Valerie Mathieu - A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services

– rental and leasing activities;

– job-related activities;

– travel agencies, tour operators, reservation services and related activities;

– investigations and security;

– building and landscaping services;

– administrative and other support activities (including call centers, trade show and convention organization, etc.).

– Number of companies: nearly one in four service companies is a company that caters to the B2B market; 18% of companies in France are B2B service companies (INSEE 2018a).

– Business creation: the INSEE considers the business services sector to be the most dynamic in terms of business creation, ahead of trade. A quarter of the businesses created in France are in the field of business services (INSEE 2018b).

– Number of jobs: 10% of jobs are in the business services industry and they account for 13% of service jobs (INSEE 2018c).

– Job creation: in its target scenario for job growth in France over the period 2012–2022, France-Stratégie-DARES considers the business services sector to be the largest contributor to net job creation (France Stratégie-DARES 2015). The business services sector has the largest number of job creations (INSEE 2019a).

– Value added: business services concentrate half of the value added of market services (47%) (INSEE 2018d).

While the economic data are unambiguous and show a reality dominated by services, the interpretations can diverge and confront us with a multiplicity of discourses, often contradictory, on the contribution of services to the economy. Should we be enthusiastic or worried about this quasi-monopoly of services?

Analysts of the macroeconomic evolution of societies have established two opposing theses 3: the post-industrial thesis and the neo-industrial thesis.

The proponents of the post-industrial thesis identify the growth of services as the major feature of contemporary economic history and support the reality of the transition from an economy dominated by the industrial sector to one dominated by services. Daniel Bell in the United States, Alain Touraine in France and, before them, Jean Fourastié have been the founders of this post-industrial society (Fourastié 1949; Touraine 1969; Bell 1973). The research studies of Engel and Baumol provide the main foundations of this thesis. Engel’s law postulates that the increase in purchasing power leads to a shift in household demand from basic necessities (especially food) to mainly industrial goods and then to “higher” goods (health, education, leisure), which are essentially services. Baumol’s work has established that productivity growth is on average faster in the industrial sector than in the service sector, justifying the irreversible decline in industrial jobs 4. Today, major market trends, such as the aging of the population and the preference of younger generations for use rather than possession, only amplify household demand for services. The behavior of companies, by outsourcing a growing number of activities, from the simplest (maintenance of green spaces) to the most complex (human resources management), also contributes to the dynamism of the services market.

In a complementary way, the industrial company feeds into this reality by backing an ever greater share of its added value with service activities. The “servuction” or tertiarization of industry are the terms commonly used today to indicate the potential of services to enhance and differentiate the industrial company’s offer. The growing technical complexity of products naturally leads to the launch of specific services to support their marketing, distribution, consumption and recycling. This is one of the challenges of Industry 4.0, which relies on the Internet of Things and data to offer innovative services that generate new sources of profit.

Finally, at the very heart of development economics thinking, while industry has long been considered indispensable for growth, the idea is now also defended that a country can develop from its service activities without necessarily relying on a solid industrial sector. India illustrates this new path of economic development, with growth based in particular on the export of advanced services, rooted in new technologies (Kucera and Roncolato 2016).

However, in the 1970s, and more recently during the 2008 crisis, given the slowdown in growth, an opposing trend emerged that attempted to re-evaluate the importance of industry. The “neo-industrial” thesis attributes a driving role in the economy to the industrial sector. According to this thesis, the tertiary sector cannot develop without maintaining a dynamic in the industrial sector. In the face of deindustrialization, the neo-industrial thesis displays the will – some would say the utopia – of reindustrialization. Reindustrialization seems to be a powerful political argument, since it is regularly used by actors from all sides of the political spectrum, up to and including Bruno Le Maire’s recent statement that “France has not chosen to be a service economy” 5.

The neo-industrial thesis probably contributes to a certain distrust of service. In a 2013 book, Augustin Landier and David Thesmar denounced three preconceived notions that they believe are sinking France, to use the title of their book (Landier and Thesmar 2013):

– misconception number 1: a France without industry would be Disneyland;

– misconception number 2: to save jobs, one has to save the industry;

– misconception number 3: a real engineer works in a factory.

The economic and health crisis at COVID indirectly revives this debate on reindustrialization and gives new weight to the neo-industrial thesis.

While the extreme positions around which the “post-industrial” and “neo-industrial” theses are developing are attractive, the fact remains that they leave a damaging void, that of the complementarity between service and industry 6. Indeed, we are forced to admit that as industrial companies develop and become more complex, they not only outsource more and more of their activities (security, catering, etc.) but also call on increasingly sophisticated services (engineering, consulting, waste treatment, etc.). In this sense, industry is fueling the demand for services. But can we also reject the hypothesis that the dynamism, innovation, growth and sophistication of service activities support and assist industrial development? In particular, industrial companies cannot meet the digital challenge without the support of digital service companies to rethink their strategy, processes and offerings. Industry 4.0 will undoubtedly be both industrial, to meet the technological and environmental challenges of society, and “service-oriented”, to deliver the value expected by the market.

The time is no longer to question the supremacy of service in our economies but to create synergies, complementarities and even mergers between the two.

Services have historically been defined by default as activities that cannot be classified in industry or agriculture according to the usual INSEE nomenclature. Economic science has been particularly concerned with approaching a definition of service, with the desire to move beyond the debate between material and immaterial and productive and unproductive, and by focusing more on the conditions and characteristics of service production 7. While it remains ambitious to try to define service, it is still necessary to understand it. Two complementary angles, the organizational angle and the market angle, can contribute to understanding it.