The discourse on decent work is gaining momentum across the global debate (Frey, 2017). According to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, decent work is a strategic goal Sustainable Development Goal 8 aimed at ensuring a sustainable, inclusive and safe growth in an era characterized by environmental crises, accelerated technological advancements, wars and forced migrations (Zehri et al., 2024). However, the ambitious targets and indicators of Goal 8 are far from being fully reached. Decent work remains a controversial and fragile issue, threatened by precarity, informality and emerging forms of exploitation (Chigbu and Nekhwevha, 2023). It is closely related to human well-being and has several implications for innovation, service and sustainability (Conigliaro, 2021; Blustein et al., 2016).
Within scholarly literature and policy discussions, to date, the discourse on decent work has predominantly resided within the purview of economists, industrial economists and legal experts (Pereira et al., 2019), while a significant gap remains in the study of the topic from a service marketing perspective (Ralph and Arora, 2024). This Special Issue aims to illuminate the intrinsic relevance of this topic to the heart of service research, with a particular focus on service marketing. The quality of employment, the well-being of staff (Grönroos, 2017; Chen et al., 2023) and their level of trust in the organization where they work significantly shape service outcomes. Positioning decent work as a central concern within service research necessitates acknowledging it as a vital resource within service ecosystems (Wilden et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2023). In this sense, decent work becomes a resource characterized by its operant nature (Madhavaram and Hunt, 2007; Caridà et al., 2019).
This Editorial encourages a reassessment of the core principles and frameworks of service research, encompassing service-dominant logic and transformative service research (TSR), as lenses to promote decent work. Rather than treating it solely as an external factor or a macroeconomic issue linked to illegality, exploitation, informal work or child labor, decent work is presented as an essential element in the value creation process (Barrios et al., 2022).
The contributions assembled in this Special Issue, “Making Service Work Decent Work: Marketing Perspectives to Uplift Human Well-Being and Service Excellence”, mirror the diversity and depth of approaches to decent work within a service-oriented frame. This Special Issue includes four original papers and two invited viewpoints. The papers offer both empirical and theoretical insights to advance knowledge about decent work in service research and stimulate reflection among service managers about the need to promote a philosophy of work that encourages inclusion and sustainable economic growth. It is possible to identify two distinct paths along which the authors’ contributions unfold.
The first path focuses on theoretical foundations to understand and develop the concept of decent work. The urgency emerging from these contributions is about defining and consolidating the theoretical basis to make decent work a concrete construct grounded in conceptual frameworks, institutional arrangements and emerging practices. In this direction, the paper “Human Thriving through Decent Work: A Multi-Theoretical Framework” by Stefan Lazic, Maria Della Lucia, Hasni Junaid Shaid and Erica Santini makes a meaningful contribution. A novel integrated framework combining humanistic management, need theories and TSR stimulates reflection among service scholars and managers about the modes of configuration of the service ecosystem to promote inclusion and sustainable economic growth, placing the human being as the primary focus. Decent work does not emerge as an end in itself, but as a bridging construct between ethics, service practices and human development.
“Social Mindfulness as an Institutional Arrangement to Promote Service Employee Well-Being” by Anthony Miyazaki, Linnéa Chapman and Todd Haderlie opens a pioneering and transformative approach to decent work. Mindfulness is proposed as a new institutional arrangement within service contexts that works at the micro-level of interaction between employees, customers and managers. Aware and “mindful” behaviours in service micro-contexts, as emerging institutional arrangements, are crucial to actively and powerfully promote practices of decent work. The “aware human being” acts as a bridge between the macro-level (institution, institutional arrangements, norms) and the micro-level (individual interactions) of the service ecosystem.
The second path focuses on a more practical perspective on decent work as a leverage for inclusion and social justice. The papers in this path focus on a practical level, targeting support for workers experiencing vulnerabilities or at risk of discrimination and pinpointing actions to improve their conditions.
In “Trapped in informality: A transformative service study of refugee women’s work in Colombia”, Mark Rosenbaum, Mario Giraldo, Germán Contreras-Ramírez, Camilo Mejia and David Juliao-Esparragoza steer the discussion towards the level of structural vulnerability of workers and relational networks. Through the analysis of the conditions of Venezuelan refugee women in Colombia, decent work is conceptualized as a normative horizon that is continually negotiated within fragile ecosystems. The definition of the informal economy/service clearly identifies a grey area that mediates or impedes access to decent work, revealing a dysfunctional systemic interplay of institutional, social and economic factors.
“Break the Silence: Managing Professional Identity of FLEs with Invisible Disabilities Towards Inclusive Services”, by Davi Marques, Tereza Lima, Sofia Ferraz and Luis Brandão Paiva, interprets decent work as the right to identity expression. Focusing on frontline employees who experience invisible disabilities, the authors define decent work as a space that embraces, acknowledges and values agency, diversity and vulnerability.
Two viewpoints conclude the special issue with critical reflections that expand the scope of the scholarly discourse. These invited contributions draw on the expertise of scholars with deep knowledge in the strategic, social and legal dimensions of work and low-skilled work, leveraging their insights to inform service research. Specifically, the two contributions, one rooted in tourism management and the other in legal studies, emphasize that, through distinct arguments and methods, ensuring decent work necessitates a genuinely multi-actor and multi-level approach. Tom Baum and Anke Winchenbach expand the scope of decent work by focusing on an actor who is generally neglected in the debate on the topic: the customer. “The neglected role of customers in the decent work equation in the service sector” invites scholars to consider decent work as a multi-stakeholder concept that integrates the customer as an actor whose choices shape the quality of work, opening research trajectories towards the integration of responsible consumption and suggesting bridging research on consumption, (decent) work and service research. Labor law scholars, Francesca Maffei, Simona Bilancia, Massimiliano Delfino and Umberto Gargiulo, in their contribution “Decent work and core labour standards: how to achieve effectiveness?”, interpret decent work as the combined outcome of regulatory pluralism, highlighting the need for coordinated, multi-faceted governance to address systemic vulnerabilities. By positioning their view within the debate on institutions and global governance of work, the authors discuss the crucial point of the efficacy of legal mechanisms of core labor standards. They argue that decent work cannot be seen solely as a high objective secured by national and international institutions; rather, it emerges from the dynamic interplay of multiple levels of regulation, including public, private, judicial and societal. The contribution of labor law discipline thus invites a shift in focus from the pursuit of a singular, universal solution to a pragmatic approach that emphasizes the complementarity of instruments and their capacity to generate tangible impacts on corporate practices before affecting national regulations.
Collectively, the papers and viewpoints in this Special Issue demonstrate the need for a complementarity between analytical approaches and critical perspectives. The papers advance the conceptual development of decent work as a complex and multi-dimensional construct in service research, highlighting how institutions, service interactions and vulnerabilities shape work conditions and environment. The viewpoints, rather than consolidating existing perspectives, challenge the service scholarly community to push beyond current boundaries, prompting inquiry into the roles of often-overlooked actors in decent work – from consumers to international organizations – while inviting reflection on the efficacy of existing tools and previously tested practices. In addition to enhancing the Special Issue through a diversity of perspectives, the inclusion of both research papers and viewpoints reveals that decent work cannot be effectively studied or advanced without sustained dialogue between theoretical rigor and institutional critique, nor without accounting for the contributions of all stakeholders engaged in service ecosystems. The contributions collected in this Special Issue stimulate reflections to guide further research. A primary reflection is undoubtedly linked to the impact of technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), which influences the conceptualization and configuration of skills, tasks and work relationships. This reveals, alongside the bright side of support and inclusion of AI and technology (Thirupathi et al., 2024), a darker aspect associated with the risks of surveillance and precarity (Keegan et al., 2023). Intimately tied to this reflection, a critical area for further investigation emerges in the framework of algorithmic governance and the intermediation structures that shape the gig economy and platform-based employment (Duggan et al., 2023; Muldoon and Raekstad, 2022). The evolving labor arrangements within this domain require both conceptual and regulatory frameworks designed to secure social safeguards while maintaining a harmonious balance with flexibility.
Decent work and sustainability are intricately intertwined, and in this vein, a future research trajectory emerging from the contributions involves jointly addressing the social and environmental dimensions in the definition of decent work. Focusing on the design of responsible value chains and the sector-specific assessment of impacts (Bennett and Grabs, 2024) would undoubtedly promote the adoption of virtuous practices and tailored methodologies that foster inclusion and support vulnerability (Mcgrath et al., 2021; Lebaron, 2021). The theme of multi-level governance, explored from a labor law perspective, encourages the exploration of synergistic combinations of available tools across various ecosystem levels, aimed at reinforcing the right to, and thus the legitimacy of, decent work (Blustein et al., 2022). A further avenue for future investigation is represented by a distinctly marketing-focused theme: consumer choices. Further studies could explore how marketing strategies and communication initiatives influence the orientation towards more conscious consumption (Anjorin et al., 2024), particularly in relation to work practices. Nevertheless, drawing together the threads of this discussion, in this space that the Journal of Services Marketing has chosen to dedicate to decent work (Subramony and Rosenbaum, 2024; Russell-Bennett et al., 2024), a critical research direction lies in positioning decent work at the heart of service research as a constitutive condition for value creation.
Re-examined through the lens of the multi-actor and multi-level construct of decent work, the established theoretical paradigms within service research can gain renewed vitality and yield valuable insights, not only for advancing theoretical frameworks but, more importantly, for fostering managerial practices that are respectful and targeted towards well-being.
The core message emerging from this Special Issue is that decent work is not an external concern to service research and marketing; rather, it represents a fundamental component, deeply rooted in their foundational principles. The quality of work is recognized as an essential element of the service itself, with the dignity of employees forming a cohesive core alongside customer trust and corporate reputation. The challenge for the service research community, therefore, extends beyond the development of new theories or the collection of empirical data; it primarily entails integrating and maintaining diverse perspectives to establish a research agenda rigorously attuned to transformations in the work domain and the global environment. Accordingly, decent work offers a critical opportunity for reflection, encouraging a reassessment of the meaning of value creation within service ecosystems for all participating actors. This path provides a direction for services marketing to follow, contributing through the creation of innovative research pathways and actionable strategies that balance prosperity and decency, justice and innovation, thereby promoting the well-being of the entire ecosystem.
