Guest editorial

Citation

Stauss, B. (2010), "Guest editorial", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 21 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/josm.2010.08521daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Service Management, Volume 21, Issue 4

About the Guest Editor

Bernd StaussProfessor of Business Administration at Ingolstadt School of Management (Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany) where he holds the chair of Services Management. He wrote and edited more than 25 books and about 200 papers on service-related subjects. His current research interests are in service customer relationship management, complaint management, and value creation through customer care.

International services research has seen an impressive evolution over the last years. Dedicated research centers have been established at universities around the world and the number of respective papers and monographs has been increasing constantly. In addition, services research is getting strong impulses from a global initiative to establish a transdiciplinary “services science” and through publicly funded research projects.

International scientific conferences play an important role within this dynamic development and serve as forums for information exchange and building scientific networks. One of the most renowned and prominent of these scientific events in the field of services management is the “quality in service (QUIS)” bi-annual conference series which is hosted alternately in Europe and North America. The 11th QUIS conference took place in Germany for the first time and was hosted by the chair of Services Management of the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in co-operation with Volkswagen After Sales and the Volkswagen AutoUni in June 2009 in the city of Wolfsburg. More than 200 participants from over 30 countries presented their research in up to nine concurrent sessions and took part in workshops and panel discussions.

One reason to organize the conference in cooperation with a global car manufacturer was the fact that services are gaining more and more importance in the traditional industrial sector. Complementary services get an increasing economic relevance as well as solution offerings and “hybrid” bundles of product and service components. Accordingly, “service infusion” – the development and management of services by manufacturers – has become of growing relevance.

This also becomes apparent within those papers selected for this special issue. In their paper “Service strategies in a supply chain” Nina Löfberg, Lars Witell, and Anders Gustafsson demonstrate how and why manufacturing companies at different positions in a supply chain choose different service strategies. The paper “Solutions offerings: a critical review and reconceputalisation” by Fredrik Nordin and Christian Kowalkowski critically analyzes the literature on solutions offerings and provides a new model of a solution theory. Also Phillipp Hypko, Meike Tilebein, and Ronald Gleich discuss a relevant aspect of the service infusion topic: in their paper “Benefits and uncertainties of performance-based contracting in manufacturing industries: an agency theory perspective” they give deep insights into the chances and imponderabilities of performance-based contracting for providers and customers.

For service providers from the manufacturing and service sector evenly relevant are the considerations of Pim den Hertog, Wietze van der Aa, and Mark W. de Jong in their paper “Capabilities for managing service innovation: toward a framework”. Here the authors categorize the dimensions of service innovation and develop a concept of dynamic capabilities for innovation in services.

A specific problem from business-to-customer-interactions in service settings is discussed in the paper “Triangle model of fairness: investigating spillovers and reciprocal transfers”. The authors, Robert Folger, Robert C. Ford, Mary Bardes, and Duncan Dickson, focus on service employees mistreated by customers and show that these treatments can have serious effects on employees’ subsequent behavior.

A more theoretical and general approach choose Kristina Heinonen, Tore Strandvik, Karl-Jacob Mickelsson, Bo Edvardsson, Erik Sundström, and Per Andersson. In their paper “A customer-dominant logic of service” the authors contrast the goods-dominant logic and the service-dominant logic by a new customer-dominant logic and by examining the creation of service value from the customers’ perspective.

All papers demonstrate the high quality of the presentations at QUIS 11 and give valuable stimuli for further research.

Bernd StaussGuest Editor