S-D logic research directions and opportunities

Abstract

The need for a systems approach to modeling and understanding service is now well established, (Barile 2009; Barile and Polese 2009; Golinelli 2010; Ng et.al., 2011a). Following the construction of Maglio et al (2009) we view a service-system as a network of agents and interactions that integrate resources for value cocreation. The context of value creation is intrinsic to the system design.and the adaptive, interactive actions of agents classifies the network as an ecosystem (Lusch et al, 2010). To date, several disciplines have broached the systems view of service and the engineering of service systems. Operations research applied to services began with a rather simplistic, macro view of resource integration in the form of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), introduced by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes in 1978 (Charnes, Cooper et al. 1994, Banker, Charnes et al. 1984). Micro models of service systems have tended to study the systems’ IT components (Hsu 2009; Qiu 2009). Engineering, which has always been associated with “assembling pieces that work in specific ways” (Ottino, 2004) and “a process of precise composition to achieve a predictable purpose and function” (Fromm, 2010 p. 2) has contributed to greater scalability and purposeful control in service systems. However, the agents of the system usually are people whose activities may not be easily controlled by predictable processes and yet are critical aspects of the value-creating system (Ng et al, 2011b). There is need for a new combinative paradigm, such as third-generation activity theory in which two or more activity systems come into contact, to explore dialogue, exchanging perspectives of multiple actors, resulting in networks or groups of activity systems that are constantly interacting (Nardi 1996, Oliveros et al 2010, Marken 2006).