The purpose of the chapter is to use a personal stepping-off point to review developments of the treatment of services within the operations management field. Three areas of development are discussed: debates concerning the definition of services from an operations management perspective; emergence of offshoring and outsourcing of services; and privatization of service activities formerly carried out by the state. After a brief outline of basic operations management principles, prominent research areas in service operations management are identified and discussed, which include the role of the customer, lean services, modular services, service supply chains, the impact of information technologies, and approaches to new service development. The chapter concludes that, although many areas of research are concerned with abiding operations management issues concerned with efficiency and scalability, the treatment of innovation in services, which arises from the theoretical and empirical developments discussed, are an extension to the existing concerns of the discipline.