THE HANDBOOK OF SERVICE INDUSTRIES

THE HANDBOOK OF SERVICE INDUSTRIES

THE HANDBOOK OF SERVICE INDUSTRIES

n the economically developed world, the majority of all jobs, often more than 75 per cent,
involve some form of service work (Bryson et al., 2004b). Furthermore, some 9 in 10 of
all new jobs are also in services, particularly in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia
and New Zealand, as well as in newly industrialised countries such as Singapore or Korea.
This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art account of this transformation which has been
under way for more than 40 years – the shift away from manufacturing to service employment.
There are important differences between national economies in the outcomes and
consequences of the shift from manufacturing to services so that there are different types
of service economy (see Chapters 4 and 5).
It is worth noting at the outset the common mistake of assuming that the transformation
of
economies towards services is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. The social
sciences have paid too little attention to the role they played during the Industrial
Revolution or earlier. The considerable rise in the importance of services in the latter half
of the nineteenth century has been largely ignored. A case example is the United
Kingdom. Using fire office registers to undertake an investigation into the structure of
London’s economy between the years 1775 and 1825 Barnett, for example, provides an
unusually detailed historical investigation from which it is concluded that:
service industries made no less contribution to the British economy during the Industrial
Revolution than manufacturing, and that nowhere was this more true than in London. Its service
economy was on a very large scale, serving the nation as a whole as well as the capital . . .
London’s service industries underpinned both its own and the national manufacturing and com-
mercial infrastructure and at the same time contributed to the new ‘commercialisation of
leisure’. (Barnett, 1998: 183)

Edward Elgar