Edward Elgar Publishing Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services: New Economic and Socio-Economic Approaches

Services now account for almost three quarters of economic activity in advanced market economies and two of the principal topics that researchers on services have been concerned with are, on the one hand, productivity, and on the other, innovation in and through services. These two issues, and finding ways to measure and conceptualise them, lie at the heart of this book. The productivity question is a puzzle in many so-called 'stagnant services', where national accounts show little or no increase in productivity, while closer empirical investigations and case studies reveal that some of these sectors are in fact as dynamic as their manufacturing counterparts. How can these opposing views be reconciled? The same applies to innovation in and through services, where many of the existing approaches retain much of their bias towards manufacturing and technology, and fail to capture some of the fundamental aspects of innovation in services. Written by some of the most distinguished authors in the field, this book elucidates the critical and complex relationships between services, production and innovation. The authors discuss the limitations of current theories to explain service productivity and innovation, and call for a conceptual re-working of the ways in which these are measured. They also highlight the important role of knowledge in the production system and in doing so make an important contribution to a key debate which has emerged in the social sciences in recent years. Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services will inform and interest those in the fields of economics, management, business studies and economic geography.