Service systems and the social enterprise

Abstract

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.

Systems, networks, and ecosystems in service research

“…These complex, adaptive, socio-technical systems each possess their own capabilities, constraints, rights, responsibilities (Demirkan et al, 2011;Gebauer et al, 2012), and patterns of interactions. For example, nations, states, cities, universities, hotels, hospitals, cruise ships, businesses, families, and people are all service system entities (Tracy and Lyons, 2013). These service system entities in turn form interconnected networks that give rise, over time, to new entities and innovative interaction dynamics.…”