The book is directed towards enabling further debate on establishing an independent research area for the study of services, called Services Science. The book contains papers presented at the First German Services Science Conference, held in Ingolstadt in 2006.
According to the editors, previous research has not been able to provide appropriate answers to the complex problems which service organizations face. They therefore propose that an independent research discipline called Services Science could contribute towards focussing research activities. It could adjust educational study programmes to the needs of service organizations and to propagating cross‐functional research. In so doing, they define Services Science as a “new scientific concept that aims at solving the complex problems of a service economy by applying a transdisciplinary approach in intensive collaboration between academia and service organizations” (p. 2).
Following an introductory section by the editors in which they outline the motivation and content of the book, the contributions are grouped into the topics “Necessity and Conceptual Frameworks” (Part 1), “Focus on Research” (Part 2), “Focus on Teaching” (Part 3), and “Focus on Collaboration” (Part 4). In sum, the reader is provided with 15 chapters dealt with from practitioner and academic viewpoints. Theoretical and conceptual thoughts as well as best practice descriptions are presented along these four lines of inquiry.
As this book is intended to encourage discussion about the need for creating such a discipline, the editors included both supportive and critical thoughts which allow the reader a much more comprehensive understanding of the Services Science initiative. While in Part 1 Spohrer offers an overview of existing service research approaches and detailed arguments for establishing an independent Services Science discipline, in Part 2, Stauss presents a critical evaluation of the boundaries of Services Science. He argues, on the one hand, that the meaning of “Science” in “Services Science” is understood quite coherently as concerned with tackling existing business problems rather than focussing on advancing basic scientific issues. On the other hand, Stauss argues that the meaning of “Services” remains fuzzy. It is not clear whether this initiative is directed towards the whole management of intangible and interactively produced goods, or the study of selected industries and/or service topics such as technology and innovation.
In Part 3, the contribution of Fähnrich and Meyer should especially be noted, as the authors review existing service‐oriented courses at universities and make concrete propositions as to how Services Science‐related courses can be integrated at universities via a stepwise procedure. Part 4 provides more insight into the actual organization of industry‐academia collaboration. They put forward the cases of the CTF‐Service Research Centre at Karlstad University (Edvardsson and Gustafsson), and the organization of the industry‐academia collaboration at Siemens AG (Gieseke and Hermann).
If we put this book into perspective to existing streams of service research, we would argue that, within the Services Science initiative, services are implicitly regarded as somehow different from products, which legitimizes the creation of a science bounded to services. Although Spohrer as well as Stauss briefly discuss service‐specific aspects, we think this underlying assumption could have received a more detailed discussion in this book.
All in all, this book should not be understood as merely a handbook of Services Science research. Rather, being compiled out of conference papers, it reflects the inherent variety of discourse on the topic of service research. As a result, this book is of interest to researchers and those business practitioners who are curious about obtaining a detailed overview of the ongoing debate in the Services Science arena.
