Guest article by Kristina Heinonen.
It is my absolute honor and privilege to take over from Linda Alkire and join Sertan Kabadayi as the new co-chair of SERVSIG for the next four-year period. SERVSIG serves people worldwide who are interested in services research. I look forward to contribute to SERVSIG as an inclusive, fun and societally relevant community of service researchers.
I am fortunate to have been surrounded by wonderful service researcher colleagues throughout my scientific career and the SERVSIG community plays a major part of that network. SERVSIG has been one of my academic homes since my doctoral studies and it has given me both professional support as well as personal friendships. I attended the first SERVSIG conference in 2003 in Reims, and besides a few gaps for personal reasons I have attended the conference since then: Porto (2010), Helsinki (2012), Thessaloniki (2014), Maastricht (2016), Paris (2018), Brisbane (2020, online) and this year in Glasgow. It was a pleasure and absolute highpoint for me personally to chair the conference here in Helsinki in 2012 and to welcome the SERVSIG community to my home university Hanken School of Economics and CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, one of the global hubs of service research. Over the years, I have had several roles at SERVSIG besides being a conference participant: committee member for the SERVSIG conference, committee member for SERVSIG awards (Emerging Service Scholar, best service research article, best conference paper), and the last two years as Mentoring officer and member of the SERVSIG board.
SERVSIG is such an open and fun community, with strong connections and close collaboration between researchers. I have enjoyed so many stimulating conversations and activities (and social events!) with so many service researchers from all over the world. What impresses me the most is that this community will turn 30 years in 2023 and it still keeps on growing, engaging and supporting, while simultaneously fulfilling its three main goals – to be open, flexible and fun. And this is because the SERVSIG community consists of so many brilliant and lovely individuals.
So I am thrilled to embark on this new path at SERVSIG and together with Sertan and the SERVSIG officers serve this great community. I am excited to be on the front row of SERVSIG’s 30-year celebrations next year and contributing to SERVSIG’s future. Exciting times ahead!
