Steve Baron is Professor of Marketing at the University of LiverpoolManagement School, and Head of the Division of Marketing andInternational Business. He is Chair of the UK Academy of MarkingSpecial Interest Group for Services Marketing. His current researchinterests include the understanding of service experiences from theconsumer perspective, and communities of service and social practice.He has publications in services, marketing and management journals,including Journal of Service Research, European Journal of Marketing,International Journal of Market Research and Journal of BusinessResearch. He is co-author of Services Marketing: Text and Cases,published by Palgrave in 2003.Kim Harris (a.k.a. Kim Cassidy) is Reader in Marketing at theUniversity of Liverpool Management School, and Director of theManagement School's suite of MBA programmes. She has organisedand chaired the UK Services Marketing Workshops in 2003 and 2004.Her current research interests include the measurement of the intendedeffect of service performance, and consumer-to-consumer interactions.She has publications in services, marketing and management journals,including Journal of Service Research, European Journal of Marketing,International Journal of Service Industry Management and Journal ofBusiness Research. She is co-author of Services Marketing: Text andCases, published by Palgrave in 2003.Dominic Elliott is Professor of Strategic Management and BusinessContinuity at the University of Liverpool Management School, and Headof the Division of Management. He is editor of the journal RiskManagement: An International Journal. His current research interestsinclude service recovery and service continuity, and de-mergerstrategies. He has publications in a number of management journals,including Long Range Planning, Journal of Contingencies and CrisisManagement and Journal of

Strategic Information Systems. He isco-author of books on Learning from Crises (published by PerpetuityPress, 2005) and Business Continuity Management: A CrisisManagement Approach (published by Routledge, 2nd edition, 2005).This is a crisis. In fact, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrancehall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on theroof, saying "This is a Large Crisis". A large crisis requires a large plan (finalepisode, Blackadder, UK comedy series).The inspiration for this special issue came from interdisciplinarydiscussions that had taken place in threesuccessive UK Services Marketing Workshops on servicefailures and service crises, and the different perspectivesoffered by academics in the fields of services marketing andcrisis management. The theme of the special issue aimed tocompare the services marketing/management responses toservice failures (i.e. service recovery) and the crisismanagement approach to service organisation crises (whichincludes service continuity). In the main, the range of papersin this issue has enabled us to meet those aims.The first four papers present recent research findings onservice recovery performances and strategies. They are finerepresentatives of current work on service recovery, covering a range of services (tourism, hospitality, web shopping andhealth) and some of the most effective methodologicalapproaches to service recovery research (scenario-basedexperimental designs, critical incident technique (CIT),regression analyses). The combined lists of references of thefour papers provide the additional benefit of an up-to-datereview of the service failure/service recovery literature.The first two of them focus on consumer responses toservice failure/recovery in the context of interpersonalencounters with commercial service providers. Schoefer andEnnew examine the

impact of perceived justice on emotionalresponses by consumers to complaint experiences relating toholiday airport check-in services. Using a 23 factorial design,the analysis of variance (ANOVA) findings demonstrate thatpositive or negative emotions were predicted by theconsumers' perceived justice evaluations. They concludethat cognitive appraisals of perceived justice may elicitemotional responses and hence (dis)satisfaction with thecomplaint handling process. Mattila and Cranage introducecustomers' choice over components of the service deliveryprocess as an antecedent to service recovery. Also using a 23factorial experiment, this time undertaken in the context ofrestaurant services, they found that choice (in this case thechoice of where to sit in a restaurant), as well as compensationand apology, contributed to customers' perceptions ofinformational fairness. In turn, informational justice wasconfirmed, along with the other elements of perceived justice(distributive, procedural and interactive) to be correlated withcustomer satisfaction with service recovery outcomes.Forbes, Kelley and Hoffman develop typologies of servicefailures and service recovery strategies in the context of webshopping, to complement earlier studies of bricks and mortarshopping, and also focus on post-recovery satisfaction and thepropensity to switch. Using the CIT, they identify ten types offailures and 11 service recovery strategies that provide initialguidelines for service/retail managers in the sector. Theirother finding, that post-recovery switching is high even withhigh levels of satisfaction with the recovery process, clearlypresents a special challenge to e-retailing service providers.There are relatively few publications of service recoveryresearch in a public service context. The paper by Ashill,Carruthers and Krisjanous evaluates service recoveryperformance

of frontline employees in a healthcare setting,using the Boshoff and Allen model, analysed through partialleast squares. Of particular interest is that some of the findingswere contrary to those that have been derived by applying themodel to private sector services such as banking. For example,in the particular hospital used as the research setting, effectiveservice recovery performance had no influence on extrinsicjob satisfaction, and neither customer service orientation noremployee rewards seemed to influence employee servicerecovery performance. Explanations of these results shouldlead to further insightful research into public sector servicerecovery processes.The next three papers provide some challenges for servicerecovery research through taking a crisis managementperspective to issues of failures in service organisations, orthrough re-considerations of a basic premise.In the paper by Smith, crises within the service sector areexplored. He argues that the process of crisis generation in thesector, particularly the notion of incubation, deserves moreattention in the services literature. A crisis managementapproach provides a focus on the prevention of crises, andthe points of intervention by which organisations mayavoid escalations of incidents, as well as on service recovery/continuity. He presents the case that serviceorganisations are especially vulnerable to crises as a result ofthe process of emergence that can occur in the service sector,and that the processes and procedures adopted by servicemanagement may contribute to the generation of crisisincidents. By identifying the key concepts of vulnerability,emergence and barriers to learning from the crisismanagement literature, in the context of service organisationmanagement, Smith has provided a framework for bringingservice failure prevention management into the mainstreamservices

literature.Most service recovery research works on the premise thatthe consumer has genuine grounds for complaint because of aservice failure or breakdown that was the responsibility of theservice organisation. Reynolds and Harris focus attention onconsumers that invent service failures in the full knowledgethat service organisations may compensate them, sometimeshandsomely, for the "failure" as part of their service recoveryprocesses. In other words, they argue, consumers areincreasingly "playing the system". Maybe some of theconventional wisdom that regards consumer complaints as avaluable component of consumer research, and that gives highpublicity to the resolution of such complaints, may bebecoming counter-productive in an age of increasingconsumerism. The paper brings to the fore the notion ofillegitimate customer complaints, and provides classificationsof the forms of, and motivations for illegitimate complaining.For managers, there may be a need to re-evaluate their servicerecovery/returns policies in the light of the potentially highcosts of compensating customers who have not been therecipients of genuine service failures.In our own paper (Elliott, Harris and Baron)[1], in an interdisciplinarystudy, we have attempted to identify how theadoption of a crisis management perspective in servicesmarketing research, and the adoption of a services marketingperspective in crisis management research, can provide newinsights, and potentially fruitful research avenues, in each ofthe fields. For services marketers, it is argued that a greateracknowledgement of the construct of "crisis incubation" inthe pre-crisis of management phase can result in future,potentially valuable directions for services research. From thefield of services marketing, the construct of "customerparticipation in service production" has been highlighted asbeing especially

relevant.