Guest article by K. Sivakumar. Siva received together with Mei Li and Beibei Dong the SERVSIG Best Service Paper Award 2015 for “Service Quality: The Impact of Frequency, Timing, Proximity, and Sequence of Failures and Delights”. Learn more here.
Service research has occupied an increasingly influential place in the marketing academic community and professional practice over the last several decades. This trend has been highlighted by a higher frequency of service-related articles in mainstream marketing journals, as well as specialized journals devoted to service research. In this essay, I share my thoughts on the ways in which the impact of marketing academicians engaged in service research can be, and should be, enhanced. I focus on two inter-related themes: (1) Enabling our university colleagues to think about academic career through a service research lens; and (2) embracing (higher) education as a viable research context/focus. I briefly discuss these two themes below.
Visualizing An Academic Career From a Service Perspective
Service researchers are in a unique position to contribute to the framing of the academic career through the lens of service. Figure 1 offers one method to visualize the traditional faculty activities of research, teaching, and service from the perspective of “service.” This visualization helps service researchers to apply the concepts from the service domain to inform the conversations about enhancing and rewarding faculty activities. This thinking need not stop at individual faculty activities; a number of other administrative offices in the university setting (e.g., student services, career services, advancement, research, communications) can be approached from a service angle.
The concepts and new terminology developed in service research (e.g., service quality; intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability as those terms are used to describe service characteristics; service-dominant logic; service failure and delight; cocreation and coproduction) can all be usefully deployed to benefit many activities of our academic lives. At a basic level, such a discussion can remind our colleagues that education is a credence service, i.e., it is difficult to evaluate the quality and value of education even after it is consumed, at least in the short term, as opposed to a search or experience service (although education can have some of these attributes as well). Viewing the academic career through this lens can help our faculty colleagues and administrators alike in enhancing the design and delivery of educational programs.
The infusion of the service lens to academic life will require service researchers to become more visible and vocal contributors to university life in general. This can be an opportunity as well as a challenge.
Embracing (Higher) Education as A Viable Research Context
Glancing at the content of papers published in top mainstream marketing journals (e.g., Journal of Marketing), as well major service-focused journals (e.g., Journal of Service Research), reveals that other than using students as subjects, researchers have not frequently focused on using education as a central theme/context for their research. Surely, some articles on aspects of education are published in journals specializing in marketing education, higher education, and so on, and some of the research therein does focus on education from a service perspective. However, I believe that top mainstream disciplinary journals have not explored the concept of higher education as a service to the fullest extent possible. Such exploration can enable the marketing field in general, and service research in particular, to increase their relevance and impact.
A majority of the population engages in education (mostly as receivers, as well as many as providers) for a significant portion of their lifetime. Whether, on the one hand, we follow the traditional IHIP ideas to distinguish goods from services or to separate services from one another, or, on the other hand, we take the perspective of emerging service-dominant logic, focusing more on education as a service, is a no-brainer.
Increased focus on education as a theme will also provide frameworks for considering other services with credence attributes such as professional services, health care, and so on. However, developing and maintaining such a focus will be a challenge as it is arguably easier to study search attributes and experience attributes than credence attributes.
Conclusion
Service researchers, especially in the marketing domain, can increase their impact by visualizing the academic life through a service lens and by placing increased focus on education as a canvas. The service research field has concepts, methodologies, and committed scholars who would like to make a difference for knowledge development and societal value creation.
I predict that broadening the impact of service research will result in researchers from other disciplines, such as social sciences, the arts, engineering, humanities, and hard sciences, increasingly engaging in service research. This will result in the current community of service scholars becoming increasingly diverse and diffused into several departments. One possibility is that it may so happen that “service research” gains more prominence and benefits more academic departments, organizations, and members of the society. Departmental affiliations will become less important and issue-based and relevant research questions will determine the practical affiliations of service researchers from the marketing discipline. While it is possible that “marketing” academics engaged in service research may indeed become a minority and will have to cede some of their territory in order to result in a larger, more inter-disciplinary research community, this not an undesirable outcome. We are already seeing this trend manifested in some of the more specialized and focused conferences. Ultimately, the challenges in supporting and rewarding such inter-disciplinary activities are not unlike the debates we are seeing in universities at large regarding how to balance disciplinary boundaries and forging connections among disciplines. Perhaps, by its very broad-based nature, “service” can be a unifying theme in academia. Let us wait and see how things evolve!
K. Sivakumar holds
the Arthur C. Tauck, Jr. Chair in International Marketing and Logistics
at the Lehigh University.
Photo: Liz Jones
