Transformative Service Research: Advancing Our Knowledge About Service and Well-Being

Abstract

As humans and consumers, we spend much of our time immersed in an array of services and service systems (e.g., telecommunications, education, financial, government, and health care) that affect almost every aspect of our lives. Our continuous connection with and usage of services and the implications they have for our lives go far beyond questions related to traditional service dependent measures such as service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Service fundamentally affects our lives and our well-being as individuals, employees, families, and communities. Given this, we are honored to be the guest coeditors for this special issue on transformative service research (TSR). First conceptualized by Anderson (2010), today we regard TSR as any research, regardless of academic discipline, that, at its core, investigates the relationship between service and well-being. More specifically, TSR represents research that focuses on creating ‘‘uplifting changes’’ aimed at improving the lives of individuals (both consumers and employees), families, communities, society, and the ecosystem more broadly (Anderson et al. 2013). What distinguishes TSR from other service work is often the outcomes under investigation. With TSR, indicators of both increasing and decreasing well-being take center stage. These metrics may focus on assessing aspects of well-being, such as physical health (objective and subjective perceptions), mental health (e.g., resilience, stress, and burnout), financial wellbeing, discrimination, marginalization, literacy, inclusion, access, capacity building, and decreased disparity among others (Anderson et al. 2013; Rosenbaum et al. 2011). Although the term ‘‘transformative service research’’ is relatively new, prior service, consumer, and marketing research has emphasized service and well-being. In a review we undertook to examine prior research that we considered TSR (see Ostrom, Mathras, and Anderson 2014), we identified eight TSRrelated themes—cocreation, employee well-being, vulnerable consumers, social support, access, service literacy, service design, and service systems—highlighting the breadth of research that has investigated service and well-being. Since TSR was spotlighted as a research priority by Ostrom et al. (2010; i.e., ‘‘Improving Well-Being through Transformative Service’’), there has been increased interest in the service community in undertaking research that examines the intersection of service and well-being. Research has attempted to better conceptualize the domain (e.g., Anderson et al. 2013; Rosenbaum et al. 2011) as well as tackle important service-related issues centered on well-being (e.g., how organization socialization can promote coproduction behaviors that influence financial well-being [Guo et al. 2013]; how systemic restricted choice related to financial services affects minority business owners [Bone, Christensen, and Williams 2014]; customer healthoriented cocreation practice styles [McColl-Kennedy et al. 2012]). In the most recent service research priority-setting effort completed by Ostrom et al. (2015), not only was ‘‘Improving Well-Being through Transformative Service’’ spotlighted again as a research priority based on input from 23 roundtable discussions conducted by 19 different service centers/networks located around the world, but, in a global survey of academic service researchers, it was ranked as the most important of the 12 identified priorities by the largest percentage of respondents. Given the interest of the service research community, we hope that the emerging, interdisciplinary subfield of service, TSR, will lead to the investigation of important but understudied service contexts and issues and that it will be inclusive of diversity of discipline and method/approach as well as the unit of analysis, focusing not only on individuals but on collectives as well. In addition, we hope that the term ‘‘transformative service research’’ itself will make it easier to identify service research that makes contributions to our understanding of well-being. As we discuss subsequently, we want the impact of TSR to go beyond publications to measurable positive improvements in the lives of consumers. To advance these objectives, our goals for