Professional service supply chains⋆

• Date: 01 March 2016
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.03.002

Professional service supply chains

*

Jean Harvey

School of Management, Universit

eduQu



ebec 

a Montr

eal, Case postale 8888, succursale Centre-Ville, Montr

eal, Qu

ebec H3C 3P8, Canada

article info

Article history:

Available online 4 April 2016

Accepted by Mikko Ketokivi

Keywords:

Professional services

Supply chain

Complexity science

Adaptive systems

Interprofessional interface

Service experience

Service episode

Catastrophic failure

abstract

Professional service (PS) exchanges are seldom narrowly bounded in time and space. This conceptual

paper discusses prolonged PS sequences involving different professionals and different types of pro-

fessionals. It is framed by the dual concepts of service episodes, representing the client's perspective and

experience, and PS supply chains, that is, organized sequences of professional, clerical, and technical

services explicitly set up to provide specific results, such as producing a financial product, designing a

house, or replacing a hip. Four illustrative, empirically inspired situations are used to characterize epi-

sodes and supply chains. Each exemplar, two each from the health and social work sectors, is real and

draws on publicly available data. The richness of the public information is a reflection of the fact that

each is some form of failure or “disaster”(Altay and Ramirez, 2010). This dual conceptualization le ads to a

holistic perspective obtained by using the complexadaptive systems framework (Dooley and Van deven,

1999, Levin, 1998) as a lens. The paper concludes with a discussion of the dynamics of such service

systems and some proposals for a research agenda.

©2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

This conceptual paper is motivated by two observations

regarding our current understanding of PS operations. First, the

paper emphasizes that PS exchange is rarely narrowly bounded in

time and space. Rather, participants engage in protracted PS epi-

sodes (henceforth “episodes”), made up of multiple interactive

exchanges. Second, and building on this idea of stretched bound-

aries, although the majority of PS research has adopted an orga-

nizational or individual unit of analysis (Kaiser and Ringlstetter,

2011; Løwendahl, 2005), the idea of interacting professionals ea

PS supply chain as it were eis frequently a more accurate

description of PS practice and, critically for this special issue, offers

a promising angle from which to (re)conceptualize the domain.

Consider how a patient with back pain may interact with a general

practitioner, a physiotherapist, an orthopedist, a pharmacist, an

acupuncturist, and a chiropractor over the course of many months

or years. These professionals will also interact, to a greater or lesser

extent, with each other. A pharmaceutical companybuilding anew

plant will need the services of architects, various types of engineers,

chemists, and pharmacists. Insurance underwriters, accountants,

tax specialists, and lawyers are likely to be involved as well, inter-

acting with various people inside the company and with each other

over a period of years, face to face or otherwise.

The challenges of normative control in a PS setting are well

documented. Indeed, it is understood that management efforts

aimed at enforcement and compliance can be counterproductive

(Goodale et al., 2008; Von Nordenflycht, 2010). If we now extend

traditional supply chain notions of agency and exchange gover-

nance to the examination of a network of interacting professionals

(plus overlapping employers, professional bodies, etc.) they are

likely to be inadequate in the face of emergent complexity. As a

result, after exploring the two framing issues in more detail, the

paper turns to the complex adaptive system paradigm (Levin, 1998;

Dooley and Van de ven, 1999) to better understand these Profes-

sional Service Supply Chains (PSSC).

We first review the relevant literature and then explore four

illustrative situations in two different PS settings. Each exemplar is

real and draws on publicly available data. The richness of the public

information is a reflection of the fact that each is some form of

failure or “disaster”an area of increasing interest to operations

management (OM) researchers; e.g., Altay and Ramirez (2010).

Disasters, and particularly manmade disasters, have long been of

significant scholarly interest, in large part because they can lead to

“alternative interpretations of events”(Gephart et al., 1990, p. 30).

Weick (1993), for example, used his analysis of the 1949 Mann

Gulch fire to “re-examine our thinking about temporary systems,

*

The author gratefully acknowledges funding support received from the RBC

Chair in Financial Services Management.

E-mail address: jean.harvey@uqam.ca.

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.03.002

0272-6963/©2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Journal of Operations Management 42-43 (2016) 52e61