JSR Special Session
Winter AMA 2024
St Pete, FL
This special session introduces the “Managerial Service” special issue of Journal of Service Research (JSR), the leading service journal. The special issue aims to foster academic-industry collaboration on service research. Marketing, as the most customer-centered business function, is central to service research. The special session focuses on managerial relevance, a topic central to the importance of marketing.
Far too often, the importance of speaking to the real business world has gotten lost in academic research. Seeing this as a common insufficiency in marketing in general, and in service research in particular, JSR plans the “Managerial Service” special issue to highlight the importance of the managerial relevance of service research. This special session intends to build a dialogue between academics and practitioners.
Panel session 1 – Journal of Service Research: An Academic-Practitioner Dialog on Managerial Service
The first session focuses on the academic and practitioner dialog, to have both the academics and the practitioners discuss from their perspectives the benefits and pain points of making service and marketing research managerially relevant.
Panel session 2 – Journal of Service Research: A Panelist-Audience Interaction on Managerial Service
The second session focuses on panelist-audience interaction, to exchange ideas about the obstacles and approaches to enhancing academic- industry collaboration between panelists and AMA conference attendees.
The purpose of the two panels is to generate discussion to foster consensus on how academic service and marketing research can be made more managerially relevant from both the academic and practitioner sides for a greater real business world impact of academic marketing and service research. The two sub-sessions share the same set of panelists, combining service and marketing academics and practitioners.
Academic Panelists (confirmed, in alphabetic order):
- Michael Brady: Director and Bob Sasser Professor of Marketing, College of Business, Florida State University. He specializes in service marketing, publishes many service articles in top scholarly journals, is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association (AMA), and past president of the AMA Academic Council.
- P. K. Kannan: Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is Chair for the AMA SIG on Marketing Research and the INFORMS Service Science section. He specializes in strategic marketing and service management and has won the AMA/MSI Paul Root Award twice.
- Detelina Marinova: Samuel M. Walton Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business, University of Missouri. Her research focuses on managing sales and service interactions at the organizational frontlines. She served as an Associate Editor of JSR and is a co-editor of Journal of Marketing.
- Roland T. Rust: Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is founder and Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service at Maryland, the AMA Vice President of Publications, and one of the inaugural AMA Fellows.
- Jagdip Singh: AT&T Professor of Marketing, Department of Design & Innovation, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. He is an internationally recognized scholar of organizational frontline effectiveness. His expertise involves designing, managing, and sustaining effective and enduring customer connections at the frontlines of organizations.
Practitioner panelists (confirmed, in alphabetic order):
- R. Gary Bridge (online participation): Investor and independent researcher. He taught at Columbia University for 23 years and founded a startup to help enterprises navigate risky technology investment decisions. That led to a senior executive role at IBM; later he headed Cisco Systems’ global consulting arm. He pursues emerging technologies that enhance customer interactions.
- Charles L. Colby (RockBridge): Principal, Chief Methodologist and Founder, Rockbridge. He is an innovation thought-leader, strategist and expert in research methods who brings decades of experience advising clients in the services, technology and non-profit sectors.
- Utpal Mangla (IBM): Utpal Mangla is a General Manager responsible for Distributed, EDGE, Sovereign Clouds in IBM. Prior to that, he was the VP and Senior Partner in IBM. He is a recognized Global leader of IBM’s Global Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment (TME) Industry. He is focused on driving AI, 5G EDGE, Hybrid Cloud and Automation Innovations for IBM’s clients worldwide. Utpal is a regular speaker at industry forums, university, and business conferences globally. He has been quoted in Fortune, Forbes, Cognitive World, Bloomberg TV, MWC among others.
- Keith Smith (MSI): Keith is the Research Director at the Marketing Science Institute, a non- profit that brings together marketing scholars and leading marketers to create an unbiased platform for scientific research. He has published in a range of marketing journals including Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
- Deborah Stokes (Dell) (online participation): Dell Technologies, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP).
Note. Due to the higher uncertainty for practitioners to attend the AMA conference, some of them can only participate virtually.
Moderator: Ming-Hui Huang, Distinguished Professor, Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University, Taipei. She is Editor-in-Chief of JSR, Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), Fellow of European Marketing Academy (EMAC), and International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford.
More info here.
