This is the time when we honor and remember our friend Robert Johnston who started Journal of Service Management 32 years ago. Time passes quickly but our memories of him as a truly aimable and good natured person, and his contributions as a scholar remain fresh in our minds.
The Bob Johnston award recognizes researchers in the service discipline. JoSM is delighted to announce this year’s award winners. Please join us to congratulate the winners of the outstanding paper awards, for their contribution to JoSM and to the service field. Additionally, there are three highly commended papers.
The winners will be congratulated at the SERVSIG Virtual Award Ceremony and Reception on Friday June 11th.
Outstanding Paper Award
Russell–Bennett, R., Mulcahy, R., Letheren, K., McAndrew, R. and Dulleck, U. (2020), “The transformative service paradox: the dilemma of wellbeing trade-offs”
https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-10-2019-0324
A transformative service aims to improve wellbeing; however, current approaches have an implicit assumption that all wellbeing dimensions are equal and more dimensions led to higher wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to present evidence for a new framework that identifies the paradox of competing wellbeing dimensions for both the individual and others in society – the transformative service paradox (TSP).
Data is drawn from a mixed-method approach using qualitative (interviews) and quantitative data (lab experiment) in an electricity service context. The first study involves 45 household interviews (n = 118) and deals with the nature of trade-offs at the individual level to establish the concept of the TSP. The second study uses a behavioral economics laboratory experiment (n = 110) to test the self vs. other nature of the trade-off in day-to-day use of electricity.
The interviews and experiment identified that temporal (now vs. future) and beneficiary-level factors explain why individuals make wellbeing trade-offs for the transformative service of electricity. The laboratory experiment showed that when the future implication of the trade-off is made salient, consumers are more willing to forego physical wellbeing for environmental wellbeing, whereas when the “now” implication is more salient consumers forego financial wellbeing for physical wellbeing.
This research introduces the term “Transformative Service Paradox” and identifies two factors that explain why consumers make wellbeing trade-offs at the individual level and at the societal level; temporal (now vs. future) and wellbeing beneficiary.
Highly Commended Awards:
#1. Meyer, C., Cohen, D. and Nair, S. (2020), “From automats to algorithms: the automation of services using artificial intelligence”
https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-05-2019-0161
The paper aims to fill this gap by positing a framework that considers the service automation decision as a matter of knowledge management: a choice between human resident and codified knowledge assets.
The paper is a conceptual paper, grounded in the knowledge-based view.
The paper uses the information processing theory, which argues that the level of uncertainty in a process should dictate the type of knowledge deployed, as the contingency for the automation choice, and customer interaction uncertainty as the driver of that contingency. From these ideas, propositions are generated relating customer interaction uncertainty and service automation. Further implications for artificial intelligence (AI) are also explored.
The framework illuminates and informs the strategic choices regarding service automation, including the use of AI in professional services, a timely and highly important topic. It offers a valuable model for practitioners and contributes to the academic literature by pointing the way for future directions for scholarly research.
#2. Wirtz, J., Holmqvist, J. and Fritze, M.P. (2020), “Luxury services”
https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-11-2019-0342
The market for luxury is growing rapidly. While there is a significant body of literature on luxury goods, academic research has largely ignored luxury services. The purpose of this article is to open luxury services as a new field of investigation by developing the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to build the luxury services literature and show how luxury services differ from both luxury goods and from ordinary (i.e. non-luxury) services.
This paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.
This article makes three contributions. First, it shows that services are largely missing from the luxury literature, just as the field of luxury is mostly missing from the service literature. Second, it contrasts the key characteristics of services and related consumer behaviors with luxury goods. The service characteristics examined are non-ownership, IHIP (i.e. intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability), the three additional Ps of services marketing (i.e. people, processes, and physical facilities) and the three-stage service consumption model. This article derives implications these characteristics have on luxury. For example, non-ownership increases the importance of psychological ownership, reduces the importance of conspicuous consumption and the risk of counterfeiting. Third, this article defines luxury services as extraordinary hedonic experiences that are exclusive whereby exclusivity can be monetary, social and hedonic in nature, and luxuriousness is jointly determined by objective service features and subjective customer perceptions. Together, these characteristics place a service on a continuum ranging from everyday luxury to elite luxury.
This article provides suggestions on how firms can enhance psychological ownership of luxury services, manage conspicuous consumption, and use more effectively luxury services’ additional types of exclusivity (i.e. social and hedonic exclusivity).
This is the first paper to define luxury services and their characteristics, to apply and link frameworks from the service literature to luxury, and to derive consumer insights from these for research and practice.
#3. Belanche, D., Casaló, L.V., Flavián, C. and Schepers, J. (2020), “Robots or frontline employees? Exploring customers’ attributions of responsibility and stability after service failure or success”
https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-05-2019-0156
Service robots are taking over the organizational frontline. Despite a recent surge in studies on this topic, extant works are predominantly conceptual in nature. The purpose of this paper is to provide valuable empirical insights by building on the attribution theory.
Two vignette-based experimental studies were employed. Data were collected from US respondents who were randomly assigned to scenarios focusing on a hotel’s reception service and restaurant’s waiter service.
Results indicate that respondents make stronger attributions of responsibility for the service performance toward humans than toward robots, especially when a service failure occurs. Customers thus attribute responsibility to the firm rather than the frontline robot. Interestingly, the perceived stability of the performance is greater when the service is conducted by a robot than by an employee. This implies that customers expect employees to shape up after a poor service encounter but expect little improvement in robots’ performance over time.
Robots are perceived to be more representative of a firm than employees. To avoid harmful customer attributions, service providers should clearly communicate to customers that frontline robots pack sophisticated analytical, rather than simple mechanical, artificial intelligence technology that explicitly learns from service failures.
Customer responses to frontline robots have remained largely unexplored. This paper is the first to explore the attributions that customers make when they experience robots in the frontline.
Outstanding Reviewers
- Simon Hazée, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
- Martina Čaić, Aalto University, Finland.
- Hyeyoon (Rebecca) Choi, Ohio University, USA.
Previous JoSM (Robert Johnston) Awards
– 2014
– 2015
– 2016
– 2017
– 2018
– 2019
