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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mutual learning implications for service productivity of the characteristics of service and service production.

This is a conceptual paper. The starting point is, first of all, that productivity as a management concept should help a firm to manage its economic profit, and secondly, that service organizations are open systems, where the customers participate as co-producers and are exposed to the firm’s production resources and processes. Unlike in manufacturing, to understand productivity in service organizations as a means of managing profit, cost effects and revenue effects of changes in the productions system cannot be separated. Due to the interaction between customers and the firm’s resources during service production, dialogical collaboration between them develops. This enables mutual learning.

Given the social dynamics in service production processes, four learning processes that influence service productivity are identified. Two processes enhance the organizations’s internal efficiency (cost savings), and two enhance its external effectiveness (perceived quality, revenue generation); two are organization-driven, two are customer-driven.

The mutual learning model demonstrates how the service provider by learning from the dynamics of service encounters in many ways can manage the productivity of the organizations’s processes. It shows that learning enables improvement of service productivity through effects enhancing both internal efficiency and external effectiveness.

In a productivity context, learning has not earlier been studied as a mutual learning phenomenon.

Despite the fact that business model innovation (BMI) has attracted intense attention from scholars and practitioners alike, practicable knowledge on the organizational implementation of BMI efforts in large multinational corporations is rather rare. This paper aims to investigate how BMI is managed in the complex environment of the chemical industry based on a study at BASF SE, a leading global chemical company.

The empirical data draw from six case studies (i.e. six BMI projects) within BASF which were observed in the 2010-2014 timeframe.

There is not one uniform BMI process archetype. Three different types can be identified, whereby the degree of technology involvement and the maturity of this technology act as determining factors for the form of the process and its organizational implementation.

This paper profits from its unique empirical setting, which allows identifying practices for the organizational implementation of systematic BMI processes in large corporations. The guidelines derived are highly relevant for general managers and business development departments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of trans-contextual processes of implementation and governance in the transformation of social and labor inclusion policies in Norway and Italy, including research and practical implications.

It combines qualitative case studies with a framework that makes them comparable, namely, the Logics of Welfare.

Differences and similarities are related to regimes’ path dependencies as well as interactions between bottom-up and top-down dynamics of implementation. Their shifting logics and patterns enhance or hinder the local actors’ agency and enactment, and the systems’ capability to reduce the risks of exclusion. Results and the ways in which they are achieved are different, although in both cases the inclusion in the labor market remains a contended issue.

The comparison is based on two case studies. A further development of in-depth comparative analysis may improve our understanding of the role of contexts in the implementation of policy reforms.

Reforms have limited capacity to achieve the expected outcomes, including due to a limited understanding of context-based factors. Practitioners and policy makers should take greater account of the latter and their active role in modifying them.

This paper provides a deeper comprehension on how policy practices affect citizens’ hard pathways toward inclusion.

Through a comparative context-based analysis, the paper shows important differences, similarities and shifting modes of operation in activation policy as well as the role of socio-organizational contexts and bottom-up mobilizations. It looks forward to the possible added value derived from a wider testing of such approaches.

This paper aims to introduce the experience-dominant (Ex-D) logic model, which synthesizes the creation, perceptions and outcomes of Ex-D logic. It is designed to offer valuable insights for strategic managerial applications and future research directions.

Employing a qualitative approach by using eight selected product launch events from reviewed 100 event videos and 55 in-depth interviews with industrial managers to develop an Ex-D logic model, and data were coded and analysed via NVivo.

Results show that the firm’s Ex-D logic is operationalized as the mentalizing of the three types of customer needs (service competence, hedonic excitations and meaning making), the materializing of three types of customer experiences and customer journeys (service experience, hedonic experience and brand experience) and the moderating of three types of customer values (service values, hedonic values and brand values).

This study has implications for adding new insights into existing theory on dominant logic and customer experience management and also offers actionable recommendations for managerial applications.

This study sheds light on the importance of Ex-D logic from a strategic point of view and provides an organic view of the firm. It distinguishes firm perspective from customer perspective, firm experience from customer experience and firm journey from consumer journey.

This paper seeks to explore empirically the relationships between efficiency, financial performance and customer service quality among a representative cross‐section of Australian banks and credit unions and the correlations between these categories of measures. In particular, it seeks to explore the strength of the relationship between efficiency, financial performance and service quality. Results show that all financial performance measures (interest margin, expense/income, return on assets and capital adequacy) are positively correlated with customer service quality scores. In contrast, the absence of a consistently positive relationship between efficiency and financial performance suggests that financial institutions that pursue improved financial performance through the single‐minded pursuit of lower costs may be fundamentally misguided.

This paper aims to develop the foundation of a model for assessing relationship marketing readiness (RMR) and provide directions for such an assessment.

Based on the promise theory and service logic, the importance of the customer–firm touchpoints and interactions to relationship marketing as an equivalent to the product variable in a conventional marketing approach is discussed. Then, a relationship marketing model and an RMR assessment model are developed.

The paper suggests an RMR assessment model based on two variables, namely, whether management’s focus is on the customers’ or the firm’s resources and processes and whether it is on the customers’ or the firm’s definition of quality. An indicative list of measurement factors is proposed.

The paper emphasizes the need to broaden the scope of marketing and offers a novel measurement approach, which both in theory and practice helps the development of relationship marketing understanding.

Disruptive shocks significantly compromise service contexts, challenging multidimensional value (co)creation. Recent focus has been on consumers experiencing vulnerability in service contexts. However, the susceptibility of service firms, employees and other actors to the impacts of disruptive shocks has received little attention. Since resource scarcity from disruptive shocks heightens tensions around balancing different needs in the service system, this paper aims to propose a framework of balanced centricity and service system resilience for service sustainability.

Adopting a conceptual model process, the paper integrates resilience and balanced centricity (method theories) with customer/consumer vulnerability (domain theory) resulting in a definition of multiactor vulnerability and related theoretical propositions.

Depleted, unavailable, or competed over resources among multiple actors constrain resource integration. Disruptive shocks nevertheless have upside potential. The interdependencies of actors in the service system call for deeper examination of multiple parties’ susceptibility to disruptive resource scarcity. The conceptual framework integrates multiactor vulnerability (when multiactor susceptibility to resource scarcity challenges value exchange) with processes of service system resilience, developing three research propositions. Emerging research questions and strategies for balanced centricity provide a research agenda.

A multiactor, balanced centricity perspective extends understanding of value cocreation, service resilience and service sustainability. Strategies for anticipating, coping with and adapting to disruptions in service systems are suggested by using the balanced centricity perspective, offering the potential to maintain (or enhance) the six types of value.

This research defines multiactor vulnerability, extending work on experienced vulnerabilities; describes the multilevel and multiactor perspective on experienced vulnerability in service relationships; and conceptualizes how balanced centricity can decrease multiactor vulnerability and increase service system resilience when mega disruptions occur.

The purpose of this paper is to record the author’s personal reflections on his career as a marketing scholar.

Personal reflections in an autobiographical approach.

The author’s career as student, teacher and scholar is described in some detail.

The paper records events and memories that might otherwise be forgotten. No other such account has been published of Christian Grönroos’s career.

The purpose of this paper is to accelerate research related to the employee-facets of service management by summarizing current developments in multiple research streams, providing propositions, and articulating new directions for theory and empirical inquiry.

Seven scholars provide short reviews of the core topics and findings from four employee-related research streams – collective turnover, service climate, emotional labor, and occupational stress; and generate propositions to guide future theoretical and empirical work. Four distinguished service scholars – David Bowen, Ray Fisk, Christian Grönroos, and Jochen Wirtz comment upon these research streams and provide future directions for accelerating employee-related research in service management.

All four research-streams yield insights that have the potential to advance service management research. Commentaries from the distinguished scholars further integrate this work with key concerns within service management including technology-enablement, transformative services, and service strategy.

This paper is unique in its scope of coverage of management topics related to service and its aim to promote interdisciplinary dialog between service management scholars and researchers conducting employee-related research relevant to services.

The study aimed to examine the antecedents to self-service technology (SST) adoption behavior and the relationships between the constructs using empirical research.

Based on synthesis of the extant literature, a model was hypothesized, hypotheses were framed. Field data collected were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Few interesting findings were noted in this research. First, SST service quality had a direct positive linkage with perceived value, but no linkage with e-satisfaction. Second, strong positive linkage existed between perceived value and e-satisfaction. Therefore, the connection between SST service quality and satisfaction was completely mediated by perceived value. Third, no relationship existed between perceived value and behavioral intentions, but a direct positive relationship existed between e-satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Thus, the relationship of perceived value with behavioral intentions was fully mediated by e-satisfaction. Fourth, no direct connection was found between SST service quality and behavioral intentions. Rather, the connection was fully mediated by perceived value and e-satisfaction. Fifth, direct positive association was found between behavioral intentions and actual adoption of SST.

This empirical research was conducted primarily on the young population.

The study will benefit managers in making better decisions on how to make SST work successfully for their organizations.

First, this research further refined the SST adoption process of a customer, thus making a meaningful contribution to the literature on SST. Second, the research validated SSTQUAL scale in a different geographical setting.