Service-Dominant Logic as a Foundation for Service Science: Clarifications

Service science is an emerging discipline concerned with the evolution, interaction, and reciprocal cocreation of value among service systems (Maglio and Spohrer [Maglio, P. P., J. Spohrer. 2008. Fundamentals of Service Science. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science36(1) 18–20.]; Spohrer et al. [Spohrer, J., S. Vargo, N. Caswell, P. Maglio. 2008. The Service System is the Basic Abstraction of Service Science. 41st Annual HICSS Conference Proceedings.]). Service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch [Vargo, S., R. F. Lusch. 2004a. Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing68(1) 1–17.] [Vargo, S., R. F. Lusch. 2008. Service-Dominant Logic: Continuing the Evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science36(1) 1–10.]) is an alternative to the traditional, goods-dominant (G-D) paradigm for understanding economic exchange and value creation. This service-centered view is based on the idea that service – the application of competences for the benefit of another – is the basis of all exchange. S-D logic has been identified as an appropriate philosophical foundation for the development of service science (Maglio et al. [Maglio, P. P., S. L. Vargo, N. Caswell, J. Spohrer, 2009. The Service System is the Basic Abstraction of Service Science. Information Systems and e-business Management (in press).]). However, perhaps partly because S-D logic is first necessarily encountered through the G-D logic paradigm to which it runs counter, it is sometimes misinterpreted and thus misrepresented. This paper discusses S-D logic as a foundation for service science by reviewing the foundational premises of S-D logic and clarifying several misinterpretations related to (1) the S-D logic meaning of “service,” (2) the role of service in economic exchange, and (3) the nature of value cocreation. Drawing on these clarifications, implications of an S-D logic foundation for service science are proposed.

[Service Science, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]