Search results

This paper aims to define the term “socially unacceptable services” and call for novel research in these under-researched service industries.

Personal reflections.

Service offerings exist that, despite their ability to create value for customers, clients or partners, many in society at large deem to be offensive, inappropriate or harmful for a variety of reasons. Service researchers have ignored the existence and impact of socially unacceptable services on consumers and society for too long.

Given the expanding role of the transformative service research (TSR) paradigm in the services marketing domain, especially given its emphasis on exchanges that influence consumer and societal well-being and the reality that many socially unacceptable services profoundly influence consumer and societal welfare in both positive and negative manners, the time is opportune for service researchers to begin exploring socially unacceptable services from a TSR perspective.

Given that buyers and sellers who enter socially unacceptable exchanges often seem satisfied by doing so, the authors encourage researchers to unearth how consumers obtain value from these exchanges and to explore whether consumers enter these exchanges with full information to make informed decisions.

This viewpoint is one of the first to provide authors with an impetus to begin research program in socially unacceptable services and offers researchers a list of potential research topics in this new area. The authors believe that socially unacceptable service research may emerge as a separate research paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the positive aspects of casinos, and gambling entertainment in particular, by revealing the health potential of these commercial establishments. In doing so, this work helps explain the affinity of Chinese consumers with gambling.

The authors draw on Attention Restoration Theory to put forth a framework on the restorative potential of a casino on human health and its effects on managerial outcomes. The authors use a sample of 605 Chinese tourists in Macau and use both structural equation modeling and moderation analyses.

Tourists’ ability to sense a casino’s restorative potential is positively related to their well-being and their propensity to view Macau as a value, to spend money in Macau and to revisit Macau. Moderation analyses reveal that tourists may still perceive a casino’s restorative qualities regardless of whether they plan to engage in gambling or other activities, are winning or losing money or reside outside mainland China.

The paper links gaming studies to the transformative research paradigm and considers the possibility that some socially unacceptable services may actually be beneficial to human well-being.

The results help clarify why Chinese tourists tend to engage in casino patronage and gambling activities throughout the world.

This work discusses health benefits associated with socially unacceptable products and suggests that many “sinful services” may offer consumers transformative benefits.

The paper is one of the first to explore positive aspects of gambling and spending time in casino environments, while showing that casinos may be “healthy places” for some consumers.

This study aims to introduce context-specific intersectionality and trauma-informed perspectives for transformative services theory and practice. While transformative service research concerning vulnerable people has focused on well-being and alleviating suffering, there has been less attention paid to how the intersection of scales of social categorisation such as class, gender and cultural norms shapes experiences and outcomes. Likewise, there is a paucity of attention to how lived experiences of trauma among people, such as human trafficking survivors, can and should influence service interactions, delivery and outcomes.

The authors draw upon insights from a focused ethnographic study featuring narrative interviews with ten human trafficking survivors and seven rescue service industry stakeholders, as well as field observations, in Nigeria. Thus, this work enriches the limited scholarship on transformative services across Africa, where local cultural contexts have a significant influence on shaping service environments.

The authors identify how the intersections of socio-economic class, gender dynamics, cultural norms and trauma shape the service experience for survivors.

The authors argue for the criticality of intersectionality and trauma-informed perspectives to transformative services to improve the mental and economic well-being of survivors of human trafficking in the long term.

Transformative service research (TSR) and social marketing share a common goal, which is to institute social change that improves individual and societal well-being. However, the mechanism via which such improved well-being results or so-called “transformation” occurs, is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to examine the claims made in the TSR literature to identity the themes and scholarly meaning of “transformative” service exchange; ascertain the mechanisms used in service contexts to realize transformation, including to motivate long-term, sustainable societal change; and develop a transformative service exchange continuum to guide research and managerial approaches that aim to create uplifting social change. The authors recommend their continuum as a framework to inform how social marketing and service scholars design service solutions to address wicked social problems.

This paper presents a qualitative study where Leximancer, a text-mining tool, is used to visualize the structure of themes and concepts that define transformative service exchanges as explained and applied in the literature. Additionally, a profiling analysis of transformation as it is discussed in the TSR literature is used to identify the mechanisms that service marketers have developed to establish current theorization of service thinking for social change. These qualitative phases of analysis then inform the development of the transformative service exchange continuum.

A scoping review identified 51 articles across 12 journals, based on this study’s selection criteria for identifying transformative service exchanges. The Leximancer analysis systematically and efficiently guided the authors’ interpretation of the large data corpus and was used in the identification of service themes. The use of text-mining software afforded a detailed lens to enrich the authors’ interpretation and clarification of six high-level concepts for inclusion on a transformative service exchange continuum.

This paper aims to unpack the meaning of transformative service exchange by highlighting the mechanism(s) used by researchers when designing social change outcomes. It contributes to TSR via the development of the continuum across micro, meso and macro levels. The temporal nature of transformative service exchanges is also elucidated. This continuum integrates current TSR studies and can guide future service studies in the TSR and social marketing domains.

This commentary extends our 2020 11th SERVSIG Panel The moral limits of service markets: Just because we can, should we?, inspired by Michael J. Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. In Sandel’s (2012) book, the pursuit of “the good life” is a common motivation for pushing the moral boundaries of markets and “the good life” is dominated by service consumption.

Like Sandel (2012), this commentary begins with a provocation regarding the need for moral development in services marketing. Next, we present three real-life case studies about a modern slavery survivor service, aged care services and health-care services as examples of moral limits, failings and tensions.

The commentary proposes four guidelines and a research agenda. As service marketers, we must reignite conversations about ethics and morality. Taking charge of our professional moral development, exercising moral reflexivity, promoting an ethics of care and taking a bird’s-eye perspective of moral ecologies are our recommended guidelines. Morality is an essential condition – a sine qua non – for service marketers. Hence, our proposed research agenda focuses first on the service marketer and embeds a moral gaze as a universal professional protocol to engender collective moral elevation.

This commentary highlights the need for a moral refresh in services marketing and proposes ways to achieve this end.

Social television (Social TV) viewing of live sports events is an emerging trend. The realm of transformative service research (TSR) envisions that every service consumption experience must lead to consumer well-being. Currently, a full appreciation of the well-being factors obtained through Social TV viewing is lacking. This study aims to gain a holistic understanding of the concept of digital sports well-being obtained through live Social TV viewing of sports events.

Focus group interviews were used to collect data from the 40 regular sports viewers, and the qualitative data obtained is analyzed thematically using NVivo 12. A post hoc verification of the identified themes is done to narrow down the most critical themes.

The exploration helped understand the concept of digital sports well-being (DSW) obtained through live Social TV sports spectating and identified five critical themes that constitute its formation. The themes that emerged were virtual connectedness, vividness, uncertainty reduction, online disinhibition and perceived autonomy. This study defines the concept and develops a conceptual model for DSW.

This study adds to the body of knowledge in TSR, transformative sport service research, digital customer engagement, value co-creation in digital platforms, self-determination theory and flow theory. The qualitative study is exploratory, with participants’ views based on a single match in one particular sport, and as such, its findings are restrained by the small sample size and the specific sport. To extend this study’s implications, empirical research involving a larger and more diversified sample involving multiple sports Social TV viewing experiences would help better understand the DSW concept.

The research provides insights to Social TV live streamers of sporting events and digital media marketers about the DSW construct and identifies the valued DSW dimensions that could provide a competitive advantage.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the exploration is the first attempt to describe the concept of DSW and identify associated themes.

This paper aims to introduce the concept of biomorphism (i.e. indirect experience of nature) in servicescape designs and validates its impact on consumer responses. Using the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, this study explores the relationship between biomorphic servicescape designs and the servicescape preference. Further, it explains how biomorphic designs can help users to get better connected with the servicescapes by introducing the mediating role of attention restoration and place identity (emotional and cognitive), as explained by attention restoration theory.

Two empirical studies were carried out to test the hypothesised relationships: an exploratory pre-experimental design with one-shot treatment using 200 images as stimuli and 3,680 responses; and a 3 × 2 factorial design with three-dimensional images with about 654 responses for three service contexts chosen a priori: fashion retail, restaurant and hospital lobby.

This study conceptualises the role of biomorphism – elements that mimic natural forms – in servicescape designs and establishes that, akin to natural elements, the indirect experience of nature in servicescapes also has a positive influence on attention restoration, perceived place identity and servicescape preference of the consumers. This implies that the effects similar to that of a biophilic servicescape can be achieved through servicescape elements that mimic natural forms.

Extending the idea of biophilia, this research adopts the concept of biomorphism from architecture and environmental psychology domains and introduces biomorphic servicescape designs, which could be more practical at times compared to biophilic servicescapes. It establishes the influences of biomorphic servicescape designs on consumer preferences. Grounded in the S-O-R model, it further explains this relationship through mediating effects of attention restoration and place identity. Being new to marketing and management domains, this research may trigger a series of research studies on biomorphic service environment designs, with desirable implications for services marketing and services operations functions.

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

The adaptationist approach of evolutionary psychology provides a model of substantial scope for understanding the function of human behaviour, including harmful behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evolutionary importance of social belonging, and also its relevance to why people deny stigmatised harmful behaviour, and the potential problems of labelling them by it.

The paper takes the form of a discussion and professional opinion.

Evolution reveals how natural selection has shaped the human nervous system for threat-detection and cooperation. It casts a light on why people convicted of harmful and stigmatised behaviour may hide, deny and lie as a means of limiting social devaluation and maintaining their fitness to belong in groups.

Amidst all our efforts as forensic practitioners to empower people to pro-socially reconnect and lead safer crime-free lives, endlessly associating them with their most unacceptable and harmful acts, might not help.

Evolutionary forensic psychology and evolutionary criminology are sub-disciplines of science that are progressively emerging. They place the adaptationist approach front and centre in the study and theory of criminal behaviour. This paper aims to offer an example of this synergy, but with a specific focus on forensic practice itself.

It is usually unnecessary to define the output of an industry, but this is not the case with mental health services. Following Grossman's conception of health capital, the outputs of mental health care enter a household production function as a commodity vector. Considering the multiple and heterogeneous nature of the services of this industry, preferences exist in multi‐dimensional space. An application of the characteristics theory of consumer demand associated with Ironmonger and Lancaster illustrates the outputs in terms of two characteristics, viz. symptom alleviation and disability reduction. Representing preferences by indifference curves, in the usual way, clarifies the relationship between mental health care inputs and the outputs of mental health care. The theoretical problem in the economics of mental health care of whether, or how, individual preferences can count is also addressed. It is shown on an indifference map what it means when society institutionalises some individuals. This approach also enables the deinstitutionalisation movement to be placed into an economic context. It is noted that empirical work on goods and services that have multiple characteristics involves the application of hedonic price analysis, a technique already applied in the economic literature on mental health.