Purpose: The customer contact approach to service has been at the core of service theory since the 1970s. It suggests that the potential operating efficiency of a service is inversely related to the extent of customer contact with the provider's operations and that various service design issues...

Looks at operations management with a particular focus on the west coast of the USA. Considers two aspects: the first being curriculum development and the second relating to teaching and research. Gives a detailed view of the type of courses offered in the field. Also gives details of research...

The literature on organization design has been dominated by descriptive models in its dealing with structure and operations. This paper takes an alternative view advocating the use of a normative model to be used in the design of service organizations. This model sees the extent of customer...

This research provides an empirically derived measurement model for customer contact, a widely used construct in service management. The model was created by applying two psychometric scaling techniques, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) and the method of paired comparisons, and Content Analysis,...

No abstract available.

Delivering high quality service during the service encounter is central to competitive advantage in service organizations. However, achieving such high quality while controlling for costs is a major challenge for service managers. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for...