John R. Bryson

Business service firms, service space and the management of change

The growth of business service firms represents the latest stage in a continuing twentieth century process of technological and organizational restructuring of production and labour skills. It is associated with the rising information intensiveness of production and the development of an economy of signs. Business service activities located in service spaces drive innova.tions both in production technology and in management systems. The co-presence of business service firms with their clients as well as other business service firms shapes the possibilities of trust between them. A detailed case study of the way in which large client firms utilize the services of independent business service companies is provided. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between small firms and business service expertise. A dual information economy may be developing in which large firms are able to search for specialist business service expertise irrespective of its location, while SMEs are tied into local providers of more generalist expertise.

THE ‘SECOND’ GLOBAL SHIFT: THE OFFSHORING OR GLOBAL SOURCING OF CORPORATE SERVICES AND THE RISE OF DISTANCIATED EMOTIONAL LABOUR

Abstract. This paper explores some of the key features of the ‘second’ global shift or offshoring of a range of service functions from America and Europe to countries like India and China. Service offshoring or global sourcing is perceived by the media, policy‐making communities and trade unions as a significant threat to existing and future service employment in developed market economies. This paper explores two issues. First, it explores the growth of call centres and data‐processing warehouses in India and elsewhere as strategies that are being used to develop a new international spatial division of service labour based on blended delivery systems. Second, it explores the impact that the second global shift is having on service operators living in India. Service work is a hybrid form of work that contains within it various types of emotional labour. Emotional labour is usually understood to be implicated in face‐to‐face encounters between service producers and consumers. The second global shift, however, involves distanciated emotional labour in which firms located in developed market economies encourage foreign workers to alter the ways in which they project their identities. The offshoring of services to India and China encourages call centre operators based in India and China to become American or English at night and Indian or Chinese during the day. Unlike the first global shift, the geographies of the second global shift are partially determined by a countrys colonial heritage.

The Handbook of Service Industries

Contents: 1. Worlds of Services: From Local Service Economies to Offshoring or Global SourcingJohn R. Bryson and Peter W. DanielsPART I: CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES 2. The Nature of Services Sven Illeris3. Services and Innovation: Conceptual and Theoretical Perspectives Jeremy Howells4. National Economies and the Service Society: The Diversity of Models Jean Gadrey5. Theories of the Information Age Nico Stehr6. The Political Economy of Services in Tertiary EconomiesPascal Petit PART II: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SERVICE ECONOMIES 7. A Global Service Economy? Peter W. Daniels8. Services and Regional Development in the United StatesWilliam B. Beyers9. Service Industries, Global City Formation and New Policy Discourses within the Asia-PacificT.A. Hutton 10. Service Development in Transition Economies: Achievements and Missing Links Metka Stare11. Whither Global Cities: The Analytics and the Debates Saskia Sassen PART III: TRADING SERVICES: FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL PRODUCTION12. Transport Services and the Global Economy: Towards a Seamless MarketThomas R. Leinbach and John T. Bowen 13. Empirical Analysis of Barriers to International Services Transactions and the Consequences of Liberalization Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern 14. Multinational Service Firms and Global Strategy Peter EnderwickPART IV: SERVICES, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION15. Knowledge-Intensive Services and Innovation Ian Miles16. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and the Consumption of Traded (Producer Service Expertise) versus Untraded Knowledge and Expertise John R. Bryson and Peter W. Daniels 17. Understanding the Relationship between Information Communications Technology and the Behaviour of Firms Located in Regional Clusters Grete Rusten and John R. Bryson18. Services and the Internet Andrew Murphy19. Knowledge Creation in a Japanese Convenience Store Chain: The Case of Seven-Eleven Japan Ikujiro Nonaka, Vesa Peltokorpi and Dai SenooPART V: SERVICE EMPLOYMENT: EMBODIED AND EMOTIONAL LABOUR 20. Embodied Information, Actor Netoworks and Global Value-Added ServicesBarney Warf21. Gender Divisions of Labour: Sex, Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment in the Service Sector Linda McDowell22. Transnational Work: Global Professional Labour Markets in Professional Service Accounting FirmsJonathan V. BeaverstockReferencesIndex

The Creation, Location and Growth of Small Business Service Firms in the United Kingdom

Since 1980 the United Kingdom has experienced very rapid growth in firms and employment in information-intensive business services. This paper documents the scale, nature and geography of this growth, with particular reference to small and new firms in management consultancy and market research. Business service growth has contributed powerfully to the UKS North-South divide, being focused on London and the outer South East. The findings of a detailed survey of small business service firms suggest that such firms are important for national and regional economic growth. The growth of small firms reflects a variety of forces rather than any single factor, but is centred on increased demand for specialised expertise and information. Entrepreneurs setting up new small firms are predominantly motivated by the perceived benefits of independence and financial gain.

Understanding the relationship between services and innovation: the RESER review of the European service literature on innovation, 2002

This essay reviews the European literature on innovation by drawing upon specially commissioned reports written by academics located in six countries. The innovation literature is classified into four types: technologist, service-orientated, integrative and theoretical. Each of these types is explored. One of the major findings is that different countries and researchers are at different stages of this life cycle approach to the literature. It is also suggested that the integrative approach is an exciting opportunity for developing the research agenda in this field.

The Creation and Growth of Small Business Service Firms in Post-Industrial Britain

Since 1980, the United Kingdom has experienced a dramatic growth in firms and employment in information-intensive business services, such as management consultancy and market research. This article reports the results of the first substantial nation-wide investigation into the nature and causes of small professional business service firm growth in Britain, undertaken in 1991. It reveals marked differences in the characteristics, markets and competitive requirements of such firms, compared with small manufacturing firms. The demand for their services comes predominantly from large companies, and is more focussed on financial and other services and government. But small firms are also making increasing use of business services. Specialised expertise, reputation and educational and professional qualifications are essential prerequisites for the establishment of new business service firms. Their success is also being enhanced by increasing use of informal networking, collaborative partnerships, and subcontracting.

Obsolescence and the Process of Creative Reconstruction

What is built and where it is built is largely determined by the activities and perceptions of global investment capital. Comparatively limited work has been undertaken into the property markets of regional cities as well as into the process of building obsolescence, refurbishment and valorisation. This paper explores the dynamics of the property development process in relation to land rent theory in marginal development locations. It argues that the debate over land rent theory, between academics who want to retain the canonical dogma and those who focus on landownership, is misplaced. What is required is a combination of these approaches. Increasingly, what is built and where it is built reflects the varied nature of property interests, as well as the actions of the local and national state. The argument is supported by a case study of Nottinghams office market.

At Face Value? Image Consultancy, Emotional Labour and Professional Work

This paper draws upon empirical research into the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. This industry is becoming increasingly important as a provider of knowledge and expertise to employers and individuals. We suggest that the literature on new forms of service employment (emotional labour and hybrid forms of work) has neglected to explore well-paid professional employees. We argue that this group is equally implicated in societal pressures to conform to conventional heterosexual images of femininity and masculinity. Pressures to conform do not have to come from management, but from professional bodies, the media and clients. Image consultancy provides one way of encouraging employees to alter their image as the advice can be packaged as independent of the employer and professional. We conclude that the new profession of image consultancy is more about gender than image. Consultants are selling codified knowledge for the construction of particularly socially accepted or preferred forms of bodily identity.

Constructing Knowledges of ‘Emerging Markets’: UK-Based Investment Managers and Their Overseas Connections:

We seek to trace the construction and circulation of the investment category of ‘emerging markets’, reflecting on the geographies contained therein. To this end, drawing on face-to-face interviews, we investigate the production and circulation of specialist expertise and knowledge amongst British-based managers and analysts. This involves starting to trace networks of information, movement, and command that connect fund managers and analysts in global financial centres such as the City of London with emerging market economies. We conclude with reflections on the distinctiveness of emerging markets analysis, arguing that these lie in the rhetorical strategies used to promote emerging markets investments and the ways that these are internalised and enacted by analysts.

Spatial divisions of expertise: Knowledge intensive business service firms and regional development in Norway

This article explores the regional geography of professional, information and intellectual services in Norway. Norway is used as one way of critiquing the global cities literature by exploring the multiple ways in which knowledge intensive services are created and consumed outside global cities. Norways regional geography of knowledge services is one of concentration and dispersal; both processes are explained by the ways in which clients access external expertise. An evolving spatial division of expertise is identified based on the ways in which service suppliers and consumers access and combine expertise that is available in different locations. Part of this evolving spatial division of expertise is illustrated in the ways in which large European providers of consultancy expertise have displaced American providers from Norways top ten ranking of consultancy providers. The paper identifies a series of fundamental changes that are taking place in the consultancy industry that affect the ways in which consultancy is provided to the Norwegian market.