Betriebswirtschaftslehre, insb. Unternehmensführung

Sustainability in Service Management and Service Research

Status: ongoing

Description

The sustainability transformation is one of the most important and pressing topics of the 21st century for politics, society, science, and the economy. Climate change, in particular, poses some of the greatest sustainability challenges for both companies as well as economies and societies at large. For example, without immediate collective global efforts, climate change can deprive the resources companies need to do their business (IPCC, 2022). Already now, companies and governments are facing high costs due to flood disasters, heat waves, and climate adaptation (BMUV, 2022). In addition, customers increasingly demand sustainable products and services from companies (Rosenbaum et al., 2022). Moreover, investors more and more often favor sustainable business models and so called green stocks over traditional ones because they deem them more crisis-resilient and predict a better financial performance in the long run (Gupta & Gupta, 2020; Jung et al., 2018). Because of these pressing reasons, companies are increasingly questioning their business logic and want to become more sustainable (Enquist et al., 2015).
The economies of developed countries have a high share of service industries. For example, in 2022 the American and German service industries had a share well above 60 % of the total GDP (Germany: 63 %; US: 72 %) (World Bank, 2022). Nearly 75 % of all jobs in Germany are provided by the service industry (BMWK, 2013). Therefore, taking account of and integrating sustainability into services and service management provides huge potential for a future sustainable and resilient economy.
While sustainability research is exceedingly growing in terms of material goods, in service research, it is still an under-investigated topic. Early work mostly focuses on sustainable service innovations and business models or sustainable service ecosystems (e. g. Chen, 2017; Field et al., 2021; Trischler et al., 2020; van Riel et al., 2021). Transformative service research (TSR) partly embeds sustainability concepts, yet, predominantly addresses individual well-being outcomes (Anderson et al., 2013; Dodds et al., 2022). Hence, work on how service research and its related concepts could and should be developed in light of the pressing issues in relation to climate change by integrating knowledge from sustainability research remains scare. As a consequence, influential researchers repeatedly call for an investigation of sustainability in service research (Anderson et al., 2013; Baron et al., 2014; Bolton, 2020; Rosenbaum et al., 2022).
The overarching goal of this research project is to pave the way for the investigation of sustainability in service research. The service research community is agreed upon the importance of integrating sustainability in services, yet lacks a clear conceptual domain and research agenda for further research. Furthermore, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in sustainable service management is an under-investigated area. The overall aim of this project is to organize the extant service and sustainability literature, clear up important definitions and concepts, integrate knowledge from the sustainability and AI field with service research, and empirically investigate the role of AI in sustainable service management.

Involved Persons

References