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The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many organisations’ reliance on the Internet, with schools, companies, and government agencies, among other institutions, all shifting their operations online in a relatively short period of time. This sudden shift created opportunities for cybercriminals, as did the burden on the healthcare sector, the rush for unemployment benefits, and the desire for up-to-date information about outbreaks and health precautions. This chapter examines the trends in cybercrime during the COVID-19 pandemic that were spurred by these changes, as well as the mitigation measures implemented by government and private industry stakeholders to help protect critical infrastructure and online operations. It argues that the nature of cybercrime and the most common forms of criminal activity did not change substantially during the pandemic, but rather that criminals’ focus on whom to target and how to exploit evolving current events enabled them to wield existing criminal tools to greater effect, and potentially also at greater scale, though reliable statistics on the frequency and size of cybercrimes are scarce. Finally, the chapter considers how these trends in cybercrime forced private organisations and governments to undertake new cybersecurity measures and programs and whether the long-term effects of the pandemic might actually include stronger cybersecurity if these efforts continue past the end of the public health crisis.

This chapter is contextual in nature. It provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19, highlighting both the significant number of deaths caused by the pandemic as well as the economic disruption that occurred. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital technologies during the pandemic, which enabled a wide range of activities (e.g. work, education and shopping) to go online. The disruptive impact of COVID-19 is widespread and far-reaching, with the pandemic acting as a ‘change agent’ expanding and encouraging the greater use of digital technologies. The second half of the chapter presents summaries of the other chapters in the book. In doing so, it illustrates the scope and scale of the impact of COVID-19, the multitude of different challenges it has caused, and how these varied across different regions and contexts, as well as the diversity of reactions to the pandemic. Some of these reactions are technical in nature, while others are commercial and political. The summaries also draw attention to ongoing policy debates, the significance of which has been heightened by the pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge service researchers to design for service inclusion, with an overall goal of achieving inclusion by 2050. The authors present service inclusion as an egalitarian system that provides customers with fair access to a service, fair treatment during a service and fair opportunity to exit a service.

Building on transformative service research, a transformative, human-centered approach to service design is proposed to foster service inclusion and to provide a platform for managerial action. This conceptual study explores the history of service exclusion and examines contemporary demographic trends that suggest the possibility of worsening service exclusion for consumers worldwide.

Service inclusion represents a paradigm shift to higher levels of understanding of service systems and their fundamental role in human well-being. The authors argue that focused design for service inclusion is necessary to make service systems more egalitarian.

The authors propose four pillars of service inclusion: enabling opportunity, offering choice, relieving suffering and fostering happiness.

Service organizations are encouraged to design their offerings in a manner that promotes inclusion and permits customers to realize value.

This comprehensive research agenda challenges service scholars to use design to create inclusive service systems worldwide by the year 2050. The authors establish the moral imperative of design for service inclusion.

Exoskeletons are characterized as wearable, mechanical orthoses that augment the physical performance of the wearer, enhance productivity and employee well-being when used in value producing contexts. However, limited research involving exoskeleton usage by service employees in frontline contexts has been undertaken within service research. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of exoskeleton research undertaken within the context of value-producing roles, introduce exoskeletons conceptually to the service research domain, provide new conceptualizations of service exchange interactions involving physically augmented service actors and propose future avenues of exoskeleton research in alignment with key service theories.

A multi-disciplinary structured literature review based on the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses method was undertaken across a variety of literature fields. A final selection of n = 25 papers was selected for analysis from an initial sample of N = 3,537. Given the emergent nature of exoskeleton research and the variety of methodology types used between literature fields, a thematic analysis approach was used for analysing identified papers.

The literature review identified four main themes within role-focused exoskeleton research. These themes informed proposals for future exoskeleton research with respect to key service theories and typologies. The findings demonstrate that the presence of an exoskeleton changes the behaviours and interactions of service employees. The augmented social presence AugSP typology is conceptualized to explain the influences of human enhancement technologies (HETs) within service actor interactions.

This research introduces the AugSP typology to conceptualize the impacts that exoskeletons and HETs impose within technologically mediated service interactions and provides a service-specific definition of exoskeleton technology to guide future service research involving the technology.

‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armour-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little, he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes’ (Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915, p. 19).

Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) appears in disability theory to aid explanation for those who experience acquired disability. This allegory offers a visceral picture of what a person can go through; there is a before and an after, a death and a life. I was able-bodied, capable, bursting with energy and then I woke up one morning utterly transformed. I no longer recognise myself; my consciousness mourns my previous existence, and I must come to terms with my reconstituted self.

It is that ‘other’ that I identify with now and, to discover what that means, I began composing a Requiem Mass. I have a long love affair with them; I have sung and conducted them and their ability to pierce the veil between life and death is of particular significance to me. This chapter examines the ways in which my acquired disability, this mystical death, impacts and informs my composition.

Twenty years before Sherlock Holmes donned his deerstalker and informed Watson that “the game's a‐foot!” an American woman, Seely Regester, pub‐lished a mystery entitled The Dead Letter (1867).

A CORRESPONDENT complains that he has undertaken a course for his final examination, after spending six years from Dunkirk to the Elbe far removed from library opportunities—only to find that librarians and libraries are building up their staffs now. The Times Literary Supplement, he says, carries column after column of advertisements of desirable posts for which he, as he thinks, is a desirable and legitimate aspirant, but he is barred by his academic obligations. This appears to be a genuine grievance and we place it first in these notes in the hope that authorities, and especially librarians, may be induced to consider it. It may be answered that there is a present urgent need to tune up libraries of every kind to meet the great public need and that many of them have already waited some years. It is perhaps a pity that they did not wait a little longer so that the men who deserve most of the country could have been brought into the competition.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.

To contribute to the development of a theoretically grounded measure of organizational internet use (OIU) by conceptualizing and operationalizing it as a theoretical construct, and by empirically assessing its reliability and validity

The focal construct OIU was conceptualized as an abstract collective object with three components, forming an index with formative, causal indicators. A multi‐method research design – including a cross‐sectional drop‐and‐collect survey among small technology‐based firms (STBFs) in Germany and an observational study of web sites – was applied to assess empirically the theoretically developed construct OIU. This was achieved by using the component‐based partial least squares (PLS) structural modeling technique using PLS‐Graph.

The empirical assessment of the scale, applied to the international business domain, proved to be reliable and valid in the structural model and across assessment methods.

The focal construct was assessed among a very specific population. This limits the claims that can be made with regard to applying it in other industries, countries, and firms. Future research should address this by applying OIU in maximally different research contexts.

The developed construct has important implications for both managers and researchers. It should help in assessing levels of organizational internet use in a consistent fashion across populations and studies. It can be used for benchmarking purposes – of specific interest to managers – and it can be used to explore antecedents and consequences of organizational internet use – of specific interest to researchers.

Internet research is moving from anecdotal and exuberant internet euphoria to internet pessimism to internet realism. Only theoretically grounded, reliable and valid measures can support such a required transition. With this paper we have made an initial contribution for such a development to occur.