John R. Bryson, Peter W. Daniels and Barney Warf Routledge: London 2004. ISBN 0-415-24786-1 (hardback), 0-415-24787-X (paperback), vii + 286 pp. Price: £80.00 (hardback); £23.99 (paperback). Over the past few years, increasing interest in, and acknowledgement of, the growing significance of service economies has led to the publication of a number of texts on the topic of ‘services’. Notable contributions have been provided by Marshall and Wood's (1995)Services and Spaces and Illeris's (1996)The Service Economy. Bryson et al.’s Service Worlds is a welcome addition to the agenda set by these earlier publications – namely, dismissal of the notion that services can be characterized by their not processing materials (and are therefore of lesser economic importance). For Bryson et al., the key players in the ‘new economy' are service activities, and Service Worlds aims to ‘provide a student-friendly account of the diversity of theoretical perspectives for understanding the ways in which work, enterprises and economies are meeting the challenges of increasingly complex economies and societies’ (p. i). Indeed, Service Worlds represents a real opportunity to plot a course through the complexities of understanding service economies, building upon previous work to establish a useful and comprehensive student text. However, in several respects this is not achieved, and the resulting publication presents a partial view of services.
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Jennifer Johns (2005) studied this question.