The Emergence of Service Economics

Summary

Structural change can be conceived as a process of quantitative economic growth or as a process of qualitative transformation. Services can be studied under both perspectives: service industries and standardized service processes, on the one hand, and creative and regulatory services, on the other hand. Economic regulatory mechanisms can be seen as the provision of services. Price regulations, contractual mechanisms, planning procedures or hierarchical organizations are regulatory systems with specific properties and fields of implementation. Beyond economic regulatory mechanisms, other mechanisms, such as psychosomatic, cultural or political regulation, are required to control the socialization process. The socialization process, which is a prerequisite for economic regulation, is produced by services. Services produce the cultural consensus and integrate the ambivalent, both violent and convivial, tendencies of individuals into competitive and cooperative social equilibria. Economics has to consider these regulatory functions in a theory of services.