This article critically examines central service management traditions in relation to older adults. It investigates how their underlying assumptions and design logics align – or fail to align – with the characteristics, constraints, and aspirations of older adults in aging societies, and identifies how service management theory might be revised to become more age-inclusive.
The article adopts a conceptual and critical literature-based approach. It reviews and synthesizes central traditions in service management – including classical service marketing, relationship marketing, service-dominant logic, service design and customer experience, and transformative service research – and evaluates them through insights from gerontology, life-course research, strengths-based, and rights-based perspectives. The analysis is further extended through recent service research on healthy aging, responsible aging, customer-perceived innovativeness, and AI-supported service.
The analysis shows that central service management traditions often rest on assumptions of a relatively autonomous, mobile, cognitively stable, and digitally capable user. When generalized across the life course, these assumptions become age-insensitive and may produce structurally exclusionary effects for older adults. The article identifies recurring limitations related to process standardization, complaint-based recovery, customer lifetime value logic, idealized co-creation, selective user-centered design, and deficit-oriented views of vulnerability. It argues that service management theory can be strengthened through greater attention to person–environment fit, life-course heterogeneity, socioemotional priorities, interdependence, and rights-based accessibility.
The article suggests that service organizations should redesign service systems around varying capacities rather than around an implicit “average” user. This includes more flexible service processes, broader evaluative criteria for quality and experience, and recognition of the relational and multi-actor nature of service use in later life. The article also suggests implications for customers, caregivers, policymakers, and regulators, particularly regarding accessibility, consumer protection, digital inclusion, and the governance of AI-enabled services.
The article highlights that age-inclusive service management is closely tied to participation, equality, dignity, and social inclusion in aging societies. By challenging age-insensitive assumptions in theory and practice, it contributes to broader debates on how service systems can support well-being across the life course and across generations.
The article contributes to service scholarship by positioning aging as a lens for critically revisiting the foundations of service management theory rather than a context of application. It offers an integrative framework for identifying age-insensitive assumptions across major service traditions and proposes directions for theoretical renewal grounded in gerontology, life-course thinking, and rights-based approaches.
