Clarifying the concept of service in service science

Over the past few decades, it has become clear that the service sector is expanding quickly and is a dominant force in the economies of highly developed countries. Service science is a branch of applied science that studies service design, delivery, and management. It is an interdisciplinary field, drawing from many disciplines, such as engineering, business, psychology, sociology, and economics that focuses on studying service systems and services. Service design is one of the ten disciplines in service science. Ten key disciplines emerged from the primary fields of service science. Considering that the term service is now familiar for many, it needs some clarifications in the academic field. This paper aims to review all the proposed concept to find the state of the art in the service science. The main conclusion to be drawn is that this paper shed light on the fact that considering a shift of paradigm in the concept of service, there should be a distinguishing feature in the concept of service as a singular form and services as a plural form.