Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Univerdity of Chicago. / "Reprinted from Social Service Monographs, no. 12, 1930."

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985. / Also available in print.

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Le secteur des services revêt une importance croissante dans toute économie. La croissance de la productivité et celle de l'emploi sont étroitement liées au succès des industries de services, et les services sont depuis récemment, de puissants moteurs de croissance économique dans nombre d'économies. Mais malgré son importance économique, le secteur des services a reçu relativement peu d’attention jusqu’ici dans les travaux d’analyse et d’enquête. Ce manque d’intérêt est attribuable à une vision négative entretenue longtemps par la réflexionEconomique sur le rôle des services.La place grandissante des services et l’accroissement de la concurrence dans le secteur tertiaire soulèvent de nombreuses questions parmi lesquelles la gestion du processus de production des services, la mesure de la productivité et de la qualité des activités de service etL’évaluation de la valeur ajoutée par le client.Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous essayerons de mettre en valeur la position axiale qu’occupent les services dans l’espace économique grâce notamment à leurs propriétés et caractéristiques intrinsèques ainsi qu’à l’évolution des approches économiques s’y rapportant. L’étude proposée passe aussi par la recherche des caractéristiques communes aux biens et aux services afin d’établir une typologie des systèmes de production puis par l’analyse des modèles de gestion propres aux biens et au service afin de réutiliser les éléments congruents de chacun pour la proposition de modèles de gestion de chacun des types identifiés. Une analyse sectorielle de terrain nous permettra par la suite d’étudier la concordance des approches théoriques avec la réalité du terrain, afin de confirmer ou d’infirmer nos hypothèses de départ, ce qui nous aidera à mettre en place notre modèle conceptuel des services. Deux secteurs en particulier retiendront notre attention: la Santé et l'enseignement supérieur. / Abstract

The service industry has become a major industrial sector in Taiwan. Service industry has some unique characteristics such as intangibility, perishability, heterogeneity, inseparably. These characteristics make it difficult for a service to be mass-produced, have consistent quality control, or have patent protection. In response to this kind of competitive environment, enterprises need rapid service innovation to enhance their value. Therefore, service innovation and service design are more and more important. The service blueprint is a tool for service process design. It can specify how service is provided, and support service process analysis. However, there is no generally accepted practice and software for designing service blueprints. This has hindered the enhancement of service productivity. In this these, we define requirements for service blueprints and develop a system prototype to show the feasibility of such as system. The service blueprint system can help visualize service process and identify potential fail points and innovation opportunities. It can be used by service companies to communicate service design with the staff, and find alternatives to eliminate service gaps.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

The World Wide Web is transitioning from being a mere collection of documents that contain useful information toward providing a collection of services that perform useful tasks. The emerging Web service technology has been envisioned as the next technological wave and is expected to play an important role in this recent transformation of the Web. By providing interoperable interface standards for application-to-application communication, Web services can be combined with component-based software development to promote application interaction and integration within and across enterprises. To make Web services for service-oriented computing operational, it is important that Web services repositories not only be well-structured but also provide efficient tools for an environment supporting reusable software components for both service providers and consumers. As the potential of Web services for service-oriented computing is becoming widely recognized, the demand for an integrated framework that facilitates service discovery and publishing is concomitantly growing.In our research, we propose a framework that facilitates Web service discovery and publishing by combining clustering techniques and leveraging the semantics of the XML-based service specification in WSDL files. We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the Web service domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features: (1) It minimizes the requirements of prior knowledge from both service providers and consumers, (2) It avoids exploiting domain-dependent ontologies,(3) It is able to visualize the information space of Web services by providing a category map that depicts the semantic relationships among them,(4) It is able to semi-automatically generate Web service taxonomies that reflect both capability and geographic context, and(5) It allows service consumers to combine multiple search strategies in a flexible manner.We have developed a Web service discovery tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real Web service descriptions drawn from operational Web services repositories. We believe that both service providers and consumers in a service-oriented computing environment can benefit from our Web service discovery approach.

Emotional labour was conceptualised by Hochschild in 1983 as a form of oppression on the service worker devised by a capitalist society; where not only were workers’ physical actions managed, but their emotions as well. Research in the area developed this concept identifying the many occupational fields in which emotional labour exists, forming models of its effects, and examining ways in which workers try to resist the emotional strain. Taking a social constructionist approach, 44 service workers and 44 customers/emotional labour recipients were interviewed using the Critical Incident Technique to gain insight into their views of performing and receiving emotional labour, and what they believed enhanced or detracted from it. The results were divided into those discussing “professional” emotional labour jobs (eg. teaching) - where the emotional labourer needs to attain a professional status; and “occupational” (eg. sales assistants) – where the emotional labourer does not need a professional qualification. It was found that 1) there were differences between the expectations, motivations and coping mechanisms displayed by professional and occupational emotional labourers; as well as in the expectations of the customer/recipient within a professional service and an occupational one; 2) that many recipients do not necessarily want to be treated as “sovereign” (ie. “king”) and judge an emotional labour interaction more positively when their individual needs are acknowledged; 3) while display rules and targets were still a notable constraint on the labourer, nevertheless “occupational” emotional labourers (sometimes in collusion with their managers) found ways of resisting further strain from recipients through over-politeness, ironically in accordance with display rules which exposed recipient rudeness; 4) professional emotional labourers, however, found the display rules and targets a hindrance. This managerial misunderstanding or poor appreciation of “professional” emotional labour caused resentment among them; 5) unique and spontaneous kindness was evident in many emotional labour interactions with managers, colleagues and most commonly recipients. Moreover, this was acknowledged by giver and receiver as the most satisfying and memorable part of emotional labour – and something unique to emotional labour itself. The recommendations of this thesis are therefore: i) that emotional labour should be differentiated within services in order for more focussed findings and recommendations to be generated and applied ii) that emotional labour be analysed as interactive process where emotional labourer, recipient and their organisational management contribute to a high level of enjoyment within the job. That is, it is not necessary to view emotional labour as the oppressive and intrusive management of personality by a capitalist organisation iii) recognition be given to the importance of kindness within the emotional labour interaction, as it can be both a source of pleasure, and also pain, for the compassionate labourer. This has important implications for the selection, training and providing emotional support for workers.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries