Front stage, backstage and off stage: the socialisation of first year physical education and primary education students on an initial teacher education programme at a Scottish university

This is a study of two cultures in a School of Education where, since 1998, PE students and primary students have taken a generic Education course that comprises one third of their study programme. PE students have been perceived to be a problem for the people responsible for running the Education course because their behaviour and attitudes have not matched the expectations of the staff. Drawing on Goffman's metaphor of theatre, and on Becker's analysis of the collectively held perspectives of medical students, this study examines the hidden curriculum of the academic front stage and students' activities back stage and off stage. The study uses an ethnographic approach using multiple methods and direct and prolonged observation of front stage, back stage and off stage settings. Three aspects of the hidden curriculum are identified, tensions between the Education courses and the ITE programmes, assessment and timetabling.The hidden curriculum supports and defines students' beliefs and defines the two student cultures. For PE students the effect was to marginalise the Education courses and promote 'mainstream' PE courses. For primary students this effect was absent. The front stage supports the development of two separate cultures and on the back stage there is an influential PE culture supported by a 'family system' that links the four year groups. Backstage is an arena for the acquisition of social capital and the deliberate construction of sociability through bonding activities and it is here that PE students are socialised into the norms and values of the group. Primary students did not appear to have an identifiable group culture, either on campus or off campus. Despite the different socialisation experiences, both groups of first year students successfully accomplished placement and had relatively similar perspectives on teachers and teaching

Service designers, unite! Identifying shared concerns among multidisciplinary perspectives on service design

Service Design is a multidisciplinary approach that asks for further research to be better integrated. This article contributes to bridging this gap by identifying shared concerns among multidisciplinary perspectives on Service Design. A qualitative study involving six focus groups was conducted on international Service Design research centers. Results show the service system concept as an abstraction that supports integrating multidisciplinary perspectives and their contributions to Service Design, by identifying shared concerns across different levels: (a) at an individual-actor level, the shared concern of an actor-centered approach; (b) at an organizational service delivery system level, the shared focus on processes and interfaces; and (c) at network and ecosystem levels, the shared interest in designing for new constellations of actors and their connected roles. This article integrates different concepts and approaches to Service Design developed in dispersed areas, supporting dialogue, collaboration and theory building to advance Service Design as an interdisciplinary field

Multi-Sided Marketplaces and the Transformation of Retail: A Service Systems Perspective

Retail is undergoing a series of major transformations as platform-based multi-sided marketplaces, like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, JD.com and Rakuten, are challenging incumbent retailers. From the thriving brick and mortar stores and the development of shopping centers, malls and retail chains throughout the 1900's, retail has become increasingly digital as multi-sided marketplaces are uniting the online and offline to create more sophisticated and personalized customer experiences. We assimilate these ongoing changes with a service systems perspective into a conceptual framework of how multi-sided marketplaces are integrating their front and back stage processes to create more personalized, convenient, and speedy shopping experiences

On a Unified Definition of the Service System: What is its Identity?

In this paper, a unified definition of the service system is proposed. The motivation of this research effort is based on our observation that there are diverse definitions or descriptions of the service system in the literature and they have not provided an identity of the service system. Our goal to define the service system is thus to establish its identity. The most salient feature in our definition is the introduction of three subsystems in a service system: infrastructure, substance, and management. The substance flows over the infrastructure under the constraints of management. A service is established at the moment when the substance interacts with the human to cause a change in the human's status or state under a protocol, which further meets the human's request and need. With this new definition, a service system can be distinguished from other systems, such as manufacturing system, agricultural system, and product system. The new definition will be useful to classification of various service systems and various theories for service systems, which is the key to knowledge management for service systems and to optimization of design and management of service systems. © 2014 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Service System Design (SSD) Innovation through Consumer Participation

This study reports on the issue of consumer-led design ideas in service innovations. The research is conducted through a “service science” lens, which treats consumers, providers, and technologies as parts of a service system wherein their interaction results in potentially mutual benefits. However, do consumers want to provide input into the design of services, can their ideas be valuable, and how and when do we approach consumers are some questions, which need empirical investigation. Thus, the objective of this research is to uncover the dimensions of consumer participation in service design. We applied a qualitative research design using focus group discussions. The results show that consumers provide informative use-based ideas to the organization if there exists, a level of trust between the two. The paper makes two contributions; a framework, which is instructive to an organization in order to include consumers in SSD and it extends the service science literature, which states that consumers are service systems with operant resources to be utilized effectively for the creation of value

Entering the back stage of innovation : tensions between the collaborative praxis of idea development and its formal staging in organisations

Idea development is a delightfully and painfully muddled endeavour. Organisations invest great effort in directing and supporting it but are repeatedly disappointed with the results of their efforts. Although current academic and practical understanding of the subject has indicated the goal towards which to strive, it has not provided sufficient understanding of the means with which to reach this goal. Despite the wide-ranging interest that creativity and innovativeness have attracted over the last few decades, the details of the everyday reality of idea development remain largely unrevealed. The aim of this dissertation is to return to this back stage of innovation and shed light on the messy reality of idea development. The dissertation explores the praxis of idea development of technology experts, with particular attention to the collaborative aspects of this praxis. The study adopts the practice perspective and builds on research into the front end of innovation, innovativeness and innovation practice. From these literature streams, the basis for the dissertation is laid by studies that have sought to describe the everyday praxis, and its collaborative nature in particular. In each research stream, these studies have represented the minority approach w i h highlights the unexplored nature of the topic. The dissertation is a case study, conducted in three established companies that operate globally in traditional industries. The empirical materials were collected through qualitative methods, namely in-depth interviews and group observations. The empirical materials include 61 interviews and 29 hours of observation. The dissertation contributes to the current theoretical and practical understanding in two ways: firstly, it provides an in-depth understanding of the praxis of idea development; and secondly, it identifies ways in which this understanding is hindered in organisations. Unlike the existing understanding, the findings of the dissertation highlight the inherently collaborative nature of this praxis and, further, the immediate, situational and delicate nature of this collaboration. Based on this understanding, the dissertation also indicates why it is so difficult to support idea development in organisations. It does this by identifying the back stage of innovation, which refers to the activities that take place in informal arenas, and the front stage of innovation, which includes formal arenas (including the support structures of innovation management). The results of the dissertation show that these two regions are tensioned and largely based on different ideals. The front stage includes ideals of clarity, objectivity and linearity, whereas the back stage is organised around situational, ambiguous and iterative activity. Furthermore, the front stage views informal actors as assertive idea champions, while the back stage also includes subtle means of idea advancement

‘Taking hold’ of mobile phone stories in a Cape Flats reading club

Magister Artium - MAThis ethnographically-orientated intervention explored how members of a Cape Flats reading club “took hold” (Street, 2009) of digital literacy in their engagement with online fictional stories accessed by a mobile phone. The Masifunde reading club takes place inside the premises of a church located in one of the most impoverished and resource-constrained communities on the outskirts of Cape Town. The club is connected to a bigger sets of clubs under the Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign seeking to create nurturing spaces for learning by introducing children to literacy through story-telling. I wanted to diversify and increase the literacy material available by introducing mobile phones to the club. This research paper is theoretically grounded in the New Literacy Studies (NLS) framework which argues that the social turn and digital turn to literacy have transformed literacy. I adopted an ethnographic approach to literacy in order to understand how mobile reading is ‘taken hold’ of within an already established activities of the club which are conceptualized using Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order”. Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order” was used to map the established print-based interaction order and then to examine the practices of reading online fiction and the materiality of the mobile phone as taken hold of within this interaction order. The notion of ‘taking hold’ of was further extended to reveal the ways in which mobile stories were resemiotized in the shared practices of the club members. The introduction of mobile phones is viewed within Prinsloo’s (2005) “placed resources” concept that pays attention to the specificity of the context in how the phone was taken hold of. What is more, through Goffman’s (1956) back stage and front stage concept, I was able to trace using Ker’s (2005) “text-chain” concept, how interactions in the back region WhatsApp group chat moved across space-time to the front stage interactions in the Saturday club event. This revealed the ways in which the uses and valuing of the phone changed across these spaces, with the phone being naturalised in the back stage, but being treated as a difficult object in the front stage sessions by the volunteers, while the children took up the phones in easy ways consistent with the existing interaction order and therefore as placed resources. The study reveals that triumphalist claims about uptake of digital technologies in resource-poor contexts and dismal internet connectivity need to be treated with caution

Metamodel for Service Design and Service Innovation: Integrating Service Activities, Service Systems, and Value Constellations

This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system design and innovation by traversing and integrating three essential layers, service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel\u27s approach to service systems as service-in-operation is an alternative to another currently used approach that views service systems as systems of economic exchange. The metamodel addresses service science topics including basic concepts of service science, design thinking for service systems, decomposition within service systems, and integration of IT service architecture with customer services. This paper\u27s contributions to service science include clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, coproduction and cocreation of value, actor roles, resources, symmetrical treatment of automated and non-automated service systems, and the relationship between service-dominant logic and service systems. Many articles have discussed these topics individually. Few, if any, have tied them together using an integrated metamodel

Information Systems in the Industrial Service Business: Analyzing Unaddressed Requirements in a Multiple Case Study

The manufacturing industry is subject to structural economic change reflected in the constantly rising fraction of industrial services. Being confronted with the strategic challenge to reduce operating costs while at the same time meeting ever-increasing industrial service demands, manufacturing firms struggle to find the appropriate information technology (IT) solution for planning and execution. Despite the existence of a parsimonious set of standardization efforts addressing product-related services, manufacturing firms have not reached a common understanding of the product-service system and the corresponding business processes and IT systems. This paper addresses this need by exploring key requirements for information systems (IS) support of product-service systems based on a multiple case study approach. For a critical reflection we confronted those requirements with scientific and managerial frameworks which are derived from a structured literature review. We contribute to the theoretical body of knowledge by outlining six highly relevant requirements for the under-researched field of back stage service systems. Based on the explored requirements, managerial practitioners are able to draw a preliminary roadmap that prioritizes their investments according to firm specific needs

On semantic annotation of decision models

The growth of service sector in recent years has led to renewed research interests in the design and management of service systems. Decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in supporting this endeavor, through management of organizational resources such as models and data, thus forming the “back stage” of service systems. In this article, we identify the requirements for semantically annotating decision models and propose a model representation scheme, termed Semantically Annotated Structure Modeling Markup Language (SA-SMML) that extends Structure Modeling Markup Language (SMML) by incorporating mechanisms for linking semantic models such as ontologies that represent problem domain knowledge concepts. This model representation format is also amenable to a scalable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for managing models in distributed environments. The proposed model representation technique leverages recent advances in the areas of semantic web, and semantic web services. Along with design considerations, we demonstrate the utility of this representation format with an illustrative usage scenarios with a particular emphasis on model discovery and composition in a distributed environment