Service and Science

Abstract

While there is a rapid growth in the number of researchers and practitioners joining the service science community, this community has not yet settled on precise answers to two fundamental questions: ``What is service?{''} and ``Where is the science (in service science)?{''} This chapter examines possible answers to these two fundamental questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and proposes the Abstract Entity-Interaction-Outcome Universals (AEIOU) theory to frame the science of service systems.