Workshop Preparations
The workshop will feature a series of
intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary discussions for which the
group to which you will be assigned need to produce a poster
presentation and a short position paper by the end of the meeting. If
you plan to bring your laptop to the meeting it might greatly help your
group work more efficiently. We will see that each group counts with at
least one laptop and will provide a printer to make copies of any
materials needed but more than one laptop per group might be very
helpful. The hotel has wireless internet connection if needed.
In addition and in preparation for the workshop discussions --having
your own discipline as a foundation-- you may want to begin thinking of
the following questions which have the objective of spur healthy
inter-disciplinary questioning. We recognize that depending of the
research problems of your own discipline some or many of the questions
below might not be relevant or even something you have had exposure to
or are interested in. This is completely fine and more than expected. If
we need to consider other questions please feel free to bring them to
the table. Having disagreement in the key questions to study is exactly
one of the reasons why we are having the workshop in the first place. In
my work with researchers from other disciplines I have learned that the
enrichment of a research problem or the methodology used to approach it
that arises from multi-disciplinary collaboration is extraordinary and
much more than a fad or fashion.
Initial questions or thoughts for you to think about are:
- What do we mean by culture? How we measure culture? How we analyze
culture?
- What exactly do we mean by an inter-cultural encounter? What are the
key characteristics of an encounter for it to be deemed inter-cultural
(behavioral, communications/rhetoric, perceptions, others?)
- Does culture matter in the design of service systems?
- What is the impact on the customer’s perceptions of quality when
receiving a service from an individual operating from a different
country or different local cultures? Is this reaction(impact) different
for different cultures --according to differences in the construct
“culture”?
- How to incorporate the different behavioral interpretations of culture
into designs and models? Is this at all possible? Practical? Needed?
- What are the considerations, if any, that we need to be aware or
include in our models/designs for service systems when intercultural
encounters are expected to occur? Why? What are the methodological
challenges that we face to model culture into mathematical models and
simulations?
- What are the management challenges that need to be investigated after
these engineering decisions (staffing, location, technology and service
script) have taken place?
- A service is delivered by the interaction between service provider and
service recipient that is shaped by co-production (i.e. the service
recipient alters the service flow). How much of this freedom to
co-produce the service can lead to higher perceived service quality and
customer satisfaction in different cultures?
Finally, just as a preview let's recall that the first day features
intra-disciplinary works and the second day features inter-disciplinary
works and presentations with the following initial agenda:
First day of the meeting (WEDNESDAY). Brainstorming at
Intra-disciplinary workgroups.
1. How is the construct “culture” defined within your discipline? What
are the core research problems surrounding inter-cultural research (or
modeling issues) in your fields and what
are the methodologies and
methods most commonly used to tackle those?
2. What are the unsolved research questions, issues or modeling
challenges in respect to service systems or service encounters?
3. What do you consider to be the next frontier in these fields? How
these effect or could effect the advancement of service science?
Second day of the meeting (THURSDAY)
.Five multi-disciplinary teams will
be formed to work each on one of the challenges identified by the
intra-disciplinary teams the day before and to elaborate in what would
be the more permanent and relevant research questions. Groups will be
formed in advance by the organizing committee with at least one member
of each discipline. A list of relevant inter-disciplinary research
questions will be produced as well as suggestions of inter-disciplinary
methods to tackle those questions in the spirit of service system
design. More information on the works and presentations of the second
day will be provided at a later time.