Table 2 Multiple approaches to inductive...

Table 2

Multiple approaches to inductive service research

Method	Examples
Thematic Analysis	In JOSM, Bettencourt and Gwinner (1996) outlined the role of frontline service staff in customizing customer experience. In a paper cited by 540 other papers, they showed how frontline employees classify customers, enact specific behavioral strategies to customize experiences and perceive personalization efforts
	In a multi-method investigation developing the concept consumer territorial behavior within the context of cafés, Griffiths and Gilly (2012) showed that understanding and dealing with consumer territorial behavior could lead to better servicescape design, less inter-customer conflict over access, reduced employee mediation of such conflict and smoother organizational processes
	Drawing from 10 interviews, 6 focus groups and 253 pages of content from documents and noted observations drawn from case studies of two community-based health care organizations – one an exemplar of a cocreation culture and the other a counter case, Sharama and Conduit (2016) conducted a thematic analysis to provide rich descriptions of the concepts and construct a conceptual framework that depicts a cocreation culture
	In JOSM, Mele et al. (2025) investigate the different effects of text- v voice-based education robots on student engagement, revealing how these interventions lead to differences in students' information processing. The study perfectly illustrates the value of inductive research in opening up relatively novel terrain to theoretical understanding
	All the above cases show how inductive research can generate new concepts. But inductive research also helps innovate novel methodologies. The Trajectory Touchpoint Technique (TTT) is a picture based, projective technique for uncovering in-depth stories of customer's lived experiences at the same time as ensuring systematic data collection and thematic analysis. Sudbury-Riley et al. (2020) propose this technique as an innovative method for service innovation
Grounded Theory	One of the earliest examples in JOSM looks at management accounting and control in service organizations. Cited by 100 other papers, Modell's (1996) paper uses grounded theory in a wholly exploratory way for which the method is suited in examining the understanding and acceptance of accounting information in public sector clinics
	Similarly, in a forthcoming JOSM, Gupta et al. (2025) make use of this inductive technique to examine how the attributes of the new voice assistant technologies combine with other conventional service attributes to affect consumer outcomes
	Cited almost 600 times, is Rosenbaum's (2006) study of the socially supportive role of third places, which are gathering spaces that are neither homes nor workplaces. Third place research has become common in the service journals but in the managerial literature more generally (e.g. De et al., 2024)
	Context is no barrier to the use of grounded theory; it is applicable in both high-touch and high-tech contexts. For example, noting that gaining user acceptance of smart interactive services such as telemedicine presents a significant challenge for managers, Wünderlich et al. (2013) employed a grounded theory approach, drawing on depth interviews, to develop a framework of barriers and facilitators to users' attitudinal and behavioral responses to smart interactive services
	Combining the long-standing interest in health care service with the emerging field of robotics, Kipnis et al. (2022) follow a grounded theory approach and focus on consumers with disabilities' experiences with robots to understanding how the integration of robots in long-term care service might contribute to (or detract from) enhanced consumer well-being
	Bringing grounded theory to bear in transformative service research, Fisk et al. (2023) deployed this method to address the problem of the digital divide. The authors were at pains to demonstrate that their “efforts to increase the accuracy, transparency, and credibility of our qualitative research were both deliberate and consistent” (p. 546)
Content analysis	In an early JOSM paper cited by 399 subsequent papers, Reynoso and Moores (1995) used content analysis of interview data to dimensionalize employee perceptions of service quality. This is an approach than can help scholars develop scale items for subsequent deductive analyses
	Beatty et al. (2016) and Bugg and Beatty (2008) have made effective use of content analysis combined with the critical incident technique to derive insight into drivers of (dis)satisfaction in both off- and online service encounters
	In an intriguing recent application in JOSM, Hunke et al. (2024) use content analysis to aggregate the results of interview data to identify key problems industry professionals experienced with using classic service concepts in service design
Narrative analysis	To understand value in service experience, Helkkula et al. (2012a, b) used a modified version of narrative analysis, namely, the event-based narrative inquiry technique, to show how service customers individually and collectively make sense of lived and imaginary value experiences
Narrative analysis	In a surprising recent JOSM (Sidaoui et al., 2020) propose that an approach to understand CE via storytelling in service research that is both highly informative and efficient could be achieved by employing chatbots equipped with artificial intelligence to automatically extract CE from narrative conversations with customers – using a sentiment analysis (SA) algorithm – and hence contribute to CE theory
Discourse analysis	Fehrer et al. (2024) made use of discourse analysis to establish a service ecosystem framework for circular service ecosystems. To do so they systematically read 3,178 blogs, posted on a variety of blog websites to identify content that reflected the complex nature of circular ecosystem transitions, the institutional changes required to facilitate such transitions and actors' role in driving institutional change. They employed abductive methods to develop the most plausible explanation for the insights that appeared interesting and surprising to them in the data, i.e. the need for a paradigm shift to drive circular economy transitions
Phenomenological analysis	Drawing on depth interviews and participant diaries, Becker et al. (2020), studied how recovering alcoholics experience their journey toward a sober life and interpreted their data using the self-regulation model of behavior, which helped make sense of the consumers' goal-setting behaviors
Phenomenological analysis	In an interesting illustration of the value of phenomenological data for analyzing customers experience, Helkkula et al. (2012a, b) demonstrated the dramatic differences between observed and felt experiences of an apparently mundane service experience; the car wash
Case study analysis	In volume 1 of JOSM Mehra and Inman (1990) contributed a case study of JIT in a particular service business. An interesting feature of the study was how implementation led to upstream servitization among suppliers to the focal firm based on enhanced communication that helped improve downstream customer satisfaction
	Hochstein et al. (2021). Highlighted the value of structural ambidexterity in value creation. They chose a B2B firm they judged typical of firms' approach to customer success management (CSM) to better understand CSM at the level of front-line employees. Through interviews and grounded theory, they show that the CS function is distinct from the sales function as well as other frontline functions and should be so managed to enhance customer retention and satisfaction
	Addressing a grand challenge, Ozgen et al. (2025) chose the context of food waste to build theory around the customer engagement concept seen as both a micro-foundation of value co-creation and a mechanism for addressing societal challenges and complex problems
	Similarly addressing a global social problem, Villers et al. (2025) make use of the stigma concept. Through a case study of the deathcare industry, they show that the deathcare service is stigmatized and that perceptions of stigmatized services are entrenched in the cultural fabric of society. And because of this stigmatization, new service offerings and new business models emerge, albeit slowly
Ethnography	Hill's (2002) month-long ethnographic engagement in a grassroots-initiated public-private partnership to deliver services to homeless teenagers would fit well within a Transformative Service Research (TSR) perspective. The paper produced many ethnographic insights into the institutional challenges such initiatives face as well as to fruitful approaches to managing them, thus providing guidance to those interested in sparking transformational service delivery. Hill was able to blend perspectives from multiple stakeholders into this account
	Harris and Baron (2004) showed how C2C interactions could serve as a defuser of service dissatisfaction in extended, proximal encounters
	In JOSM, using participant observation and other inductive techniques, Torres et al. (2018) provide a nice complement to the firm led approach to service customization by inducing three theoretical modes o8f customer serviced customization
	Blocker and Barrios's (2015) very rich ethnographic research with a non-profit organization led them to elaborate a concept of transformative value in service experience, what distinguishes transformative value from habitual value and the role of services in supporting the emergence of agency among vulnerable populations
	Chronis (2019) showed that customers' disparate interpretations of a servicescape could provoke tension and place the onus on front-line staff to produce interpretive solutions in the face of customers' discrepant interpretations. The tension-ridden context he explored would be ripe for analysis in terms of provider-driven transformation or conversely, antiservice as examined by Hill et al. (2016)
	Illustrating the opposite of transformation, Hill et al. (2016) develop the concept of antiservice based on ethnographic work in a maximum-security prison. They show antiservice is associated with a less-than-humane conception of the noncustomer prisoners and document the turn to an illicit, underground marketplace due to the condition of constant service failure. A key contribution is showing the virtue of ethnographic action research in producing a climate of research trust in a repressive social context
	Riehle et al. (2024) adapt the tribal concept from consumer research to show how passionate service employees develop tribality sociality at work. In the face of a general climate of employee dissatisfaction, they recommend service organizations provide employees with an experience platform to develop this tribal sensibility
Netnography	One example of limited scope was an unobtrusive netnography of Trip Advisor reviews that enabled the authors to identify cognitive and emotional triggers of both direct and indirect negatively valenced influencing behavior (NVIBs). Such research is helpful to managers in recognizing how to avoid triggering NVIBs (Azer and Alexander, 2020)
Netnography	Focusing on Syria during the Arab Spring, Skålén et al. (2015) drew data from a host of local and regional social media sources. They showed that by integrating resources and cocreating value within several ICT tools, online activists transformed four inter-dependent service systems – the media, the social movement, health care and the financial service systems. The authors show that ICT can be an opportunity space for activism and that the positive transformation of service systems is derived from conflict between incumbent and challenger actors rather than harmonious collaborations

Method	Examples
Thematic Analysis	In JOSM, Bettencourt and Gwinner (1996) outlined the role of frontline service staff in customizing customer experience. In a paper cited by 540 other papers, they showed how frontline employees classify customers, enact specific behavioral strategies to customize experiences and perceive personalization efforts
	In a multi-method investigation developing the concept consumer territorial behavior within the context of cafés, Griffiths and Gilly (2012) showed that understanding and dealing with consumer territorial behavior could lead to better servicescape design, less inter-customer conflict over access, reduced employee mediation of such conflict and smoother organizational processes
	Drawing from 10 interviews, 6 focus groups and 253 pages of content from documents and noted observations drawn from case studies of two community-based health care organizations – one an exemplar of a cocreation culture and the other a counter case, Sharama and Conduit (2016) conducted a thematic analysis to provide rich descriptions of the concepts and construct a conceptual framework that depicts a cocreation culture
	In JOSM, Mele et al. (2025) investigate the different effects of text- v voice-based education robots on student engagement, revealing how these interventions lead to differences in students' information processing. The study perfectly illustrates the value of inductive research in opening up relatively novel terrain to theoretical understanding
	All the above cases show how inductive research can generate new concepts. But inductive research also helps innovate novel methodologies. The Trajectory Touchpoint Technique (TTT) is a picture based, projective technique for uncovering in-depth stories of customer's lived experiences at the same time as ensuring systematic data collection and thematic analysis. Sudbury-Riley et al. (2020) propose this technique as an innovative method for service innovation
Grounded Theory	One of the earliest examples in JOSM looks at management accounting and control in service organizations. Cited by 100 other papers, Modell's (1996) paper uses grounded theory in a wholly exploratory way for which the method is suited in examining the understanding and acceptance of accounting information in public sector clinics
	Similarly, in a forthcoming JOSM, Gupta et al. (2025) make use of this inductive technique to examine how the attributes of the new voice assistant technologies combine with other conventional service attributes to affect consumer outcomes
	Cited almost 600 times, is Rosenbaum's (2006) study of the socially supportive role of third places, which are gathering spaces that are neither homes nor workplaces. Third place research has become common in the service journals but in the managerial literature more generally (e.g. De et al., 2024)
	Context is no barrier to the use of grounded theory; it is applicable in both high-touch and high-tech contexts. For example, noting that gaining user acceptance of smart interactive services such as telemedicine presents a significant challenge for managers, Wünderlich et al. (2013) employed a grounded theory approach, drawing on depth interviews, to develop a framework of barriers and facilitators to users' attitudinal and behavioral responses to smart interactive services
	Combining the long-standing interest in health care service with the emerging field of robotics, Kipnis et al. (2022) follow a grounded theory approach and focus on consumers with disabilities' experiences with robots to understanding how the integration of robots in long-term care service might contribute to (or detract from) enhanced consumer well-being
	Bringing grounded theory to bear in transformative service research, Fisk et al. (2023) deployed this method to address the problem of the digital divide. The authors were at pains to demonstrate that their “efforts to increase the accuracy, transparency, and credibility of our qualitative research were both deliberate and consistent” (p. 546)
Content analysis	In an early JOSM paper cited by 399 subsequent papers, Reynoso and Moores (1995) used content analysis of interview data to dimensionalize employee perceptions of service quality. This is an approach than can help scholars develop scale items for subsequent deductive analyses
	Beatty et al. (2016) and Bugg and Beatty (2008) have made effective use of content analysis combined with the critical incident technique to derive insight into drivers of (dis)satisfaction in both off- and online service encounters
	In an intriguing recent application in JOSM, Hunke et al. (2024) use content analysis to aggregate the results of interview data to identify key problems industry professionals experienced with using classic service concepts in service design
Narrative analysis	To understand value in service experience, Helkkula et al. (2012a, b) used a modified version of narrative analysis, namely, the event-based narrative inquiry technique, to show how service customers individually and collectively make sense of lived and imaginary value experiences
Narrative analysis	In a surprising recent JOSM (Sidaoui et al., 2020) propose that an approach to understand CE via storytelling in service research that is both highly informative and efficient could be achieved by employing chatbots equipped with artificial intelligence to automatically extract CE from narrative conversations with customers – using a sentiment analysis (SA) algorithm – and hence contribute to CE theory
Discourse analysis	Fehrer et al. (2024) made use of discourse analysis to establish a service ecosystem framework for circular service ecosystems. To do so they systematically read 3,178 blogs, posted on a variety of blog websites to identify content that reflected the complex nature of circular ecosystem transitions, the institutional changes required to facilitate such transitions and actors' role in driving institutional change. They employed abductive methods to develop the most plausible explanation for the insights that appeared interesting and surprising to them in the data, i.e. the need for a paradigm shift to drive circular economy transitions
Phenomenological analysis	Drawing on depth interviews and participant diaries, Becker et al. (2020), studied how recovering alcoholics experience their journey toward a sober life and interpreted their data using the self-regulation model of behavior, which helped make sense of the consumers' goal-setting behaviors
Phenomenological analysis	In an interesting illustration of the value of phenomenological data for analyzing customers experience, Helkkula et al. (2012a, b) demonstrated the dramatic differences between observed and felt experiences of an apparently mundane service experience; the car wash
Case study analysis	In volume 1 of JOSM Mehra and Inman (1990) contributed a case study of JIT in a particular service business. An interesting feature of the study was how implementation led to upstream servitization among suppliers to the focal firm based on enhanced communication that helped improve downstream customer satisfaction
	Hochstein et al. (2021). Highlighted the value of structural ambidexterity in value creation. They chose a B2B firm they judged typical of firms' approach to customer success management (CSM) to better understand CSM at the level of front-line employees. Through interviews and grounded theory, they show that the CS function is distinct from the sales function as well as other frontline functions and should be so managed to enhance customer retention and satisfaction
	Addressing a grand challenge, Ozgen et al. (2025) chose the context of food waste to build theory around the customer engagement concept seen as both a micro-foundation of value co-creation and a mechanism for addressing societal challenges and complex problems
	Similarly addressing a global social problem, Villers et al. (2025) make use of the stigma concept. Through a case study of the deathcare industry, they show that the deathcare service is stigmatized and that perceptions of stigmatized services are entrenched in the cultural fabric of society. And because of this stigmatization, new service offerings and new business models emerge, albeit slowly
Ethnography	Hill's (2002) month-long ethnographic engagement in a grassroots-initiated public-private partnership to deliver services to homeless teenagers would fit well within a Transformative Service Research (TSR) perspective. The paper produced many ethnographic insights into the institutional challenges such initiatives face as well as to fruitful approaches to managing them, thus providing guidance to those interested in sparking transformational service delivery. Hill was able to blend perspectives from multiple stakeholders into this account
	Harris and Baron (2004) showed how C2C interactions could serve as a defuser of service dissatisfaction in extended, proximal encounters
	In JOSM, using participant observation and other inductive techniques, Torres et al. (2018) provide a nice complement to the firm led approach to service customization by inducing three theoretical modes o8f customer serviced customization
	Blocker and Barrios's (2015) very rich ethnographic research with a non-profit organization led them to elaborate a concept of transformative value in service experience, what distinguishes transformative value from habitual value and the role of services in supporting the emergence of agency among vulnerable populations
	Chronis (2019) showed that customers' disparate interpretations of a servicescape could provoke tension and place the onus on front-line staff to produce interpretive solutions in the face of customers' discrepant interpretations. The tension-ridden context he explored would be ripe for analysis in terms of provider-driven transformation or conversely, antiservice as examined by Hill et al. (2016)
	Illustrating the opposite of transformation, Hill et al. (2016) develop the concept of antiservice based on ethnographic work in a maximum-security prison. They show antiservice is associated with a less-than-humane conception of the noncustomer prisoners and document the turn to an illicit, underground marketplace due to the condition of constant service failure. A key contribution is showing the virtue of ethnographic action research in producing a climate of research trust in a repressive social context
	Riehle et al. (2024) adapt the tribal concept from consumer research to show how passionate service employees develop tribality sociality at work. In the face of a general climate of employee dissatisfaction, they recommend service organizations provide employees with an experience platform to develop this tribal sensibility
Netnography	One example of limited scope was an unobtrusive netnography of Trip Advisor reviews that enabled the authors to identify cognitive and emotional triggers of both direct and indirect negatively valenced influencing behavior (NVIBs). Such research is helpful to managers in recognizing how to avoid triggering NVIBs (Azer and Alexander, 2020)
Netnography	Focusing on Syria during the Arab Spring, Skålén et al. (2015) drew data from a host of local and regional social media sources. They showed that by integrating resources and cocreating value within several ICT tools, online activists transformed four inter-dependent service systems – the media, the social movement, health care and the financial service systems. The authors show that ICT can be an opportunity space for activism and that the positive transformation of service systems is derived from conflict between incumbent and challenger actors rather than harmonious collaborations

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