CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE FUNCTIONAL OF SERVICE ENTERPRISES: A VIEW FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to conceptualize the functional of the service enterprise as a category that enables the study of the functional structure of the service sector and the assessment of its correspondence to the objectives of implementing sustainable development models. The relevance stems from the growing role of the services sector and the need to reconsider the function of services – from a residual category to a system-forming factor in the development of the socio-economic system. Achieving this purpose required solving a set of interrelated tasks: revealing the specificity of the service enterprise as an economic entity; distinguishing the systemic functions of the enterprise from its internal, managerial functions; establishing the relationship between the concepts of «function», «functional», «functional potential», and «functioning»; and clarifying how the systemic function of an individual enterprise is connected to sectoral effects and the implementation of development models.

It is substantiated that the specificity of the service enterprise is determined by the nature of the service, and that its systemic function – as a role in the reproduction of the system – differs fundamentally from internal management functions, which serve as the means of its realization. A conceptual apparatus is proposed in which the function appears as a type of systemic role, the functional as the structural profile of the systemic functions of services, the functional potential as the resource basis for their performance at the enterprise level, and functioning as the process of their realization. It is shown that the systemic function of an individual enterprise, through the aggregation of the functions of enterprises of different types, forms the functional of the sector, which has a multiplicative effect on the implementation of development models.

The scientific novelty lies in the conceptualization of the functional as a category representing the structural profile of the systemic functions of services and in the delineation of related concepts by levels of analysis. The practical significance of the results is that the proposed apparatus makes it possible to study the functional structure of the service sector and to assess its correspondence to the objectives of implementing sustainable development models.