It’s time for a critical edge to service research

Guest article by Ross Gordon, Josina Vink, Kaisa Koskela-Huotari, Gauri Laud, & Nadia Zainuddin.

In a critical state

Service research has undergone significant shifts in its underlying research paradigm over the decades – from differentiating services marketing, focusing on quality, fostering relationships, recognizing service as the fundamental unit of exchange, to facilitating transformation (Fisk et al., 1993; Lovelock & Gummesson, 2004; Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Tronvoll et al., 2011; Anderson et al., 2013).

As the field increasingly integrates a systemic perspective (Vargo et al., 2015) and focuses on transformative approaches to serve humanity (Field et al., 2021), there is a growing recognition of the need for service research and researchers to engage more with critical perspectives (Tronvoll & Edvardsson, 2023; Gordon and Vink, 2024).

We argue that a failure to constructively engage with critical perspectives, adopt critical thinking and reflexivity, as well as interrogate power relations in service contexts, risks merely perpetuating the status quo and missing the opportunity for genuine transformation (Vink & Koskela-Huotari, 2022), which is so urgently needed to serve and protect people, planet, flora and fauna.

To support the field in achieving its ambitious goals and ensuring research accountability, we see an imperative to advance a critical service research paradigm (Gordon and Vink, 2024). Critical perspectives in service research can serve as a powerful engine of theory development, propelling the field into yet another significant era.

The benefits of critical perspectives in service research are constructive and transformational, as it can help test biases and assumptions; challenge existing power structures; foster reflexivity, polyvocality and inclusivity; improve decision making; facilitate liberation; and promote social justice and social good (Bohman, 2021). These are all essential processes for better serving humanity in more rigorous and meaningful ways.

Constructive criticality in service research would also mirror developments in other related fields such as critical marketing (Saren et al., 2007), transformative consumer research (Tadajewski et al., 2014) and social marketing (Gordon et al., 2022) – marking a maturation of both the academic domain and its practice.

Developing a critical mass

At the most recent SERVSIG 2024 Conference in Bordeaux, a two-hour dialogic special session was held with participants from around the globe to explore and debate the rationale, justification, conceptualisation, and potential contributions of such a critical paradigm.

Themes in the special session included:
– The relevance of critical thinking and critical theories to service research
– The importance of critical reflexivity for informing research and practice
– The role of intersectionality in helping shed light on power relations shaped by the multiplicity of constructed dimensions of difference
– The importance of decolonization and active resistance to systems of oppression within current power asymmetries
– Examples of the need for criticality in service systems, such as in the context of disability supports and failures of a market-based approach

Tensions that emerged in the dialogue:
– Lack of support for critical perspectives in journal processes and among supervisors, exemplified by previous personal attempts, showing the need for strengthening the rationale
– Worry over resistance to language and use of the term “critical”, while acknowledging the need for the work to still have teeth and not erode its impact to simply increase acceptance
– Debate between a focus of the effort on populations who experience vulnerability or marginalization in service vs. the need for criticality more broadly in all research
– Questions about the implications of a critical paradigm on service research’s tradition of informing service businesses – can such a paradigm also be good for business?

Towards a critical manifesto

As a result of this dialogue and related research, we put forward a work-in-progress manifesto for critical service research to the service research community for continue exploration and debate. We propose the following principles as guideposts for ongoing work on and withing the critical service research paradigm:

1. Commit to critical thinking and reflexivity – think, question, analyse and evaluate the taken for granted aspects of service research and support others in doing the same. Reflect upon, test and challenge assumptions conclusions that are reached, within critical service research and service research in general.

2. Acknowledge and interrogate power – build and demonstrate a deep contextual understanding of power dynamics in service systems, and within service research processes, and how these manifest to create privilege or oppression.

3. Engage with critical social theories – there are a range of critical theories that can help researchers and practitioners to historicise, highlight and critique power relations of domination and subordination, as well as inherent contradictions in service contexts. Such critical social theories can help understand how knowledge, ideas and power are produced, held and used in service ecosystems; enabling people to challenge problematic systems of oppression; and suggest pathways for positive transformation.

4. Embrace polyvocal perspectives – bring different voices and perspectives into our thinking processes, theory development, research and practice. The dominance of certain ways of knowing over others is problematic for service research as it severely limits the bodies of knowledge upon which we draw to inform theory and practice. There is a need to question which perspectives and voices are currently missing and make efforts to platform ideas from a diverse range of ontologies, epistemologies, people and cultures, including but not limited to Indigenous, Black and Global South knowledge systems.

5. Harness critique for transformative change – employ critical thinking not simply as a destructive force, but to generate constructive possibilities and advance the field.

6. Walk the critical research talk – work toward processes of research that reflect the aspirations of critical service research, not just desired outputs (e.g. securing good journal publications), but still holding research accountable to its transformative impact.

7. Nurture spaces and places for continued debate – nurture constructive discussions, debates, disagreements and reflexive dialogue at conferences, events, workshops, journal publications, and online.

8. Avoid working in silos – draw on and contribute to other critical theory discussions and concepts to strengthen service research and contribute to other interdisciplinary discussions.

9. Be bold, yet humble – take steps out in the open to advance service research while continuing to question pathways and adapt to the feedback within and beyond the service research community. The intentions is to embrace discomfort, while ensuring safety – taking risks that might lead to uneasiness when addressing the dominant paradigm, while ensuring the safety of those involved.

10. Rethink the service research academy – Consider how we can foster academic inclusion in service research. This may encourage us to rethink the politics of publishing; who and what is published; who has access to and is platformed at conferences; the recruitment and experience of students and teachers; the key literature, concepts, course content and teaching methods we utilise; and the research funding decisions we administer.

Join the critical path

Our intention is to further develop these ideas into a coherent research agenda, deepen the debate and encourage more contributions to critical service research in the coming years. But first, we want to engage the service research community with a few key questions:
– What should be incorporated into this draft manifesto to make it most effective at supporting constructive critique in service research?
– What interesting applications or implications do you see for a critical service research paradigm?
– What challenges might arise in embracing critical perspectives within service research?

We would love to hear from you! Let us know your thoughts in the quick survey post at the link below.
https://uow.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aXK6ZLF1PBWFzwy