An Inductive Approach to Reconceptualizing and Theorizing about Digital Services

摘要

We posit that academic understandings of services and service quality have reached a point in their life-cycles when the use of "umbrella constructs" is no longer productive for researchers. We pose a theoretical argument for resolving the confusion of terminology and definitions of digital services, by inductively developing a taxonomy of digital service types, using techniques such as metaphor analysis that are relevant to multiple disciplines.