5th Serving: What Are Service Systems?
- Jun 21
- 4 min read
Sunday, June 21, 2026
By Ray Fisk, Founder and President of ServCollab
This 5th Serving describes systems and service systems because our lives are deeply embedded within Earth’s networks of living systems. We depend on these systems for our survival, yet we still don’t understand them very well.
Even service researchers like me have trouble. In this Serving, I confess to a significant mistake in my categorization of systems.
Humans live within both natural and human-created systems.
Natural Systems
Natural living systems include the Earth itself and the vast number of species that evolved on Earth and coexist in interdependent relationships. Earth’s natural systems will be the subject of a future Serving. This Serving focuses on the natural systems of our human species that exist within Earth’s living systems.
As a social species, humans live in three natural systems: our bodies, biological families, and communities.
Our human bodies are biological systems that evolved to serve our needs. Many aspects of our bodies identify us as a distinct species versus our primate cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. Unlike other primates, we evolved the ability to vocalize a wide range of sounds, which enabled us to create music and language. Our faces are remarkably distinctive and expressive, which facilitates identifying and understanding each other. Also, the evolution of walking erect enabled our species to migrate across the Earth.
The second natural system is the biological family, which provides biological and social services. Biological families work together to feed and shelter children, thereby increasing the human population. Long childhoods require families to provide social services that help children socialize and receive an education. To service researchers, families were the first service system.
The third natural system of community emerged in our prehistory and was the foundation for our modern history. Human communities provide essential social services to their members, especially helping other humans and facilitating connections with them. Early human communities worked together to hunt and gather food, raise children, socialize, and bury their dead during human prehistory.
Human-Made Systems
From the humble beginnings of prehistoric human communities, many human-made systems emerged over the past 5,000 years. I will group these human-made systems into three interdependent categories: social, economic, and political systems.
Social systems range widely. Cultures are the most important social systems because many other social systems are embedded within them. Language and music emerged within cultures to serve our ancestors’ needs for communication and joy. The largest social systems are cities. Cities tend to have distinct communities within them. Every human life is fundamentally shaped by the social systems they live within.
Economic systems manage the exchange of resources. They precede our modern monetary times with ancient roots in gift economies and barter economies. Precious metals like gold and silver were early forms of money, but modern money has escaped such physical requirements. The rapid growth of economic systems led to the global emergence of business schools with disciplines such as accounting, economics, finance, management, and marketing. The service research field emerged (approximately 1980) from among management and marketing scholars and focused primarily on commercial service organizations.
Political systems manage decisions about power, especially the use of force. Political systems have the unique ability to impose force on anyone deemed to violate their rules. They can be at any scale from small communities, large cities, nation-states, or global governance mechanisms. As the complexity of these political systems has grown, their ability to serve human needs in our modern times is being severely tested.
Service Systems
It took decades for service systems to become a common frame within service research.
Like most service researchers, I have described social, economic, and political systems as service systems. However, the categorization mistake I made (and many other service scholars have made) is that NOT all social, economic, or political systems are actually service systems.
It is time to correct that mistake!
At the July 2026 Frontiers in Service Conference in Helsinki, Finland, Qusay Hamdan (ServCollab’s Vice President and Research Scholar) and I will present a normative reframing of human-made systems.
We classify human-made systems into three types: cruelty, dominance, and service. These classifications are based on the nature and flow of their interactions with people, other life, and the Earth: The figure below summarizes these three types.
Cruelty Systems
When social systems engage in discrimination, racism, or sexism, they are cruelty systems. When economic systems exploit the poor, they are cruelty systems. When political systems engage in war, they are cruelty systems.
Dominance Systems
When social systems encourage dominance and subservience roles, they are dominance systems. When economic systems engage in labor exploitation and customer exploitation, they are dominance systems. When political systems oppress minorities, they are dominance systems.
Defining Service Systems
What then are service systems? ServCollab defines service systems as configurations of people and technology to co-create value, thereby serving human needs through mutual benefit.
_______________________________
