Over the past 50 years, the service sector has grown in most advanced industrialized economies to be the dominant economic activity. Researchers are working to understand service activities and define scientific concepts and methods of service under an emerging research area called service science. Service is defined as the application of competence and knowledge to create value. Value is realized through interactions and cocreation among service systems. Service systems vary in scope (from individuals to businesses, organizations, governments, and nations) and adapt dynamically and connect to other service systems through value propositions. The service system has been proposed as an abstraction for service science, and yet it is not clear how to characterize a given organization as a service system. In this article, we present a review of literature on service system concepts and define a service system framework developed from the literature that can be used to characterize an organization as a service system. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Service science is an emerging multidisciplinary field concerned with the study of service systems and value cocreation. In recent years, the field has expanded considerably, growing to encompass a community of researchers and practitioners from a range of backgrounds and knowledge domains. However, very little research has focused on the study of service systems within the context of social‐purpose organizations (SPOs), such as a nonprofit charitable organization or an academic institution. We contend that SPOs represent a class of service systems that are understudied in service science. The goal of this study is to contribute to the ongoing development of the discipline's theoretical foundations through an empirical study of a special type of SPO, the social enterprise. Through case‐study research, we analyzed five social enterprise organizations. Our findings point to a number of areas that suggest a bias in service science concepts toward economically motivated and profit‐driven service systems. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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