{"id":5316,"date":"2017-09-19T20:35:34","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T00:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/?p=5316"},"modified":"2017-10-25T22:09:52","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T02:09:52","slug":"what-we-dont-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/2017\/09\/what-we-dont-know\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Don\u2019t Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

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guest article by\u00a0Timothy Keiningham, Christopher Lovelock Award Recipient 2018<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"I was thrilled when SERVSIG asked me, as the most recent Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Services Discipline<\/strong> recipient, to give my thoughts on the future of service research and practice.\u00a0 Since I began as a service researcher two decades ago, the discipline has grown dramatically in scope and influence.\u00a0 I am certain that this will continue given the dramatic technology-driven changes that are occurring in almost all business sectors. \u00a0Given the disruptive service-driven changes underway, there are numerous opportunities for discussion.<\/p>\n

\"\"As I contemplated what thoughts I should share, however, a quote from Socrates kept playing in my head. \u201cI do not know anything \u2026 I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy that I know what I do not know.\u201d\u00a0 This recognition of the limits of our current understanding was hammered home in a recent presentation given by Professor Leonard Schlesinger1<\/sup> of the Harvard Business School, co-creator of the seminal Service-Profit Chain.2<\/sup>\u00a0 He began his talk with the recognition that new developments\u2014one of which was a comprehensive meta-analysis of the Service-Profit Chain by Jens Hogreve, Anja Iseke, Klaus Derfuss, and T\u00f6nnjes Eller3<\/sup>\u2014had caused him to question many of the tenets he had believed most strongly.<\/p>\n

Professor Schlesinger\u2019s talk caused me to reflect on precisely what drove most of my service research.\u00a0 The conventional wisdom and much of the supporting scientific research at the time wasn\u2019t working for me in practice. I needed to figure out why or choose a different career path. \u00a0It would be a huge stretch to say \u201cI (or \u201cwe\u201d) figured it out\u2014do X, Y and Z and great things will happen.\u201d Of course, we certainly know more about what works and why than we did twenty years ago.\u00a0 But as a friend once told me, \u201chumanity is described in the error term\u201d in our models.<\/p>\n

As I look back over my own career, and at the body of knowledge that makes up the service literature, I am awed by the evolution of my (and the field\u2019s) thinking over this time.\u00a0 And I still find myself regularly surprised to learn that things I believed strongly to be true were at best oversimplifications, and often completely wrong.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, medical research was recoiling from the widely publicized argument that as much as 85% of published research findings are false.4<\/sup>\u00a0 I certainly do not believe that to be the case for service research.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I believe that many of the concepts we consider proved or even self-evident can be superseded by more nuanced investigations. From my own research, I think of the evolution of conceptualizations of customer commitment from a one-dimension, to a three-dimension, to a five-dimension construct.5<\/sup><\/p>\n

Clearly, the business opportunities and challenges on the horizon\u2014automation and artificial intelligence, industry 4.0, robotics, etc.\u2014offer tremendous opportunities for service researchers to explore new vistas.\u00a0\u00a0 But I believe that many of our greatest discoveries will be those that overturn our current certainties.\u00a0 It is my hope that at some point in my lifetime every major contribution I have made to the literature will have been superseded by something more complete and useful.\u00a0 I encourage all interested researchers to take up this challenge\u2026but you will have to beat me to it!<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.\u201d \u2013 Mark Twain<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Timothy Keiningham, Ph.D
\n<\/em>J.Donald Kennedy Endowed Chair in E-Commerce
\n<\/em>St. John\u2019s University
\n<\/em>The Peter J. Tobin College of Business<\/em><\/p>\n

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REFERENCES<\/strong><\/p>\n

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  1. Schlesinger, Leonard A. (2017), \u201cWhat Great Service Leaders Know and Do: Implications for Service Futures,\u201d plenary presentation at the 2017 Frontiers in Service Conference, Fordham University, New York, NY (June 23).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. Heskett, James L., Thomas O. Jones, Gary W. Loveman, W. Earl Sasser, Jr., and Leonard A. Schlesinger (1994), \u201cPutting the Service-Profit Chain to Work,\u201d Harvard Business Review<\/em>. vol. 72, no. 2, 164-174.<\/li>\n
    2. Hogreve, Jens, Anja Iseke, Klaus Derfuss, and T\u00f6nnjes Eller (2017), \u201cThe Service-Profit Chain: A Meta-Analytic Test of a Comprehensive Theoretical Framework,\u201d Journal of Marketing<\/em>. vol. 81, no. 3, 41-61.<\/li>\n
    3. Ioannidis, John P. A. (2005), \u201cWhy Most Published Research Findings Are False,\u201d PLoS Medicine<\/em>. vol. 2, no. 8, e124. Available at: http:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosmedicine\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pmed.0020124<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Keiningham, Timothy L., Carly M. Frennea, Lerzan Aksoy, Alexander Buoye, and Vikas Mittal (2015), \u201cA Five-Component Customer Commitment Model: Implications for Repurchase Intentions in Goods and Services Industries,\u201d Journal of Service Research<\/em>. vol. 18, no. 4, 433-450.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      guest article by\u00a0Timothy Keiningham, Christopher Lovelock Award Recipient 2018 I was thrilled when SERVSIG asked me, as the most recent Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Services Discipline recipient, to give my thoughts on the future of service research and practice.\u00a0 Since I began as a service researcher two decades ago, the discipline has grown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[486,485,488,484,487,482,481,483],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5316"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5533,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5316\/revisions\/5533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}