Knowledge dissemination in the global service marketing community

Abstract

Purpose -The evolution of the service marketing field was marked by the emergence of a global, vigorous and tolerant community of service marketing researchers. This paper seeks to examine the history of the service marketing community and argues that it may be an archetype for building the emergent global service research community. Design/methodology/approach -The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. The authors interviewed four pioneering service scholars and also collected descriptive data (e.g. Authorship, Affiliation, Title, Keywords) of all service related articles published in 13 top peerreviewed marketing and service journals over the last 30 years (5,432 articles; 6,450 authors). In a dynamic analysis the authors mapped global collaboration between countries over time and detected clusters of international collaboration. Findings -Findings suggest a growing international collaboration for the USA and the UK, while for other countries like Israel the global collaboration started from a high level and decreases now. Further, the service marketing community never became polarized and there were always contributions from researchers all over the world. Research limitations/implications -As the global service research community is developing, service marketing becomes a research neighborhood within the broader service research community. Simultaneously, other research neighborhoods are emerging within this new community (e.g. service arts, service management, service engineering, service science). Originality/value -Anchored on the social evolution and biological evolution metaphors, this study explains the evolution of the service marketing field from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Furthermore, it explains the development of the service marketing community as an archetype for building the global service research community.

Beyond templates: methodological reporting practices and their impact in qualitative service research

“…Despite these calls, qualitative methods remain underrepresented in the service research literature (Benoit et al. , 2017; Lages et al. , 2013; Valtakoski, 2020).…”

“…Recently, scholars have called for a greater use of qualitative methods (Baron et al, 2014;Epp and Otnes, 2021;Ostrom et al, 2015;Witell et al, 2020) given that these methods are argued to be more suitable than quantitative approaches for addressing emerging complex, cross-disciplinary topics such as healthcare service improvement, transformative services and customer experience (Bansal et al, 2018;Eisenhardt et al, 2016;McColl-Kennedy et al, 2015). Despite these calls, qualitative methods remain underrepresented in the service research literature (Benoit et al, 2017;Lages et al, 2013;Valtakoski, 2020).…”