STS 200-5: Service Science, Management & Engineering (SSME)

This course is an exploration of the creation of a new field, Service Science Management and Engineering. The particular focus of this STS course will be on the kinds of expertise that will be necessary for service systems management, and for the study of service systems. By the end, students will be able to adopt a 'service mind-set' when looking at global challenges and opportunities.

The emergence of this field represents an interesting STS problem for two reasons:

1. Sociologists like to study paradigm shifts as they are happening. Those looking back at history will know whether a new field emerged or not—and will label the result a success or a failure, coloring the account. This kind of historical scholarship is valuable, but needs to be complemented by case-studies where the outcome is not known.

2. There is a new STS literature on expertise which, combined with a cognitive science literature, will help us investigate what kind of expertise might be needed to do SSME, and how it could emerge.

3. What constitutes science, and what constitutes scientific thinking, are old themes in STS that we will explore as they relate to SSME

Core questions:

What kind of expertise is necessary to do SSME? Is your education providing it?

Will SSME become a new field? What does it take for a new field to form?

What would make SSME scientific? What does it mean to call a field a science?

Format: see schedule for details

Guest lectures

Discussions of lectures and readings

Student projects and presentations

Take-home final

Approximate grading distribution

Fulfills the Engineering School's 200/300 level STS requirement and also counts for the Engineering Business Minor.

Honor system

Adherence to the Honor Code is expected on all assignments and all activities connected with the class!

Assignments

All assignments will be posted on Collab, along with readings and a schedule of guest lectures and topics. One good source of readings on the internet is the SSME issue of IBM's Systems Journal. Look also at the readings on IBM's SSME web-site, and the articles in Collab resources for this class. Please buy or borrow a copy of Three cups of tea by Mortenson and Relin (for the take-home final). This schedule will have to be revised to accommodate speakers, events and the pace at which the class learns: please stay on top of it!