Governance of Smart Service Social Responsibility: A Systematic Literature Review

Smart technologies are reshaping service operations across sectors while raising critical concerns related to privacy, fairness, and accountability. Given the complexity of risks arising from interactions among diverse service agents, effective governance demands a holistic understanding of how responsibility is generated and managed within smart service ecosystems. To address these dynamics, we conduct a systematic literature review in order to establish a foundational understanding of smart service social responsibility (SSSR). We propose a novel “I-D-G” (identify-deconstruct-govern) framework, providing an integrated lens through which to analyze responsibility emergence, attribution, and governance in multiagent systems. Our review identifies key dimensions of responsibility, clarifies the roles and interactions of agents, and synthesizes governance practices along three pathways: technological governance, institutional regulation, and multiparty supervision. This study advances the literature on service, operations, and engineering management by offering a structured framework with which to enhance social responsibility and collaborative governance in smart service operations. Finally, we propose several future research directions to strengthen the adaptive and effective governance of SSSR from both theoretical and practical perspectives.