Special Issue on "Service research in the digital era"

The digital transformation characterizing business and society has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. The vast amount of online information facilitates data access and gathering, trend analysis, prediction, and prescriptions, and supports informed decisions. On the one side, actors have been strengthened in their decision-making capacities thanks to the prompt and easy access to a wide range of sources such as online databases, academic journals, online communities, social media, and search engines. On the other side, the conceptualization of service and service research (Ostrom et al., 2021) needs to adapt and adhere to the fact that companies, communities, businesses, and society are in an era of significant change due to artificial intelligence (Kaartemo and Helkkula, 2018; Adam et al., 2021; Spohrer et al., 2022), augmented reality, intelligence augmentation (Barile et al., 2021), the internet of Things, blockchain solutions (Russo-Spena et al., 2022), industrial automation and servitization (Sklyar et al., 2019). In other words, technology can enable value co-creation (Akaka and Vargo, 2014; Breidbach and Maglio, 2016; Mele et al., 2023) in multiple directions, not always through market sustainable behaviors.

Markets can be interpreted as service ecosystems (Vargo and Lusch, 2016), a perspective that frames a deep understanding of value co-creation dynamics between actors, also between human and non-human actors (Polese et al., 2022). Diverse actors’ knowledge, intentions (Taillard et al., 2016), and awareness of institutional arrangements and emergent properties (Vargo et al., 2023) can give rise to market emergence (Akaka et al., 2021), market multiplicity in terms of multiple perspectives (Kjelleberg et al., 2006), purposive actions to create, maintain and change institutional arrangements market shaping (Baker et al., 2022) and, definitely, market viability (Polese et al., 2020). The spread and adoption of technological advances, thus, generates opportunities and innovations that continually challenge markets, stimulating unforeseen emerging situations and contexts and new service platforms for service research opening up numerous exciting research streams.

Central issues and topics

Possible topics of submissions include, but are not limited to:

+ Service research and digital transformation

+ Human-machine interactions and robots in value co-creation

+ Technologies as enablers of market emergence and transformation

+ Technologies and market shaping and market viability

+ Phygital customer journey and metaverses

+ Service research in complex industry settings (e.g., Industry 4.0)

+ Business models to manage networks and service systems

+ Emergence and institutionalization in service eco-systems

+ Application of service-dominant logic to networks and markets

+ Advances in combining network theory and service science

Submission

Electronic Markets is a Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)-listed journal (IF 8.5 in 2022) in information systems. This call is open for all contributions but also invites selected papers from the Naples Forum on Service. We encourage original contributions with a broad range of methodological approaches, including conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative research. Please also consider position papers and case studies for this special issue. All papers should fit the journal scope (for more information, see www.electronicmarkets.org/about-em/scope/) and will undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Submissions must be made via the journal’s submission system (elma.edmgr.com) and comply with the journal's formatting standards. The preferred average article length is approximately 10,000 words, excluding references. Instructions, templates, and general information are available at www.electronicmarkets.org/authors/general-information/. If you would like to discuss any aspect of this special issue, you may either contact the guest editors or the Editorial Office.

Keywords:

Service, emergence and transformation, digitalization, technology

Important deadline:

* Submission Deadline: January 30, 2024

Find the full list of references here.