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This study aims to examine the individuals’ perceived usefulness and ease of use of the government’s electronic services (e-government). It also explores the effect of the social influences, as well as of the facilitating conditions, on the individuals’ intentions to use the government’s digital and mobile services.

The researcher has adapted various measuring items from the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and from the theory of acceptance model to investigate the participants’ utilitarian motivations to engage with the government’s online services. The analysis involved a two-step, structural equation modeling approach that included a confirmatory factor analysis that verified the constructs’ validity and reliability.

There was a satisfactory fit for this study’s research model. The findings revealed that there were direct and indirect effects that predicted the individuals’ readiness to use the e-government services. The results suggest that the respondents’ perceived usefulness and ease of use of this digital technology were significant antecedents for their behavioral intention to use it. The strength of these relationships was affected by the moderating variables, including, age, gender and experience. Yet, these demographic variables did not have a significant effect on the link between social influences and behavioral intention.

This study reported that the citizens felt that the e-government systems were useful and easy to use for them. The research participants indicated that they will continue accessing their government’s online services. Therefore, this research implies that the public services should continue improving the facilitating conditions, including the provision of service quality and capability; as well as secure the accessibility to their e-government systems via digital and mobile technologies. In conclusion, this contribution identifies possible research avenues to academia.

Much has been written about the manifestations and managerial implications of customer co-production in service offerings. However, there have been relatively few references to issues of co-production in international service environments. Co-production is very relevant in international environments because of the requirements for interaction between producers and consumers, which interaction spans international borders and national cultures. The purpose of this paper is to apply an established theory of co-production, the Unified Service Theory (UST), to the international service context. This provides the authors with structured models for conceptualizing the co-productive nature of international service offerings and assessing-related managerial implications.

The UST provides a model of co-productive service delivery. Extending that model, the authors develop a taxonomy of international service based on the “four modes of service supply” provided in the General Agreement on Trade and Services instituted by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Then, using data from the WTO and World Bank, the authors propose and test six hypotheses for predicting service exporting focus corresponding to the co-production taxonomy.

Based on the analysis of empirical data, the authors find more service exporting focus in small, growing, high-wage economies that have a significant service base and focus in merchandise exporting. The strength of these effects differs for different modes of service supply.

The authors also discuss cultural issues of international service, but the empirical analysis of culture effects is thus far inconclusive. Also, the analysis is limited to modeling and studying dyadic relationships, i.e., service providers in one country involved in an interchange with customers in another country. A natural extension would be to consider triads and more complex networks of co-productive service offerings.

This research shows how managerial implication of the UST can be extended to international service contexts. The authors review managerial implications pertaining to meeting variable demand, describing service characteristics, and pricing.

Co-production research is well-established in service management literature. This paper extends that research to international contexts by describing the WTO taxonomy in terms of the UST. This allows the authors to apply various insights of co-production to international service offerings.

Organizations increasingly develop and offer sharing services enabled by means of product-service systems (PSS). However, organizations offering sharing-based PSS face a unique set of design challenges and operational risks. The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with customer-based insights into service delivery system design and risk management for sharing-based PSS operational success.

This qualitative study combines in-depth interviews with supplementary, multidisciplinary literature and secondary firm data. In total, the authors conducted 56 semi-structured interviews with diverse customers across different business-to-customer (B2C) PSS settings.

First, the authors develop an integrative conceptual framework that reveals what structural and infrastructural design choices customer expect organizations to make for mitigating risks and enhancing customer-perceived value in the sharing economy. These design choices may influence customers' trust and control perceptions in all actors involved in the service delivery system. Second, the results suggest that sharing value proposition, customer-perceived level of consequentiality and level of customer-supplied resources are contingency factors that need to be considered when making design decisions for risk management in the sharing economy.

This study extends Sampson's Unified Service Theory by proposing that, with sharing-based PSS, production flows from customers to customers. This situation creates unique challenges for operations management. This paper extends current understanding of the role, characteristics and contingencies of service delivery system design for risk management in the sharing economy. In doing so, authors challenge common wisdom and suggest understanding both the organizational and customers' individual contexts is critical for (contingency) theory and practice.

This study aims to identify the antecedent factors influencing consumer attitudes and patronage intentions toward an intelligent unmanned convenience store (IUCVS) in Taiwan. The IUCVS is a new smart service that offers customers a novel shopping experience, given that it avoids queues and physical contacts with cashiers. However, studies discussing IUCVS remain scant owing to its brief history.

This research develops a synergistic model combining original unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) constructs with perceived risk and value to test differences between unexperienced and experienced customers’ attitudes and patronage intentions toward IUCVSs. Data collected from 268 experienced and 156 unexperienced consumers were tested against the proposed research model using partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA).

In line with expectations, three UTAUT variables (i.e. performance, effort expectancy and social influence) and perceived value significantly and positively influence consumer attitudes toward IUCVSs. This research confirms the significant and negative direct effect of perceived risk on consumers’ patronage intentions toward IUCVSs. Furthermore, the PLS-MGA results unveil that a significant difference exist in the effects of perceived convenience value on attitudes toward IUCVS between consumers who had experience of using self-service machines and those who have not.

This research successfully fills the research gap by offering a synergistic model for evaluating consumers’ attitudes and patronage intentions toward a new smart service. Several important theoretical and practical implications are provided to help retail managers develop service strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature service operations management (OM) and its application to the field of humanitarian operations.

The paper serves as the editorial for this issue of JHLSCM.

The paper suggests that there is an opportunity for service OM academics to apply their knowledge and skills to answer fundamental questions in the humanitarian OM field.

There is a need for a re-conceptualization of the term “humanitarian operations” to include services. Humanitarian OM is not just products but also services.

The paper contributes to the knowledge and applications of services OM in humanitarian operations research. This is the first work to identify how services OM theories can be adopted for humanitarian OM research. This research should serve as a foundation for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of context and its implications for theory and research in service.

This is a conceptual paper based on exploring existing research and theory related to context in service research.

The characteristics of service make context both important and challenging, there is great contextual diversity in service research as reflected, for example in ecosystems made up of multiple contextual variables. There is a need to identify the context-specific nature of middle range theory and the contextual logic of general theory. The authors explore the challenges of context for service theory and how we might learn from theory in a particular context and test or adapt it in other contexts.

The findings of this paper are of value to researchers seeking to develop and justify theory in service research (general, middle range or theory in use).

Banks and financial services providers are increasingly delivering their services via electronic banking, also known as e-banking. Yet even though this type of delivery is now common, the degree of personalization in the services provided via this channel exhibit considerable variation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of service personalization on consumer reaction to the e-banking service. Based on research of information and communication technology (ICT) service innovation and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model, this study further examines one contingent factor, compatibility with previous experience with e-banking. This study focuses on the interactions effect of personalization and technology compatibility on customer e-banking service usage.

A survey was conducted to investigate the impacts of personalization on e-banking usage decision process and the interactions between personalization and compatibility with past e-banking experience. Quota sampling was applied and different type of customers were approached in 30 branches of the commercial bank. Data were collected from a sample of 181 banking customers in a metropolitan region in southern China.

The results indicated that personalization leads to increased performance expectancy and decreased effort expectancy, which in turn lead to increasing intention to continue to use e-banking services. In addition, compatibility with previous e-banking experience and personalization produces an interaction effect on both performance expectancy and effort expectancy.

The theoretical contribution of this study is to demonstrate how the contingent factor of compatibility moderates the impact of personalization, thus extending the UTAUT model in the area of e-banking service adoption. Implications are twofold: personalization influences evaluations of both utility and ease of use, and the effect is magnified when compatibility with prior e-banking experience is factored into the model. This is an important extension and future research should examine whether the same relationship holds in other industries using new technologies to deliver services. The UTAUT model, after extension by including the moderating impact of compatibility, works well in demonstrating the impact of various factors on the adoption of a new technological delivery system for a service.

This study has two significant implications for managerial practices. First, the study sheds lights on the segmentation of e-banking customers. Modern marketers know that the best way to engage with consumers is through personal messaging strategies and should make great efforts to identify customers before trying to reach them. In the e-banking realm, consumer banking preferences keep changing. With a clear understanding of the different consumer banker segments, financial institutions can identify which channels appeal to them. For example, some users are more likely than average to use e-banking. Second, this study helps e-banking service provider design different personalized e-banking service for different customers.

This study sheds light on social value of personalization, particularly among those new to a delivery platform.

This study provides evidence demonstrating that personalization increases customer perceptions of performance expectancy and decreases effort expectancy, and that the effect is most profound for customers with limited level of perceived compatibility with past experience with e-banking. This paper extended the UTAUT model and research on ICT service innovation by providing more insights on the impacts of e-banking service personalization and the contingency impact of user’s background in e-banking context.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how reverse resource exchanges and resource dependencies are managed in the service supply chain (SSC) of returnable transport packaging (RTP).

A single case study was conducted in the context of automotive logistics focusing on the RTP SSC. Data were collected through 16 interviews, primarily with managers of a logistics service provider (LSP) and document analysis of contractual agreements with key customers of the packaging service.

Resource dependencies among actors in the SSC result from the importance of the RTP for the customer’s production processes, the competition among users for RTP and the negative implications of the temporary unavailability of RTP for customers and the LSP (in terms of service performance). Amongst other things, the LSP is dependent on its customers and third-party users (e.g. the customer’s suppliers) for the timely return of package resources. The role of inter-firm integration and collaboration, formal contracts as well as customers’ power and influence over third-party RTP users are stressed as key mechanisms for managing LSP’s resource dependencies.

A resource dependence theory (RDT) lens is used to analyse how reverse resource exchanges and associated resource dependencies in SSCs are managed, thus complementing the existing SSC literature emphasising the bi-directionality of resource flows. The study also extends the recent SSC literature stressing the role of contracting by empirically demonstrating how formal contracts can be mobilised to explicate resource dependencies and to specify, and regulate, reverse exchanges in the SSC.

The research suggests that logistics providers can effectively manage their resource dependencies and regulate reverse exchanges in the SSC by deploying contractual governance mechanisms and leveraging their customers’ influence over third-party RTP users.

The study is novel in its application of RDT, which enhances our understanding of the management of reverse exchanges and resource dependencies in SSCs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled the transition in the workplace into the digital era. The purpose of this review paper is to highlight how the pandemic has further exposed the digital divide and the structural inequalities in remote workers’ access to home-location technology infrastructure and services. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) is adopted to highlight how the pandemic has forced the workforce to accept and use digital technology from home for work purposes.

This desktop-based review paper is drawn from the existing literature. Although both benefits and disadvantages are noted, technology plays a critical role in connecting remote workers to the digital world.

The paper found that remote workers did not necessarily struggle to work remotely from home to undertake their daily work tasks. Still, the critical challenge was the available Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in their respective residential areas.

The paper seeks to highlight that even though the COVID-19 pandemic and related events have fast-tracked the switch of many work activities into the digital era, the uneven distribution of ICT infrastructure accentuates the barriers to effective home workplaces for many in developing communities. The research found a significant role that the advancement and acceptance of technologies play in the efficacy of remote working from home.

The relevance of this paper is in its contribution to the literature in extending knowledge about the UTAUT on remote working during a pandemic. The arguments presented herein may contribute to policy development and the ongoing debate about how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift into the digital era on a global basis.

This study aims to detect and mitigate opportunistic behavior in call centers through proper performance management and to provide companies considering outsourcing and/or offshoring their call center services with the important performance factors.

The study introduces performance management as an important mediating process affecting BPO performance, and presents insights to the performance management of call centers, particularly related to detecting opportunistic behavior. Building from contractual and agency theory, KPI data from two different companies using two different pricing schemes was analyzed. The data represented 107 weeks under each contract type covering specific Service Level Agreement measures.

The study indicates the importance of having in place a performance management system to manage BPO, and presents the notion of proxies to detect difficult to measure service level performance targets. The study confirms the existence of opportunistic behavior from the vendor side, and offers a structured method to detect and control for opportunistic behavior.

The research is limited to the call center outsourcing in the telecom industry. Price per call (PPC) and price per time (PPT) were the only pricing models studied.

The study supports telecom companies that are interested in outsourcing their call center services with the important factors they need to consider during the outsourcing process, particularly in light of the vendor opportunistic behavior.

The study contributes to the limited literature on performance management in BPO, and offers a structured method to test for the existence of opportunistic behavior.