Commentary: The moral limits of service markets – just because we can, should we?

Purpose This commentary extends our 2020 11th SERVSIG Panel The moral limits of service markets: Just because we can, should we?, inspired by Michael J. Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. In Sandel’s (2012) book, the pursuit of “the good life” is a common motivation for pushing the moral boundaries of markets and “the good life” is dominated by service consumption. Design/methodology/approach Like Sandel (2012), this commentary begins with a provocation regarding the need for moral development in services marketing. Next, we present three real-life case studies about a modern slavery survivor service, aged care services and health-care services as examples of moral limits, failings and tensions. Findings The commentary proposes four guidelines and a research agenda. As service marketers, we must reignite conversations about ethics and morality. Taking charge of our professional moral development, exercising moral reflexivity, promoting an ethics of care and taking a bird’s-eye perspective of moral ecologies are our recommended guidelines. Morality is an essential condition – a sine qua non – for service marketers. Hence, our proposed research agenda focuses first on the service marketer and embeds a moral gaze as a universal professional protocol to engender collective moral elevation. Originality/value This commentary highlights the need for a moral refresh in services marketing and proposes ways to achieve this end.

The Short-Term Impacts of the Registration-Based IPO Reform in China: Towards a More Sustainable Equity Market

The sustainable development of a modern equity market heavily relies on an effective IPO system that can properly reflect the underlying risk, demand, and supply in the IPO market. Recently, China has implemented an unprecedented IPO reform that transforms the previous approval-based IPO system to a registration-based one. Despite its importance, the impacts of the reform still remain unexplored. Using firm-level data from the Chinese A-shares market, we show that the recent IPO reform significantly increases IPO cost and reduces the degree of IPO underpricing. We also investigated the impacts of the reform on the market structures in different IPO service markets. Overall, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the registration-based IPO reform makes the IPO system in China more market-oriented. To our best knowledge, this is the first empirical study that sheds light on the short-term impacts of the adoption of a registration-based IPO system.

PDCA 4.0: A New Conceptual Approach for Continuous Improvement in the Industry 4.0 Paradigm

Continuous improvement (CI) is a key component of lean manufacturing (LM), which is fundamental for organizations to remain competitive in an ever more challenging market. At present, the new industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 (I4.0), is taking place in the manufacturing and service markets, allowing more intelligent and automated processes to become a reality through innovative technologies. Not much research was found regarding a holistic application of I4.0′s technological concepts towards CI, which clarifies the potential for improving its effectiveness. This clearly indicates that research is needed regarding this subject. The present publication intends to close this research gap by studying the main I4.0 technological concepts and their possible application towards a typical CI process, establishing the requirements for such an approach. Based on that study, a conceptual approach is proposed (PDCA 4.0), depicting how I4.0 technological concepts should be used for CI enhancement, while aiming to satisfy the identified requirements. By outlining the PDCA 4.0 approach, this paper contributes to increasing the knowledge available regarding the CI realm on how to support the CI shift towards a I4.0 industrial paradigm.

Trends in the developing Ukrainian non-bank financial service markets assessed using a mixture separation method

Non-bank financial institutions play an important role in the non-bank financial service markets expressed in expanding the access to financial services for individuals and legal entities. The non-bank financial service markets demonstrate their performance peculiarities in the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods that bring up to date the need to form a scientific presentation of their development trends. Therefore, it is necessary to provide scientific background and identify the regress and progress processes in the non-bank financial service markets. The research aim is to develop an analytical approach to determining the peculiarities of the development processes in the non-bank financial service markets. The research assesses the key indicators of the non-bank financial service markets in terms of quantity by dividing a set of values into groups by cluster analysis and multidimensional object clustering by a system of indicators, as well as identifying the progress and regress patterns in the non-bank financial service markets. Achieving the research results requires taking into account the above-mentioned objectives fulfilled in seven stages. The research results reflect the influence on the financial service markets exerted by the governmental regulation policy and the consumer protection level in these markets.