant agreement between two care coordination’s activities: compiling support plans and monitoring and review.

Findings are based on a purposive sample of organisations and therefore care must be exercised in generalising from them.

This study is one of the first to systematically explore the nature and extent of information about care coordination activities provided by the non-statutory sector in England. It was conducted when policy advocated both an increased role for the non-statutory sector and an increase in self-directed support.

In response to the call for research on customer experience across the customer journey, this study aims to analyze and compare the effects of perceived quality on customer satisfaction among the different stages of search, experience and credence services.

This paper constructs a formation model of customer satisfaction based on service stages. Data on perceived quality and customer satisfaction in different stages of search, experience and credence services was collected through experiments and practical survey and the model was empirically tested through multiple linear regression.

The results show that perceived quality in the preparation and departure stages of search and credence services has a greater influence on customer satisfaction than in the delivery stage. While compared to the preparation stage, the perceived quality in the delivery and departure stages of experience service has a greater influence on customer satisfaction.

This research will help service firms optimize the allocation of service resources according to the importance of different service stages within the three indicated service types, promoting customer satisfaction.

This is the first study of its kind to compare the effects of perceived quality on customer satisfaction among the stages of search, experience and credence services.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new scale for measuring the scope (i.e. breadth and depth) of industrial service offering.

The scale and its constructs are developed by combining the key insights from prior literature and practitioners gained through expert interviews; validating the constructs by 3 item-construct validation rounds with 9 academic experts; and by testing and further revising the scale, with a sample of 91 manufacturing firms.

The distinct contribution of the study is the construction and validation of a new multi-dimensional scale for operationalizing the scope of industrial service offering. In addition, the identified service categories (i.e. pre-sales services, product support services, product life-cycle services, R&D services and operational services) extend the current literature on service typologies.

The data are somewhat biased toward small- and medium-sized industrial firms. Hence, the development of the measurement in the context of large industrial firms provides one fruitful avenue for further research.

For managers of industrial firms, the identified service categories provide novel insight on how to develop, bundle and commercialize industrial services to their varying customer segments.

This study develops a multi-dimensional, fine-grained, statistical and relationship-level scale for measuring the scope of industrial service business. Moreover, this study tests and further develops the scale with quantitative empirical data.