Rebekah Russell-Bennett and Mark Rosenbaum co-editors of the Journal of Services Marketing (JSM) are pleased to announce and congratulate the winners of the best paper awards and best reviewer awards.
Most Outstanding Paper
Sylvia C. Ng, Hui Yin Chuah and Melati Nungsari (2022), A voice for the silent: uncovering service exclusion practices
This paper aims to provide an in-depth conceptualization of service exclusion by drawing on our exploratory research as well as thick and rich insights from the authors’ qualitative data.
Qualitative research was used to explore service exclusion practices against customers experiencing vulnerabilities. A total of 28 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with refugees residing within Malaysia. The Gioia methodology was used for the authors’ data analysis and the findings were validated by an independent moderator.
The authors’ empirical findings challenge how service exclusion is currently understood, by adding substantial depth and complexity beyond simply describing “the lack of access to services”. The authors also offer rich empirical findings describing 29 forms of exclusion, which were further reduced to seven types of service exclusion practices: discrimination, restriction, cost barriers, language and technology barriers, poor servicing, non-accountability and non-inclusivity.
This study conceptualizes service exclusion from a process perspective, that is, “how” customers experiencing vulnerabilities are being excluded, rather than “what” is excluded.
Highly commended papers
Vitor Lima and Russell Belk (2022), Human enhancement technologies and future of consumer well-being
The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework that highlights transhumanism’s ideals of achieving superintelligence, super longevity and super well-being through human enhancement technologies (HET) and their relations with services marketing principles.
Framed by the transformative service research (TSR), this conceptual work articulates the 7Ps of the marketing mix with four macro-factors that create tensions at both the marketplace and consumer levels.
HET has potential for doing good but also tremendous bad; greater attention is needed from services marketing researchers especially in one proprietary research area: bioethics.
The authors contribute to the growing work on TSR investigating how the interplay between service providers and consumers affects the well-being of both. Additionally, the authors call for novel interdisciplinary work in transhuman services research.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers in services marketing research to explore the promises and perils of transhumanism ideals and human enhancement technologies.
Michaela Lipkin and Kristina Heinonen (2022), Customer ecosystems: exploring how ecosystem actors shape customer experience
This study aims to characterize how ecosystem actors shape customer experience (CX). The study also proposes implications for managers and research regarding the customer ecosystem, its actors and actor constellations in the context of CXs.
A qualitative study is conducted among activity tracker users to identify how actors within their ecosystems shape CXs. Data include 28 in-depth interviews and ten self-reported diaries.
This study delineates six actor categories in the customer ecosystem shaping CX within and beyond the service. The number of actors and their importance to the focal customer in various actor constellations form individual-, brand- and socially driven ecosystems. These customer ecosystem types show how actors combine to drive CXs.
Researchers should shift their attention to experiences emerging in the customer’s lifeworld. A customer ecosystem highlights the customer-centered actor configuration emergent within the customer’s lifeworld. It is self-constructed based on the customer’s reference point.
Managers should aim to locate, monitor and join the customer’s lifeworld to gain more insight into how CXs emerge in the customer ecosystem based on customer logic.
Customers are not isolated actors simply experiencing service; rather, they construct idiosyncratic actor constellations that include various providers, social groups and peers.
This paper extends the theory on CXs by illustrating how the various actors and actor constellations forming the customer ecosystem shape CXs.
Outstanding Reviewers
Janet Davey
Victoria University of Wellington
Rory Mulcahy
University of the Sunshine Coast
Emmanuel Mogaji
University of Greenwich
Previous JSM Excellence awards
– 2012 JSM Awards
– 2013 JSM Awards
– 2016 JSM Awards
– 2017 JSM Awards
– 2018 JSM Awards
– 2020 JSM Awards
– 2021 JSM Awards
