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The purpose of this study is to develop a scale for measuring service inclusion for tourists with disabilities in tourism and hospitality services. Transformative service research serves as the basis for the conceptualization and dimensionality.

To develop and purify the items as well as develop dimensions, standard scale development procedures were applied. Two studies were undertaken. In Study 1, the factorial structure of the service inclusion was constructed and confirmed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. In Study 2, the field study was conducted to validate the scale.

The study developed a new scale for measuring service inclusion. The results show that service inclusion is a higher-order construct with four dimensions, namely, enabling opportunity, offering choice, relieving suffering and fostering happiness. Furthermore, service inclusion has a significant effect on tourists’ well-being perception, which results in more favorable behavioral responses. The newly constructed scale is declared as valid and reliable by the study that examined it for nomological validity by examining the relationship between service inclusion and tourists’ perceptions of their well-being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to develop measurement scale for service inclusion in the tourism and hospitality industry. The scale is proven as reliable and valid and is well suitable for measuring service inclusion for tourists with physical disabilities. It has potential to use for other relevant service contexts.

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.

While service inclusion principles raise the awareness of scholars to service that improves holistic well-being, little research explicitly investigates the spiritual dimensions of service inclusion. This study, therefore, aims to explore faith-based service inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa.

A qualitative case study of the Salvation Army’s Chikankata Services in Zambia was undertaken. Semi-structured interviews with the organization’s leaders and professionals were analyzed thematically.

Service inclusion pillars evince contextualized meaning and priority. In resource-constrained, vulnerable communities, faith-based service inclusion prioritizes two additional pillars – “fostering eudaimonic well-being” and “giving hope,” where existence is precarious, fostering (hedonic) happiness is of low priority. Findings reveal that pillars and processes are mutually reinforcing, harnessed by the individual and collective agency to realize transformative outcomes from service inclusion.

This paper provides unique insight into faith-based service inclusion but acknowledges limitations and areas warranting further research.

The study yields important managerial implications. Service providers can use the framework to identify the contextual priority and/or meaning of service inclusion pillars and relevant reciprocal processes. The framework emphasizes the harnessing potential of individual agency and capability development for transformative well-being.

Faith-based service inclusion, predicated on inclusion, human dignity and holistic well-being, has important implications for reducing the burden on scarce resources while building resilience in communities.

By examining a faith-based service in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper provides a holistic framework conceptualizing pillars, processes, agency and outcomes to extend Fisk et al.’s (2018) service inclusion pillars and to better understand the shaping of service delivery for service inclusion.

This paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review on the fintech services and financial inclusion of the developing nations that particularly focuses on lower middle-income group nations (LMIGN) and upper middle-income group nations (UMIGN) to highlight the research areas that have not received attention and present opportunities for future research.

This paper adopts a systematic approach to examine 65 research articles published from 2016 to 2021, adhering to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines.

The study identifies research gaps in two key themes: backward and outward linkages. In backward linkages, the literature on UMIGN should pay attention to the behavioural patterns associated with lending, investment and market provision-related fintech services. Further research is needed to understand the relationship between fintech services on the usage and quality dimension of financial inclusion in both LMIGN and UMIGN. For outward linkages, future research work should explore the role of fintech and financial inclusion in the development of LMIGN. This study provides valuable insights and guides future research directions by comprehensively mapping the existing studies.

This study does not use quantitative tools, such as meta and bibliometric analysis, to validate the findings.

This research paper offers new perspectives that introduce a novel framework for analysing literature on fintech, financial inclusion and its impact on the overall development of UMIGN and LMIGN.

Secondary customers often experience secondary vulnerabilities that manifest in family-centred transformative services as other- and self-related customer needs. Yet, a relational perspective on primary and secondary customers’ needs is lacking. The study analyses secondary customers’ needs and their relationship to primary customers’ needs to enhance well-being in customer entities. The service inclusion lens is used to understand customers’ experiences of vulnerability.

The study uses an exploratory approach. The data consists of ethnographic observations and interviews of elderly residents (primary customers), their family members (secondary customers) and nurses in two nursing homes.

Primary and secondary customers’ needs are interrelated (or unrelated) in four ways: they are separate, congruent, intertwined or discrepant. The vulnerability experiences fluctuate in intensity and over time, individually reflecting on these need dimensions.

The study contributes to service research concerning customers’ experiences of vulnerability, secondary customers and their inclusion in services. Primary customers’ service inclusion may increase/decrease secondary customers’ service inclusion and their experience of vulnerability. Moreover, secondary customers’ inclusion is often necessary to foster primary customers’ inclusion and well-being.

Fostering service inclusion and well-being for primary and secondary customers requires balanced inclusion and acknowledging the needs of both groups. Service providers may need to act as moderators within customer entities if discrepant needs occur.

The study addresses the under-researched areas of family members’ customer needs, their relation to primary customers’ needs, experiences of secondary vulnerability and context-related vulnerability.

This paper aims at analysing the socio-economic characteristics, mobile phone ownership and banking behaviour as key determinants of digital financial inclusion in India.

This study is based on the Global Findex Survey of the World Bank covering 3,000 adult individuals in India. Simple statistical tools such as descriptive statistics, chi-square test and regression analysis with a marginal effect have been used for the data analysis.

About 35.2% of respondents have reported using digital financial services in the country. There is a significant association between the socio-economic profiles of individuals with the adoption of digital financial services in terms of gender, age, education, occupation and income. The marginal effect indicates that socio-economic factors, mobile phone ownership and banking behaviour of individuals towards borrowings and savings have indicated significant influence on digital financial inclusion. The analysis depicts that male with higher age, education, working status and higher income are more likely to adopt digital financial services. Further, individuals with mobile phone ownership and utilising banking in terms of borrowings and savings are more likely to adopt digital financial services.

As digital banking services have emerged as a preferred channel for financial service delivery, this study provides timely insights on developing user driven-strategies for promoting digital financial services.

Socio-economic characteristics, mobile phone ownership and banking behaviour are critical determinants of financial inclusion, so assessing its implications in the era of digitisation becomes imperative.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-10-2022-0673.

The concept of social inclusion features prominently in current policy and practice developments in mental health services. The Social Exclusion Unit (2006) highlighted the need for mental health day services to promote inclusion and participation, by integrating with the wider community, and by supporting and encouraging users to access opportunities in the local community. The Leeds i3 (inspire, improve, include) project aimed to modernise local mental health day services accordingly. The aim of our study was to develop and validate a measure of social inclusion to be used in mental health day services in Leeds. The underlying assumption was that recent changes in mental health day service provision would substantially improve social inclusion of the service users.The social inclusion questionnaire was developed through extensive iterative consultation with mental health service users and staff, and its reliability was proven using test‐retest statistics. It was shown to be a simple, inexpensive, user‐friendly and repeatable measure that could be used routinely by mental health day services. Factor analysis of the questionnaire showed that social inclusion had seven important components. We suggest that these components form a useful basis for discussion with service users, as well as for planning and evaluating services.

This paper aims to examine customer experience value orchestrated by non-banks' financial touchpoints to understand how they enhance the financial inclusion of low-income consumers.

Two independent but related studies were conducted using qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) research design with semi-structured interviews to compare and contrast customer experience value at two rural locations in Southern Africa. The interview transcripts were analysed using ATLAS.ti, which is a powerful operating system for analysing qualitative data.

The results indicate that non-banks in the two countries design financial services that include functional, economic, humanic, social and mechanic customer experience value dimensions.

The data for this study was collected from financial services customers of retailers and mobile phone network operators in only one research setting in each country. Further research could extend the comparative context for qualitative studies across similar markets. Other limitations are discussed in the paper.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by highlighting the salient and germane dimensions and components found to be important in understanding financial inclusion using customer experience value. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that incorporates customer experience value dimensions in understanding the financial inclusion of low-income consumers at the base of the social and economic pyramid in emerging markets.

The research examines how behavioral intentions, as a higher-order construct, indirectly affect financial inclusion through service trust, usage behavior and financial literacy in mobile money adoption.

Following the positivist research philosophy, a cross-sectional study design was used to collect data through questionnaires comprised of scales adapted from prior studies. With a usable sample size of 340 respondents, this study employs partial least squares structural equation modeling to assess the model.

The study revealed the significant indirect role of behavioral intention on financial inclusion through use behavior, behavioral intentions on use behavior through service trust, and use behavior on financial inclusion through financial literacy. The role of behavioral intentions on financial inclusion through serial mediation of service trust, use behavior and financial literacy was also found to be significant.

This study's novelty resides in examining the indirect relationship between behavioral intentions and financial inclusion, specifically via the serial mediation of service trust, use behavior and financial literacy.

The main purpose of this study is to test for the interaction effect of digital literacy in the relationship between financial technologies (FinTechs) of biometrics and mobile money and digital financial inclusion among the unbanked poor women, youth and persons with disabilities (PWDs) in rural Uganda.

Covariance-based structural equation modeling was used to construct the interaction effect using data collected from the unbanked poor women, youth and PWDs located in the four regions in Uganda as prescribed by Hair et al. (2022).

The findings from this study are threefold: first; the results revealed a positive interaction effect of digital literacy between FinTechs of biometrics and mobile money and digital financial inclusion. Second; the results also confirmed that biometrics identification positively promotes digital financial inclusion. Lastly; the results showed that mobile money positively promotes digital financial inclusion. A combination of FinTechs of biometrics and mobile money together with digital literacy explain 29% variation in digital financial inclusion among the unbanked poor women, youth and PWDs in rural Uganda.

The data for this study were collected mainly from the unbanked poor women, youth and PWDs. Further studies may look at data from other sections of the vulnerable population in under developed financial markets. Additionally, the data for this study were collected only from Uganda as a developing country. Thus, more data may be obtained from other developing countries to draw conclusive and generalized empirical evidence. Besides, the current study used cross sectional design to collect the data. Therefore, future studies may adopt longitudinal research design to investigate the impact of FinTechs on digital financial inclusion in the presence of digital literacy across different time range.

The governments in developing countries like Uganda should support women, youth, PWDs and other equally vulnerable groups, especially in the rural communities to understand and use FinTechs. This can be achieved through digital literacy that can help them to embrace digital financial services and competently navigate and perform digital transactions over digital platforms like mobile money without making errors. Besides, governments in developing countries like Uganda can use this finding to advocate for the design of appropriate digital infrastructures to reach remote areas and ensure “last mile connectivity for digital financial services' users.” The use of off-line solutions can complement the absence or loss of on-line network connectivity for biometrics and mobile money to close the huge digital divide gap in rural areas. This can scale-up access to and use of financial services by the unbanked rural population.

This paper sheds more light on the importance of digital literacy in the ever complex and dynamic global FinTech ecosystem in the presence of rampant cyber risks. To the best of the authors' knowledge, limited studies currently exist that integrate digital literacy as a moderator in the relationship between FinTechs and digital financial inclusion, especially among vulnerable groups in under-developed digital financial markets in developing countries. This is the novelty of the paper with data obtained from the unbanked poor women, youth and PWDs in rural Uganda.