Service Research

Abstract

The last 4 years have passed very quickly! As everyone says, each year seems to pass by faster than the one before it, and I would agree. This will be my last editorial as editor in chief of Journal of Service Research (JSR), and the last issue on which my name will appear as editor. As such, I want to take this opportunity to recognize some of our shared achievements as a field, think a bit about the future, and thank people. Service researchers have honored and aimed for both rigor and relevance in our research since the field began to emerge in the early 1980s. We were spurred into existence by leaders in the business community who hungered for new ideas, new theories, and new knowledge related to the management of services. From the very beginning, we were called on to focus on managerially relevant topics and challenges faced by service organizations. Quickly we all learned, by talking with our counterparts in business, that the challenges were not the same as those faced in manufacturing contexts. We responded by creating new ideas, theories, frameworks, and models to capture the challenges and assist managers in service industries. As we moved along, it soon became apparent that manufacturing and high-technology companies also cared about service. They had their own unique challenges around offering services to generate revenue and shifting their organizations toward a service culture. Again, our community responded to these challenges. Relevance is clearly at the heart of what we do, and it is evolving now to focus on the future of service whether that be in technology-delivered services (think the Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) artificial intelligence, etc.) and services for the base of the pyramid and underserved or vulnerable populations (think transformative service research).