Transformative service research, service design, and social entrepreneurship

The Incorporation of Service-Learning into a Management Course: A Case Study of a Charity Thrift Store

(1) Background: A charity thrift store commonly takes on employees with disabilities, but such a business model creates many challenges to overcome, as will be described. This research focuses on the satisfaction of such individuals taking service-learning courses. (2) Methods: The five management functions are planning, organization, leadership, coordination, and control. Service-learning students learn management theory to apply in practice. To test the quality of their learning, a reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, and T-test were carried out using the questionnaire survey method. (3) Results: First, there is a need for education, training, and process improvements for internal staff. Then, efforts must be made to improve customers’ perception of the charity thrift store, e.g., via beautification. Beyond that, institutional promotion may be an option, as are social media posting suggestions. Finally, real serving experience enables those in training to engage in critical self-reflection. The results of the questionnaire survey show that the students most satisfied with the service-learning training are those seeking to work in social care, rather than retail, but that all service-learning students were at least somewhat satisfied with the training provided. Significant differences were observed in service-learning satisfaction related to the students’ gender and identity. (4) Conclusions: Students’ self-reflections can enhance their self-growth and problem-solving skills. Additionally, this management course awakens respect among the students for those with disabilities. After their satisfaction is reviewed, college students are willing to continue to participate in the service-learning. This course offers sustainable results by supplying a steady stream of trained workers to charity thrift stores.

A methodological framework for crafting situated services

Purpose

This paper discusses how service design can be used to activate a transition of textile artisan communities towards a sustainable future.

Design/methodology/approach

Two participatory case studies were undertaken with textile artisans in the UK and South Africa. These led to the development of an original methodological framework for “crafting situated services” – services designed to be meaningful to the local communities within which they are embedded. An evaluation study assessed the originality of the framework, its relevance for tackling real-world problems, its extensibility and the rigour of the research process.

Findings

The framework brings together a variety of roles, methods and tools that designers can adopt in order to enter communities, make sense of sustainable futures, facilitate the co-design of situated services and activate legacies within communities. Building on emerging anthropological approaches, the framework makes a bridge between service management and service design for social innovation, advancing the field towards design for social entrepreneurship.

Originality/value

Arguing against the idea of the designer “parachuting” into communities to create services regardless of the local context, the concept of “situated services” is proposed in this paper, alongside a process for “crafting” meaningful social innovations. This requires the service designer to adopt a more situated and embedded approach to designing with communities in order to align with their needs and aspirations, interweave places, time, people and practices within the process, and co-design contextually better services.

Bridging Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Circular Flow of Interaction among the University, Industry, and People

Universities foster a collaboration with industry with their commitment towards society. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of organizations facilitate implementation of the recognition of prior learning (RPL) in higher education, while creating long-term opportunities for sustainable development. The researchers of this study come from two different disciplines, and aim to embed sustainable development strategies for transforming education by utilizing the capacity of educators and industry professionals, while also contributing to the community and economy. The researcher with a specialization in economics identified the well-being of the community and economy, and another researcher with a design and ergonomics background brought the concept of service design. Results of the conducted surveys imply that a skill gap exists in the labor market and participants from the community are interested in receiving hands on training from the industry. The researchers introduce a model focusing on the significance and implementation of RPL, allowing youth and adults to accumulate credit through non-formal and informal learning experiences. The model reflects how the university assesses the current skills and needs of the target communities, how they are communicated to industry by identifying potential areas of development, how industry responds to the needs by providing training, and how the university acknowledges prior learning and promotes potential candidates to contribute towards industry.

How Michelin-starred chefs are being transformed into social bricoleurs? An online qualitative study of luxury foodservice during the pandemic crisis

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to examine response strategies and the change in Michelin-starred chefs' practices to adapt to the global pandemic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis that has strongly affected the foodservice sector.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative research that used mixed-method, combining online interviews with 12 French Michelin-starred chefs and archival data. A manual thematic analysis method was used to analyze the data and identify relevant themes following an iterative coding process.

Findings

The findings show that Michelin-starred restaurants implement multilevel response strategies by developing dynamic capabilities while playing a social role through the development of new forms of business practices. The results show that Michelin-starred chefs adopt social bricolage entrepreneurial thinking to deal with the extreme situation and use diverse resources and response strategies to tackle social issues and improve the collective and individual well-being. The authors identified three major response strategies implemented by luxury restaurants: philanthropic activities targeting the well-being of the community, socially responsible business practices to support the foodservice actors and initiatives centered on consumer's food well-being.

Research limitations/implications

The limits of this study are related to the small sample size and the elimination of psychographic criteria such as age and gender, which can extend our understanding of response strategies implemented by female and male owners or by age range during crises in the foodservice sector. Also, given that France is the country of Haute gastronomy, the conclusions of this study may not be generalizable to other countries where the gastronomic culture might be different.

Practical implications

Restaurants with high-end or luxury positioning must use multilevel – i.e. individual, sector and societal – response strategies to play a social role while sustaining their businesses during times of crisis. These insights seek to provide a roadmap which can be applied to other sectors to assess response strategies driven by various motives, resources and capabilities.

Social implications

This research contributes to transformative service research literature by providing insights regarding how service providers can rethink their activities during the crises to play an active social role. Also, the findings point to several ways in which service actors can help customers and the community to improve their well-being.

Originality/value

To our knowledge, no prior research examined both the type of response strategies deployed by companies to survive and the importance of playing a social role and developing socially responsible business practices during times of crisis.

A transformative supply chain response to COVID-19

Purpose

This research employs a transformative service lens to examine the role of the supply chain ecosystem in ensuring the health and safety of employees and customers as a well-being outcome during the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a conceptual paper examining the response of the supply chain to the current food crisis caused by the pandemic.

Findings

Based on the service-dominant logic (SDL) paradigm, the COVID-19 examination of the supply chain ecosystem provides a foundation for further research employing a transformative lens.

Research limitations/implications

The COVID-19 situation is primarily explored from a Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies’ context. Future research should explore the applicability of the transformative service lens to other societies.

Practical implications

The conceptual discussion and research agenda provide direction for researchers, practitioners and policymakers towards a transformative supply chain ecosystem.

Originality/value

This research includes the well-being of employees and customers in the service supply chain outcome measures, draws supply chain management into the TSR domain, while also solidifies a service ecosystem perspective of supply chain management.

Customer delight during a crisis: understanding delight through the lens of transformative service research

Purpose

The unprecedented dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced firms to re-envision the customer experience and find new ways to ensure positive service encounters. This context has underscored the reality that drivers of customer delight in a “traditional” context are not the same in a crisis context. While research has tended to identify hedonic need fulfillment as key to customer well-being and, ultimately, to invoking customer delight, the majority of studies were conducted in inherently positive contexts, which may limit generalizability to more challenging contexts. Through the combined lens of transformative service research (TSR) and psychological theory on hedonic and eudaimonic human needs, we evaluate the extent to which need fulfillment is the root of customer well-being and that meeting well-being needs ultimately promotes delight. We argue that in crisis contexts, the salience of needs shifts from hedonic to eudaimonic and the extent to which service experiences fulfill eudaimonic needs determines the experience and meaning of delight.

Design/methodology/approach

Utilizing the critical incident technique, this research surveyed 240 respondents who were asked to explain in detail a time they experienced customer delight during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed their responses according to whether these incidents reflected the salience of hedonic versus eudaimonic need fulfillment.

Findings

The results support the notion that the salience of eudaimonic needs become more pronounced during times of crisis and that service providers are more likely to elicit perceptions of delight when they leverage meeting eudaimonic needs over the hedonic needs that are typically emphasized in traditional service encounters.

Originality/value

We discuss the implications of these findings for integrating the TSR and customer delight literatures to better understand how service experiences that meet salient needs produce customer well-being and delight. Ultimately, we find customer delight can benefit well-being across individual, collective and societal levels.