A service perspective: Key managerial insights from service-dominant (S-D) logic

Several hundred years ago, when production began to shift to factories, the firm became a bureaucracy that organized and planned production and its sale. Most production occurred in the cottage or household or in relatively small, craftsfocused shops. The ascendance of the bureaucracy during this period occurred when people, things, and information moved slowly. Network connections between people and organizations were relatively few, short, slow, and at times impossible to develop. As we entered the Industrial Revolution, few recognized that the transformation was less about manufacturing and mostly about the ascendance of communication and transportation technologies. These developments enabled a revolution in manufacturing and established network connections between people and organizations that increasingly extended to networks connecting things, people and organizations. By the 1950’s, most developed countries were moving beyond the industrial era and were entering what some called a ‘‘postindustrial’’, ‘‘services’’, ‘‘information,’’ and ‘‘network’’ society. In this era, the revolutions in transportation and communication continued and were joined by a revolution in computation. Soon, the network connections and the transmission of information between people and organizations became many, long, fast, and more easily performed. During the Industrial Revolution economics was developing as a science, largely based on the pursuit of a Newtonianlike equilibrium model of markets and the economy. At the same time the manufacturing or goods-dominant (G-D) logic of management also developed. G-D logic embraced separating the consumer from the firm (producer) in order for the firm to focus on producing large quantities of homogeneous goods with workers performing highly specialized tasks that increased efficiency (lower costs). These produced goods would then be inventoried and transported to customers