A Customer-supplier Paradigm for Service Science

Recent articles have proposed that the future of services research may be at risk due to the foundation upon which the services discipline has been built. Indeed, the most fundamental issue of the service discipline or science is still subject to debate, namely the paradigm that answers the question “What is a service?” Common paradigms of services have been criticized in the literature as being “outdated” and “deeply flawed.” Various researchers have put forth calls for new paradigms that overcome shortcomings of prior paradigms. This article reviews major service paradigms and their criticisms. Paradigms coming from a services marketing perspective are compared with those coming from a service operations perspective. A “customer-supplier” paradigm coming from the operations perspective is presented which is based on the concept of customers being suppliers of process inputs for all service processes, but not for non-service processes. This customer-supplier paradigm has also been called the Unified Services Theory (UST). Empirical data shows that the customer-supplier paradigm is superior to other service paradigms. keywords: service operations, empirical research, interdisciplinary