Hospitality as the bridge: advancing transformative service research towards human flourishing

ABSTRACT As an increasingly important paradigm in the services domain, transformative service research (TSR) emphasizes the need for improving the well-being of entities inside and outside the service organization. The present article offers that hospitality – as an ethic and experience – offers compelling avenues to move the TSR agenda to its next stage of evolution. Specifically, given its indelible connections to the fledging paradigm of human flourishing, hospitality provides tangible pathways for service organizations to effect transformative value creation as systemic human flourishing at the individual, collective, and ecosystem levels. The article examines this proposition in the context of research at the intersection of hospitality and healthcare. It then offers a novel conceptual framework – Hospitality-Oriented Systems of Transformation In Services (HOSTIS) – that uses hospitality as the starting point and the bridge between the two paradigms of TSR and human flourishing. The article concludes with opportunities for future research that addresses the key conceptual and empirical considerations of the framework. The HOSTIS framework recognizes the potential of service organizations to contribute to a flourishing society.