CASE STUDY RESEARCH PATHS IN SERVICE RESEARCH

With regard to the research objective, almost 30% of the case studies focus on gaining insight into innovation. These studies are published in service, marketing, management, operations and other journals. All aforementioned journals – except for the management journals – also include case studies designed to explore value co-creation, which represents more than 20% of the article set. Next, more than 15% of the case studies aim to contribute to a better understanding of servitization, but here most publications stem from service and operations journals. The remaining case studies center on actor engagement, well-being, process design, outsourcing, service triads, offshoring, experience design, service failure, organizational identity, and strategic fit. Table 2a details the research objectives for each of these themes, thereby showing that most case studies center on exploring how and why these phenomena manifest themselves and/or its underlying mechanisms. Although a number of studies do not justify the choice for a case study to achieve the research objective (9 studies), most studies provide an extensive rationale – often referring to the work of Yin and/or Eisenhardt and colleagues or discipline-specific case study specialists in service research (e.g., Gummesson, 2007; Gummesson and Mele, 2010) and operations research (e.g., Voss et al., 2002; 2016).

As shown in Table 2b, the main reasons for a case study approach revolve around the exploratory nature of the research due to a lack of theoretical frameworks and/or empirical evidence (38 studies), the need for in-depth and richer descriptions of the phenomena (44 studies) and/or the appropriateness for building new theories and/or expanding or refining existing theories (31 studies) A study about the co-formation of organizational and industry identities, for instance, opts for a case study with a grounded theory approach to illuminate sensemaking and sensegiving processes (Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018). A case study about scaling up innovative service ecosystems, in turn, aims to refine the Service-Dominant Logic (Di Pietro et al., 2018), which often serves as a starting point for case studies in service research (see other theoretical frameworks in Table 2b). If theoretical insights contribute to a better understanding of process dynamics, researchers often rely on the work of Ann Langley (12 studies). One of the case studies, for instance, aims to explore the relationships between resourcing across organizational practices and strategic change (Wiedner et al., 2017). Another example involves a case study that strives for a better understanding of the way in which service production system change as a consequence of offshoring (Brandl et al., 2017). An overview of the justification of case studies in service research is depicted in Figure 2.

---------------------------------------------------------

Insert Table 2a and 2b and Figure 2 about here

---------------------------------------------------------