Founded in 2018 by Ray Fisk, ServCollab is a product of the realisation that humans have always lived in service systems and that our previous conceptualizations of service had missed a larger truth: in addition to the corporations and their customers that were the primary focus in the past, service researchers realised that ancient human systems such as families, tribes, villages, cities, and nations were all service systems.
This realisation meant that academic disciplines in the social sciences and in business are only studying part of the human experience. Such fragmentary understanding of human needs undermines our ability to find solutions to the many urgent problems in today’s human service systems. A more unified understanding of human service systems is needed.
Therefore, ServCollab realised that we need new research approaches that transcend the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines, which is why ServCollab is named from the phrase “Serving Humanity through Collaboration.”
ServCollab seeks to serve humanity by elevating the human experience. This requires recruiting and organizing the people, projects, and perspectives necessary to engage in creating large scale service solutions for today’s many human service system problems.
Emerald strongly believes in ServCollab’s mission and we feel like they’re doing exceptionally important work by getting researchers involved in humanitarian efforts. These efforts are something that we want to be shining a light on. That’s why Emerald and ServCollab are working collaboratively to disseminate ServCollab’s research to a wider audience by making their research freely available for everyone to read, for limited time periods. As a founding signatory of the UN SDG Publisher Compact, Emerald believes wholeheartedly in creating a sustainable future and utilising research to create real world impact.
We are starting this collaboration off by making the following introduction to ServCollab article by Fisk et al. free access from the 15th September 2022-15th December 2022:
Elevating the human experience (HX) through service research collaborations: introducing ServCollab
Fisk, Raymond P., Linda Alkire, Laurel Anderson, David E. Bowen, Thorsten Gruber, Amy L. Ostrom, and Lia Patrício (2020), "Elevating the Human Experience (HX) through Service Research Collaborations: Introducing Servcollab," Journal of Service Management, 31 (4), 615-635. DOI: 10.1108/josm-10-2019-0325