Service industries at a crossroads: some fragile assumptions and future challenges

Service research has been slowly evolving for more than 40 years. At the start of the twenty-first century some of the assumptions about the behaviour of services have become more fragile in the context of increased global economic dependencies and whether it is now realistic to treat them as a discrete set of activities. The embedding of services into seamless production chains characteristic of a 'manuservice' economy points to new challenges for a research agenda that is less focused on services per se. The components of a possible research agenda are many and varied, reflecting different disciplinary priorities or the rise of the new field of service science. Those outlined in this paper are offered from the perspective of an economic geographer.