Service portraits in service research: a critical review

Purpose Focusing on one main research question: how is the phenomenon “service” portrayed within service research?, the aim is to describe and analyze how the concept of service is defined, how service characteristics express the concept, the relevance of the existing “service portraits”, and to suggest a new way of portraying service. Design/methodology/approach A literature search was carried out in order to find definitions of the service concept and expressions about the service characteristics. Databases were searched and 34 articles were used for further analysis. The same procedure was carried out for service characteristics. The articles that were chosen by the databases were reviewed thoroughly and…