International Services System Engineering Research Lab   

Workshop:

 Models of Intercultural Service Systems: Scholarly  

Chairperson: Alexandra Medina-Borja, Ph.D. ,
Organizing Committee:
Omell Pagán, Ph.D.,
Viviana Cesaní, Ph.D
             Industrial Engineering Department                     

University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

May 19 - 22  San Juan, Puerto Rico
Hotel El Convento, Old San Juan

Delivering services in New Delhi or Mexico City through call centers, hotel networks or other mechanisms is intuitively quite different than performing the same tasks in New York City or San Francisco. Evidence gathered through a handful of research studies has begun to support this intuition (e.g. Stauss and Mang, 1999; Bittner, 1990, 1992; Winsted, 1997). Further, whenever the service provider and service recipient are of different cultures (as happens in an increasingly globalized world but also due to increased local diversity within the same locality), cultural clashes might occur.

The service science research community recognizes that services rely on the essential interaction of service provider and service recipient (the service encounter), and the outcome of such interaction is very much influenced by the cultural and social background of these two or more players (people). As humans, their personal characteristics and service expectations play a huge role in the service encounter undertaking (Chatman et al, 1997; Richards et al, 2007). Yet, this is an issue not much discussed in the engineering and information systems literature and which should greatly influence design and modeling of such service delivery systems. To certain extent, behavioral, management and marketing scientists have advanced this field of inquire in the last twenty years but engineers have been slow at introducing behavioral considerations in their designs and models (e.g. see Bateson, 1985 and Cushner and Brisling, 1996 and particularly Zhang et al, 2008). It is undeniable that to truly advance the inter-cultural thrust in service science an interdisciplinary approach is needed. A recent chronicle of big ideas in research related to service operations prepared by Chase and Apte (2007) presents a timeline of big advances and milestones accomplished in history in which globalization of service operations is mentioned at least twice within the 21stscentury, alongside the use of behavioral science considerations in service operations, but surprisingly no specific mention to cultural considerations is made.

Objectives of the Project

This NSF-sponsored research workshop will bring a wide range of interdisciplinary researchers to a common forum to promote discussion and understanding of the implications of inter-cultural service encounters in the design and implementation of service delivery systems. The main goal is to speed up the development of modeling frameworks that will include those inter-cultural considerations by fostering interdisciplinary research among the following academic disciplines and technical clusters: marketing, cognitive and behavioral science, anthropology/ethnography, operations research/ management science, industrial & systems engineering, machine learning, information systems, complex systems modeling, decision sciences, and management and human resources.

We will use this workshop to (1) identify and extend an inter-cultural service systems (ICSS) research community, (2) define ICSS issues and propose interdisciplinary methodologies and, (3) articulate a common agenda for the emerging research frontier of inter-cultural Service Science and Engineering. This development is aligned with NAE’s call for an engineer of 2020 that is capable of understanding the societal characteristics of his/her surroundings and operating in diverse environments.
 

Service science researchers have already acknowledged that it is difficult, if not impossible, to standardize services simply because of the customer participation in the service interaction (e.g. Metters and Maruchek, 2007). Some believe that services can never be as productive as manufacturing operations for variability can never be eliminated. Hence, several scholars have discussed how much variability can be controlled or should be allowed in the service system by design. The implications of these discussions are increasingly important under the light of distributed locations with service encounters having actors sometimes under radically different cultures acting in the roles of the service provider and service recipient. For these diverse actors perceptions of politeness, time, sympathy and expertise might be quiet different. For example, standardizing protocols might result in a shorter interaction in the case of technology-enabled distant call centers that could be interpreted as rude by some customers. Standardization can then have different consequences (Holfstede, 1993).

Intellectual Merit

 It is apparent that truly interdisciplinary system design has not yet happened as usually service systems design and the technology that accompanies them are the works of engineers and computer scientists. Recognizing that services have been the object of study for marketing researchers (e.g. Parasuranam et al, 1983, 1985), while culture has been largely studied by behavioral scientists, anthropologist, ethnographers and human resources researchers, A truly inter-disciplinary research meeting will be the only way to foster this new field of inquiry and advance a research agenda. All and all, most of the seminal research in cultural theory is at least fifteen years old (see Holfstede, 1980, 1984, 1991) and globalization and technology advances might have made some of these theoretical frameworks somewhat invalid. This meeting will allow us to update the issues and push a more contemporary research agenda.