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The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on Mander's paper on people with learning disabilities’ first-hand experience of accessible information.

The commentary reflects on some of the findings presented by Mander and builds on these, with particular emphasis on what it means to understand information.

Everything from initial product design to building capacity and constructing knowledge requires expertise and attention to detail.

There are no easy fix solutions to achieving understanding of information for people who have learning disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to present exciting and innovative research questions in service operations that are aligned with eight key themes and related topics determined by the Journal of Service Management (JOSM) Service Operations Expert Research Panel. By offering a good number of such research questions, this paper provides a broad range of ideas to spur conceptual and empirical research related to service operations and encourage the continued creation of deep knowledge within the field, as well as collaborative research across disciplines that develops and incorporates insights from service operations.

Based on a Delphi study, described in the companion article, “Service Operations: What Have We Learned?,” the panel identified eight key research themes in service operations where leading-edge research is being done or has yet to be done (Victorino et al., 2018). In this paper, three or four topics within each theme are selected and multiple questions for each topic are proposed to guide research efforts. The topics and questions, while wide-ranging, are only representative of the many ongoing research opportunities related to service operations.

The field of service operations has many interesting research topics and questions that are largely unexplored. Furthermore, these research areas are not only increasingly integrative across multiple themes within operations but often transcend functional disciplines. This creates opportunities for ever more impactful research with a greater reach throughout the service system and suggests that service researchers, regardless of functional affiliation, can contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of service operations in value creation.

Leveraging the collective knowledge of the JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel to expand on the research themes generated from the Delphi study, novel questions for future study are put forward. Recognizing that the number of potential research questions is virtually unlimited, summary questions by theme and topic are also provided. These questions represent a synopsis of the individual questions and can serve as a quick reference guide for researchers interested in pursuing new directions in conceptual and empirical research in service operations. This summary also serves as a framework to facilitate the formulation of additional research topics and questions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify research themes in service operations that have great potential for exciting and innovative conceptual and empirical work. To frame these research themes, the paper provides a systematic literature review of operations articles published in the Journal of Service Management (JOSM). The thorough review of published work in JOSM and proposed research themes are presented in hopes that they will inspire impactful research on service operations. These themes are further developed in a companion paper, “Service operations: what’s next?” (Field et al., 2018).

The JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel conducted a Delphi study to generate research themes where leading-edge research on service operations is being done or has yet to be done. Nearly 700 articles published in JOSM from its inception through 2016 were reviewed and classified by discipline focus. The subset of service operations articles was then further categorized according to the eight identified research themes plus an additional category that primarily represented traditional manufacturing approaches applied in service settings.

From the Delphi study, the following key themes emerged: service supply networks, evaluating and measuring service operations performance, understanding customer and employee behavior in service operations, managing servitization, managing knowledge-based service contexts, managing participation roles and responsibilities in service operations, addressing society’s challenges through service operations, and the operational implications of the sharing economy. Based on the literature review, approximately 20 percent of the published work in JOSM is operations focused, with earlier articles predominantly applying traditional manufacturing approaches in service settings. However, the percentage of these traditional types of articles has been steadily decreasing, suggesting a trend toward dedicated research frameworks and themes that are unique to the design and management of services operations.

The paper presents key research themes for advancing conceptual and empirical research on service operations. Additionally, a review of the past and current landscape of operations articles published in JOSM offers an understanding of the scholarly conversation so far and sets a foundation from which to build future research.

The chapter tries to understand how nuclear tests and the radiation fallouts in their aftermath can lead to cancer. It seeks to explore how our diseased ecological systems have resulted in silencing the birdsong and the spreading of cancer in the Anthropocene with reference to Terry Tempest Williams' (An environmentalist and Utah naturalist) two memoirs – “‘Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place” and “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice.” It would also try to factor in connections between climate change, pandemics like the COVID-19, and the onslaught of other terminal illnesses like cancer, all a result of mankind's anthropocentric hubris and domination of nature.

Mine would be a qualitative approach wherein I will refer to the original two texts mentioned for primary material and other sources for secondary references and analyze them from an ecofeminist perspective.

We need to establish the health of the Environment through reduced usage of nuclear weapons and by developing a language and an environmental praxis that doesn't separate the subject and the object and only then we can usher in biological egalitarianism, and restore the song of the whistling thrush again. We also need to revere our Mother Earth and see to it that she maintains her ecological balance through homeostasis.

This article investigates the role of schemas in shaping customer experiences in new servicescapes, across the customer journey. The authors take a customer perspective that reveals how schematic information processing takes place at four pyramidal levels—event, touchpoint, encounter and concrete activities—that in turn lead to customer responses.

The study introduces a novel ethnographic schema elicitation technique (ESET), which enables unraveling schemas at the touchpoint level across the customer journey of a European grocery store that recently launched a new SST innovation. This tailored approach provides fine-grained insights into customer experiences at the moment they occur.

The conceptual framework unravels schematic information processing, as illustrated with an empirical study. The activation of different schemas and their modification is highlighted in rich qualitative data.

Innovative service offerings require customers to adapt their existing behaviors. Understanding this highly individual process, which requires schema modification, could be furthered by longitudinal in-depth research.

By understanding schematic information processing, managers and policymakers can develop better strategies for activating sustainability or health-conscious schemas that guide customer behavior in positive directions.

By applying ESET to new self-service technology, the authors provide valuable insights for service managers and retailers. They show the particular need for prudence in changing schemas in ways that avoid negative cognitive, emotional or behavioral responses.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how two types of drivers, namely, executive compensation and market competition, can affect hospital quality in the USA. Recently, patients, insurers and regulators have increasingly focused on hospital quality. Understanding the interplay of incentives in this industry is important because in 2019, hospital treatment contributed $1.161bn to health-care costs in the USA. This study answers the call for more studies in the so-called “mixed” industry, where ownership differences can affect organizational objectives and operating constraints.

This study explores the roles of hospital executive compensation and industry competition as determinants of health-care quality. Specifically, the study probes the heterogeneity in the factors that influence quality across hospital types in the USA.

Using California hospital data from 2006 through 2020, the findings show that the effects of compensation and competition on hospital quality differ by ownership type. Executive compensation is positively associated with quality in for-profit hospitals but is not associated with that of nonprofit hospitals, suggesting for-profit hospitals are more likely to use higher levels of compensation to attract managers with higher ability, whereas the utility function for nonprofit managers may be multidimensional. Within the nonprofit hospital group, competition is more positively associated with quality for religious nonprofits relative to secular nonprofits, suggesting that competition provides more monitoring for religious hospitals.

Taken together, the findings provide evidence that the drivers of quality vary across hospitals in ways consistent with differences in constraints and objectives across ownership types. The findings are important for regulators seeking to incentivize higher quality. For example, Medicare in the USA has incorporated quality measures into its new hospital reimbursement scheme (value-based purchasing) to incentivize quality. This study proposes that regulators should consider differences across ownership types when evaluating the best ways to incentivize hospital quality.