Essay About Provision Of Service Products And Service Industries

Services
Services
Service industries and firms, unlike manufacturing,
construction, and extractive (e.g., agriculture, fisheries,
forestry, mining, petroleum, quarrying, and
the like) sectors and firms, have as their main
function the provision of service products. The
North American Industry Classification System
(NAICS)
and the Statistical Classification of Economic
Activities in the European Community
(NACE)
provide more detail on service industries
than did earlier frameworks, such as the United
Nations International System of Industrial Classification,
though the level of detail is still coarser than
for manufacturing industries. The high-level NACE
categorization involves nine sections (Table 1).
The industrial categories presented in Table 1 are
rather broad for undertaking a serious analysis of
innovation processes. For example, transport and
communication are combined, and within the latter,
postal and telecommunication services are combined.
More disaggregated data are increasingly
available, but many lines of analysis, including
international comparisons, are limited by a lack of
statistical detail.
Services represent a huge range of industries. The
service industries category carries a legacy of being
the residual sector into which are put the leftovers,
that is, all the industries that do not produce raw
materials and tangible artifacts, as do the primary
and secondary sectors. (The primary sector is
composed of extractive industries, and the secondary
sector consists of such industries as manufacturing,
construction, and utilities. The tertiary sector
is services, which was once known as the residual
sector.)
However, the service products in which these
industries specialize share two fairly common
features: intangibility and interactivity. By intangibility,
we mean that rather than being material
products, service products typically involve transformations
in such entities as the state of material
products, of people (and other organisms), and in
data. Some are delivered through physical artifacts
(e.g., CD-ROMs and consultancy reports) and some
are associated with them (e.g., dental fillings and
credit cards). Such physical elements