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Organizational Frontlines

Introduction

10th Anniversary, Special issue of the Journal of Service Research; Deadline now 31 May 2025

INTEREST CATEGORY: SERVICE
POSTING TYPE: Revisits

Posted by: Ming-Hui Huang

Journal of Service Research announces a

10th Anniversary Organizational Frontlines Special Issue

Submission Window EXTENDED:泭 March 31, 2025 May 31, 2025

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Organizational Frontlines (OF) initiative, the Journal of Service Research is pleased to announce a Special Issue dedicated to advancing the study of organizational frontlines. We invite conceptual, empirical, and review articles on any topic related to phenomena at the frontlines of organizations. As a multidisciplinary journal, JSR encourages interdisciplinary perspectives and welcomes submissions from authors across diverse disciplines for this 10th OF Special Issue

Organizational Frontlines (OFs) broadly encompasses the study of interactions and interfaces at the points of contact between organizations and their customers, where value is created and exchanged (Singh, Brady, Arnold, and Brown, 2017; Singh and Bridge, 2023). The concept of frontlines first gained attention in the business literature in the early 1970s, initially describing employees operating at organizational boundaries, interacting with customers on behalf of the organization. Over the next four decades, as interest and research in the area expanded, “frontlines” became entrenched as an adjective to classify employees based on their role in customer interactions.

In April 2015, a diverse group of about 60 scholars and practitioners from various disciplines, including HR/management, marketing, and service, convened at a retreat at Oklahoma State University to reconceptualize frontlines more broadly as a noun, moving beyond its adjective constraints. This shift from an adjective to a noun in organizational frontline (OF) research aimed to bring clarity and coherence to ongoing research traditions across disparate fields exploring organizational boundaries, boundary-spanning roles, interface technologies, exchange platforms, customer contact touchpoints, interactions, and service.

A key aim of the 10th OF Special Issue of Journal of Service Research is not only to reflect on and draw new insights from the progress made thus far but also to look ahead. We seek papers that adopt a forward-looking perspective, break new ground, and provoke interest as they boldly advance the field of OF. While the following topics are of particular interest, they should be viewed as illustrative rather than exhaustive, reflecting the field’s openness to diverse perspectives and phenomena centered on the frontline. We welcome inquiries from authors seeking input or clarification from any member of the editorial team.

Designing Frontlines

  • How can interfaces be conceptualized as dynamic and spatial (physical/digital/virtual) constructs that vary in capacity and efficiency for customer-firm interactions? What explains these variations, and how can they be effectively designed? How can interface design account for flexible and dynamic adaptation by customers and organizations?

Dynamic Frontlines:

  • What organizing frameworks and frontline capabilities are most effective for coordinating customer handovers between touchpoints to optimize subjective time and assure seamless engagement in a customers journey? What technologies can detect customers states to infer subjective time, and how effective are these technologies across different customer segments and situations?

Managing Frontlines:

  • How can the portfolio of interfaces available to customers at a given time be managed to balance effectiveness, cost, and speed? How can their effectiveness in reducing interaction friction be tracked, and when and how should innovations be introduced to enhance their effectiveness?

Regulating Frontlines

  • How can trade-offs between personalization-targeting and privacy-monetization be theorized, modeled, and tested to ensure that frontlines comply with consumer privacy preferences and ethical data practices?

Innovating Frontlines:

  • How can relational dynamics in customer-firm interactions across multiple touchpoints be theorized, modeled, and tested to explain the fluctuations in relational communication acts? These dynamics involve multiple entities pursuing goals and are characterized by features such as dynamics, interdependence, and feedback effects?

Orchestrating Frontlines:

  • How do consumers interact with brands across multiple touchpoints and platforms? How can customer interactions be designed and orchestrated to flow seamlessly across an optimal combination of human or machine, and physical or virtual interfaces, ensuring they are coordinated for efficient problem-solving and value creation?

Researching Frontlines:

  • Are there new approaches to the study of frontline phenomena? What are the novel theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches for studying organizational frontlines? How can we improve the dimensions of validity in frontlines research?

Submissions to the 10th OF JSR SPECIAL ISUUE are

  • invited for submission on the JSR webpage between 03/31/2025 and 05/31/2025.
  • open to all scholars in any discipline with OF interest
  • open to conceptual, empirical or review contributions
  • open to any and multiple levels of analysis (e.g., individual, group, organizational, cultural)
  • scheduled to be processed on a first accepted first published basis.

泭Questions regarding submissions to the Special Issue may be sent to any one of the co-editors:

Todd Arnold todd.arnold@okstate.edu; Mike Brady mbrady@fsu.edu; Tom Brown tom.brown@okstate.edu; Jagdip Singh jxs16@case.edu 泭

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