Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 06:40:09 GMT
From: Decision Sciences Institute <dsimail@langate.gsu.edu>
Subject: CFP: Decision Sciences Special Topic Forum on Services

Call for Papers
Decision Sciences Special Topic Forum

The Next Frontier in Services Research

Associate Editor Team
Ann Marucheck, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill
Richard Metters, Emory University

A new frontier for services appears on the horizon. Services now account for more than half of the U.S. economy.   Companies with long histories of designing and producing products are increasingly looking to services to distinguish themselves in a world characterized by intense competition and rapid technological change.  Multi-national companies are delivering diverse services worldwide and often find themselves challenged with the cultural and social issues germane to the region’s specific service economy. Technology advancements are enabling the design of new complex services across the extended enterprise.  Customers have come to expect multiple channels for the purchasing products and services. Businesses are procuring services on an increasing rate through outsourcing arrangements with global service providers.

While academia has made great strides in the past decade to discover, evaluate, and model decisions in the services economy, there is still much work to be done in rigorously developing the "science" of services. Services research, has, and will likely continue, to draw from diverse academic disciplines such as operations management, information systems, marketing, organizational behavior, and technology management.

This Special Topic Forum (STF) focuses on the next frontier of services by publishing forward-thinking, rigorous research that stimulates future research on designing and managing services in today’s rapidly changing environment. STFs consist of a collection of three to five articles that are published in a regular issue along with other peer-reviewed articles.

Building on the refocused editorial mission of Decision Sciences, this STF seeks manuscripts utilizing diverse research approaches such as theoretical, empirical, and analytical research methods. The STF encourages research examining different types of service decision problems ranging from strategic to operational that occur in various forms including inter-organizational, group-based, and technology-enabled. Articles published in this STF must meet Decision Sciences high standards of research rigor and originality, while embracing managerial relevance, not only in the research problem studied, but also in their impact on enhanced decision making.

Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to:

• Designing consumer services for global delivery
• Managing the sourcing of business services
• Delivery of knowledge-based and web-based services
• Use of communication and information technology for co-production
• Metrics and performance evaluation of service systems
• Managing logistics and distribution as a service
• New Service development models and practices
• Inter-organizational service systems decision making
• Innovation models for services
• Location decisions for service units
• Decision making in revenue management
• Professional service decision making

All submissions must adhere to the format and style guidelines of the Decision Sciences Journal.  Manuscripts will be evaluated on the same criteria as regular manuscripts.  The evaluation process will be similar to regular paper submissions, except the Associate Editors assigned to the manuscript will be part of the STF Editorial Team.  Manuscript preparation and submission instructions can be found on journal’s web site at

  https://wpcarey.asu.edu/DSJOnline/Help/Author/author_Guidelines.cfm .

In the cover letter, please indicate that your submission is for the Services Special Topic Forum.

Deadline for Submissions to DSJ Online (https://wpcarey.asu.edu/dsjOnline/index.cfm): March 15, 2006.

Jeanne Elliott (on behalf of the special issue editors)