...PART ONE • UNDERSTANDING SERVICES SERVICES IN THE MODERN ECONOMY As consumers, we use services every day. Turning on a light, watching TV, talking on the telephone, riding a bus, visiting the dentist, mailing a letter, getting a haircut, refueling a car, writing a check, or sending clothes to the cleaners are all examples of service consumption at the individual level. T h e institution at which you are studying is itself a c o m p l e x service organization. In addition to educational services, today's college facilities usually include libraries and cafeterias, counseling, a bookstore, placement offices, copy services, telecommunications, and even a bank. If you are enrolled at a residential university, campus services are also likely to include dormitories, health care, indoor and o u t d o o r athletic facilities, a theater, and perhaps a post office. Customers are not always happy with the quality and value of the services they receive. People complain a b o u t late deliveries, r u d e or i n c o m p e t e n t personnel, i n c o n v e n i e n t service h o u r s , p o o r p e r f o r m a n c e , and needlessly complicated p r o cedures. T h e y grumble about the difficulty of finding sales clerks to help t h e m in retail stores, express frustration about mistakes on their credit card bills or bank statements, shake their heads over the complexity of new self-service equipment, m u t ter about p o o r value, and sigh as they are forced to wait in line almost everywhere...
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...EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Two big events will frame the year ahead: America’s presidential election and the summer Olympic games in Beijing. The race for the White House will be a marathon, from the front-loaded primary season in January and February to the general election in November. The betting is that the winner will be a Democrat—with a strong chance that a Clinton will again be set to succeed a Bush as leader of the free world. China, meanwhile, will hope to use the Olympics to show the world what a splendid giant it has become. It will win the most gold medals, and bask in national pride and the global limelight. But it will also face awkward questions on its repressive politics. America and China will be prime players in the matters that will concentrate minds around the world in 2008. One of these is the world economy, which can no longer depend on America, with its housing and credit woes, to drive growth. America should—just—avoid recession, but it will be China (for the first time the biggest contributor to global growth) along with India and other emerging markets that will shine. Another focus of attention will be climate change. As China replaces America as the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases, serious efforts on global warming depend on the serious involvement of those two countries. If 2007 was the year when this rose to the top of the global agenda, in 2008 people will expect action. It is striking that green is a theme that links all the contributions...
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