Transformative Service Research

Transformative Service Research, TSR, aims to improve well-being for individuals and communities. Is TSR different in that respect from traditional service research?
- You could say that traditionally service research has mainly been management-oriented and mostly contributed to developing models and theories aimed at improving management, primarily in businesses. TSR is first of all geared towards improving the well-being of other stakeholders, such as employees and customers, and other types of institutions such as public organizations, volunteer organizations and social movements, says Per Skålén, Professor of Business Administration at CTF.
CTF has actually a long history of studying TSR-related issues since transformation and change processes always have been central issues. Apart from management, other perspectives have also been important, for example research in working life science where dignity and aesthetic skills have been used as perspectives to problematize the employee’s working situation. The researchers within the network Academy for Citizen Centered Government Services have during the last ten years focused on government agencies out of the service perspective. Much of the public transport research conducted in Samot, The Service and Market Oriented Transport Research Group, has also focused on public organizations. Other examples of research are on customers who behave badly towards staff in service encounters, including violence and verbal harassment, and corporate responsibility. The difference now is that CTF has a collected and conscious focus which will contribute to giving TSR both force and weight.
The new focus on TSR has already paid off. Professor Per Skålén, together with Ph. D student Kotaiba Abdul-Aal and Professor Bo Edvardsson, have an article accepted in the first special issue of TSR, which will be published by the Journal of Service Research in the spring of 2015. The title of the article is “Co-creating the Arab Spring: Transformation of service systems in contention” and describes how activists during the Arab spring established service systems to co-create value on a democratic basis. The article studies thus a social movement and its attempts to improve conditions for people that has lived under oppression for generations through co-creation of value that is not out of economic-, but cultural and social value. In this way the article is a typical expression of TSR research even if it might not be a typical expression of traditional service research.
The TSR initiative takes place within the framework of the Excellence funding that CTF was granted by Karlstad University. The main idea of the application is to “put an edge” to CTFs existing research themes, service management, service innovation and service experiences by adding TSR.