This handbook provides an innovative, thorough overview of service management. It draws together an impressive, international group of leading scholars who offer a truly global perspective, exploring current literature and laying out guidance for future research. Beginning with defining service as a perspective on value creation, and service management as ¿a set of organizational competencies for enabling and realizing value creation through service,¿ it then moves on to follow the evolution of service research. From there, the book is structured into six main themes: perspectives on service management; service strategy; service leadership and transition; service design and innovation; service interaction; quality and operations; and service management and technology.
This book is valuable reading for academics, lecturers, and students studying service management, operations management, and service research.

¿Bo Edvardsson, is Professor of Business Administration and founder of the Service Research Centre, Karlstad University Sweden.

Bård Tronvoll is Professor of Business administration at the Service Research Centre, Karlstad University Sweden, and at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. 

Part 1: Perspectives on Service Management.- Chapter 1: Overview of the Book.- Chapter 2: Framing and Defining Service Management.- Chapter 3: Service Management: Evolution, Current Challenges, and Opportunities.- Chapter 4: Service Management - Scope, Challenges, and Future Developments.- Chapter 5: Is Service Management experiencing a Change of Era?.- Chapter 6: Service-Dominant Logic and Service Management 4.0.- Chapter 7: Adapting Service Management for the Sharing Economy.-  Part 2: Service Strategy.- Chapter:8: Service Management Strategic Mindsets That Create Positive Customer and Employee Experiences.- Chapter 9: Service Strategizing - Shaping Service in Dynamic Contexts.- Chapter 10: Servitization - A State-of-the-Art Overview and Future Directions.- Chapter 11:  Servitization and the necessity of becoming ambidextrous-a 12-year longitudinal study.- Chapter 12:  How contemporary scholarship addresses service management practices.- Chapter 13: Contract Innovation: Driving Scale and Scope of Nonownership Value Propositions.-Chapter 14: 2.7 Managing the Exclusivity of Luxury Service Experiences.- Part 3: Service Leadership and Transition.- Chapter 15: The transformative role of resource integration in shaping a new service ecosystem.- Chapter 16: Behavior change-five ways to facilitate co-creation of service for a better world.- Chapter 17:  Self-Leadership and Empowerment: Lessons from Service Firms.- Chapter 18: Organizational communication in service management.- Chapter 19: Culture-powered Service Excellence and Leadership-Chinese characteristics.- Chapter 20: Towards socially responsible business: A typology of value postures in nested service ecosystems.- Chapter 21:  Customer-Centric Service Ecosystem for Emerging Markets.- Chapter 22: Service Management for Sustainable Business Transformation.- Chapter 23: Transformative Service Research: Where We Are and Moving Forward at the Collective Level.- Part 4: Service Design and Innovation.- Chapter 24:  Service Design for systemic change in legacy organizations: A bottom-up approach to redesign.- Chapter 25: Service Design - Innovation for Complex Systems.- Chapter 26: The multiple identities of service design in organizations and innovation projects.- Chapter 27: Tracing the Systems Turn in Service Design and Innovation: Convergence toward Service System Transformation.- Chapter 28: Service Innovation in Networks: Co-creating a Network Business Model.- Chapter 29: Beyond the line of visibility: towards sustainable service innovation.- Chapter 30: Managing employee empowerment and engagement to foster service innovation.- Chapter 31: Understanding Key Market Challenges Through Service Innovation.- Part 5: Service Interaction, quality and operation.- Chapter 32: Customer-to-customer interactions in service.- Chapter 33: Understanding and managing customer experiences.- Chapter 34: How customers'resources influence their co-creation experience.- Chapter 35: Measuring and Managing Customer Experience (CX): What works and what doesn't.- Chapter 36: Improving service quality through individuals' satisfaction. Evidence from the healthcare sector.- Chapter 37: Service Productivities' Next Top-Models.- Chapter 38: Effective Service Operations Management: Aligning Priorities in Healthcare Operations with Customer Preferences.- Chapter 39: Service Failure and Complaints Management: An Overview.- Chapter 40:  Expanding the scope of service recovery.- Part 6: Service Technology.- Chapter 41: Technology in Service Systems.- Chapter 42: Smart technologies in service provision and experience.- Chapter 43: Rapport-Building Opportunities and Challenges in Technology-Infused Service Encounters.- Chapter 44: Artificial intelligence and decision making: human-machine interactions for successful value co-creation.- Chapter 45:  Managing Artifical Intelligence Systems for Value Co-Creation. The case of Conversational Agents and Natural Language Assistants.- Chapter 46: Servitization and Digitalization as "Siamese Twins" - Concepts and Research Priorities.- Chapter 47: Towards a New Service Reality - Human-Robot Collaboration at the Service Frontline.