Exciting times for service scholarship

Abstract

Service scholarship has reached an exciting stage. Nothing shows this better than the large number of service-focused research centres all over the globe and the number of special issues in an ever-increasing number of service-related journals. Most importantly, however, these trends reflect and are driven by the increasing need for service-related knowledge both for businesses and society at large (Ostrom et al., 2015). Acquiring this service-related knowledge simultaneously represents both challenges and opportunities; challenge, as scholars are faced with the need to look more beyond their own disciplines in order to synthesize knowledge across boundaries. However, these cross-disciplinary collaborations provide a very exciting field for creating better understanding of a particular phenomenon from a broader perspective and give opportunities for exploring new ideas.