Addressing service grand challenges through inductive research

What is it about?

The article argues that to tackle big, messy problems in services (like sustainability or complex care systems), researchers need inductive, qualitative methods that start from real-world observations rather than pre-set hypotheses. It shows how past qualitative studies helped create core ideas in service research—like service encounters, the role of physical spaces, service recovery, and the benefits of long-term relationships. Services are hard to study with numbers alone because they are intangible, co-created by people, and shaped by culture and context. That’s why qualitative approaches fit well. The paper explains what qualitative data look like and how to gather them—through interviews, observations, ethnography/netnography, videos, fieldnotes, and archives. It reviews common ways to analyze qualitative data, including thematic and grounded theory approaches, content, narrative, and discourse analysis, phenomenology, case studies, and ethnography/netnography. Practical tips cover how to design a study, choose sites and participants, and know when you’ve learned enough (saturation). It encourages flexible designs and careful, transparent interpretation that draws on researchers’ lived understanding of contexts. Qualitative research strengthens more traditional, hypothesis-driven work by clarifying how and why things happen, helping design better experiments and measures, and generating new theories—especially by looking at extreme cases and overlooked groups. Done well, inductive studies can reveal cause-and-effect processes in context, complementing statistical approaches that look for patterns across many cases. For early-career scholars: be explicit about your scientific stance, seek mentors and training (including outside your field), and match your questions to your methods. Future directions include researching sustainability, nonprofit and informal care systems, more-than-human perspectives (e.g., nature, animals, devices), and the full range of service experiences from high-tech to low-tech. Bottom line: inductive, qualitative methods are vital for grounding service research in real life and building actionable theories to address major service challenges.

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Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Every generation of young scholars can take inspiration from the work of pioneering scholars employing inductive methods to address significant social and economic issues and likewise from the use of these methods in diverse cultural and social contexts.

Perspectives