Service Provisions and Business Relationships in the Digital Era – Four Essays in the B2B Context
type: CreativeWork
description: Digitalization has fundamentally changed how services are provided and how service providers and their customers interact with each other in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Against the backdrop of these developments, this thesis considers – in four essays – the changes brought about by both service and sales digitalization. Each essay investigates for one research topic the aspects of existing knowledge regarding non-digital services and/or sales which can be transferred to digital services and sales and which aspects must be adjusted. The aim is to support B2B firms that offer or receive services or plan to do so in the future which cope with the challenges of service and sales digitalization. In doing so, the first and second essay investigate the contingency effect of service digitalization on service characteristics from the provider and customer views, respectively. Both essays aim at explaining service value as an endogenous variable. In the first essay, service modularity and service flexibility are considered as predecessors that help explain service value. The second essay investigates the effect of customer cocreation on service value. Whereas the first and second essay focus on service characteristics, the third and fourth essay focus on business relationships. Both essays explain relational conflict, one important facet of business relationships, as the endogenous variable and consider the perspectives of both providers and customers. The third essay elaborates on the diverging effect of service digitalization on relational conflict from these two perspectives. The fourth essay incorporates both service and sales digitalization and investigates the contingency effects of the two forms of digitalization on the relationship between coercive power use and relational conflict. In conclusion, this thesis provides a more fine-grained view on the construct digitalization by differentiating explicitly between service digitalization and sales digitalizati…
abstract: Digitalization has fundamentally changed how services are provided and how service providers and their customers interact with each other in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Against the backdrop of these developments, this thesis considers – in four essays – the changes brought about by both service and sales digitalization. Each essay investigates for one research topic the aspects of existing knowledge regarding non-digital services and/or sales which can be transferred to digital services and sales and which aspects must be adjusted. The aim is to support B2B firms that offer or receive services or plan to do so in the future which cope with the challenges of service and sales digitalization. In doing so, the first and second essay investigate the contingency effect of service digitalization on service characteristics from the provider and customer views, respectively. Both essays aim at explaining service value as an endogenous variable. In the first essay, service modularity and service flexibility are considered as predecessors that help explain service value. The second essay investigates the effect of customer cocreation on service value. Whereas the first and second essay focus on service characteristics, the third and fourth essay focus on business relationships. Both essays explain relational conflict, one important facet of business relationships, as the endogenous variable and consider the perspectives of both providers and customers. The third essay elaborates on the diverging effect of service digitalization on relational conflict from these two perspectives. The fourth essay incorporates both service and sales digitalization and investigates the contingency effects of the two forms of digitalization on the relationship between coercive power use and relational conflict. In conclusion, this thesis provides a more fine-grained view on the construct digitalization by differentiating explicitly between service digitalization and sales digitalizati…
author: Stoffer, Torben
date published: 2019-10-08
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:45:06Z
provider: Universität Passau
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Universität Passau