A Brave New Service World? An Analysis of the Services Sector through the Lenses of Service Science

The services sector is subject to a continuous transformation process and to technological changes and innovations; in the last few years the emergent Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) discipline did several attempts in developing theories and explaining the service industry’s phenomena. The present paper, which is theoretically grounded in the Work Systems Theory, aims at describing the ongoing situation of Service Science applications in specific services industries. We hereby present a study, conducted on 24 academic papers that deal with different applications belonging to the Service Science domain, that provides a classification of each application according to: which part of the Service Science domain it involves, which specific industrial sector it belongs to and finally on which operational level, of a company’s organizational structure, it can be positioned. Although this study cannot describe the whole services sector and all its trends and characteristics, it provides an emblematic description of what the Service Science Management and Engineering discipline means in different industrial fields and which are the main trends and issues related to some specific industrial sectors.