Interdependent Structure of Service Economy
It is well known that vast quantities of living creatures are interdependently surviving with each other by using the natural resources of our planet. Today, the economic transformation of the service economy makes our world more and more interdependent and also makes the interdependent structure more difficult to understand. This is because service activity requires value co-creation between parties and such activity is becoming more complex, for example, “social, technological, economic, environmental, and political change are all interdependent” (Spohrer 2009, p.i) and service is “the ‘glue’ which holds the artificial world together” (ibid, p.i).
While our service economy is very complex, our overall economy functions interdependently with other living things in the biosphere and with natural resources as shown in Figure 1. Every service activity depends on the planet’s original resources such as lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Also, service depends on the biosphere elements such as animals, fisheries, insects, and plants. For example, many services such as supermarkets, restaurants and even hospitals provide food to their customers. Therefore, we should never forget that all human service activities depend on the biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. We should know more about what type of interdependence our economy creates with other spheres.
Figure 1. The relationship between our economy and environments