Workshop: Models of Intercultural Service Systems: Scholarly Discussion for Building a Research Agenda
San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 19 to 22, 2009 Chairperson: Alexandra Medina-Borja, Ph.D. Omell Pagán, Ph.D., Viviana CesanÃ, Ph.D. International Service Systems Engineering Research Lab, Industrial Engineering Department, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
This grant will provide funding for a research workshop involving a wide range of interdisciplinary researchers discussing and identifying key aspects of inter-cultural service encounters in the design and implementation of service delivery systems. The standardization of services is difficult, if not impossible, because of the customer participation in the service ?co-production?. Some attempts have been made to incorporate human considerations into service models, but truly interdisciplinary system design has not yet occurred. Service system design, and the accompanying technology, is usually the work of engineers and computer scientists while services and culture have been studied by marketing researchers, behavioral scientists, anthropologists, ethnographers and human resources researchers. Thus, a truly inter-disciplinary research workshop is needed to foster this new field of inquiry and advance a research agenda. The main goal of the workshop is to hasten the development of modeling frameworks that include inter-cultural considerations by fostering interdisciplinary research among a variety of fields, academic disciplines and technical clusters spanning the areas of, but not limited to, industrial engineering, complex systems, cognitive and behavioral science, anthropology/ethnography, information systems, and management and human resources.
If successful, this workshop will (1) identify and extend an inter-cultural service systems (ICSS) research community; (2) define ICSS issues and propose interdisciplinary methodologies and, (3) articulate a common agenda for the emerging research frontier of inter-cultural Service Science and Engineering. The development of this research direction is of increasing importance given the distributed locations of service providers and their customers; sometimes coming from radically different cultures. For the diverse participants in the service encounter, perceptions of politeness, time, sympathy and expertise might be quiet different. Call centers in international locations, hotel chains, and domestic health care centers serving diverse populations are only few of the many service systems whose design would benefit from this research direction.
