Search results

Future is rarely explicitly addressed or problematized in business network research. This study aims to examine the possibilities of developing a business actor’s future orientation to network studies and imports ideas and concepts from futures research to support the development.

The study is conceptual and interdisciplinary. The authors critically analyze how extant studies grounded in the sensemaking view and process research approach integrate future time and how theoretical myopia hinders the adoption of a future orientation.

The prevailing future perspective is restricted to managers’ perceptions and actions at present, ignoring the anticipation and exploration of alternative longer-term futures. Future time is generally conceived as embedded in managers’ cognitive processes or is seen as part of the ongoing interaction, where the time horizon to the future is not noticed or is at best short.

To enable a forward-looking perspective, researchers should move the focus from expectation building in business interaction to purposeful preparation of alternative future(s) and from the view of seeing future as enacted in the present to envisioning of both near-term and more distant futures.

This study addresses the growing need of business actors to anticipate future developments in the rapidly changing market conditions and to innovate and change business practices to save the planet for future generations.

This study elaborates on actors’ future orientation to business markets and networks, proposes the integration of network research concepts with concepts from futures studies and poses new types of research questions for future research.

Using multiple theoretical lenses, the paper develops and empirically tests a service design-based framework of effective customer participation (CP) in service delivery. Particularly, the paper examines the impact of customer education on effective CP, besides the latter's effect on service quality. The direct and moderating effect of service modularity on the association between customer education and effective CP is also studied.

Covariance-based structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses using the survey data collected from the healthcare industry within Pakistan.

The results lend support for the presence of individual and mutually reinforcing effects of customer education and service modularity on effective CP in service delivery, ultimately affecting service quality.

Building on the CP and customer learning literature, this research extends the work on antecedents and consequences of effective CP in the larger domain of the service design and service delivery literature.

The findings reveal that service managers should design services such that by design, CP is ingrained within service delivery processes so that it is effectively managed during service delivery for superior service quality.

Given the already scant research that has either taken a narrower view of CP (mostly in pre- or post-service delivery), the current research makes one of the initial attempts to identify, theorize and empirically test the service design level antecedents for holistic CP spanning over the physical, behavioral and informational participation during the service delivery.