Some reflections on my career, publishing, and contributing significantly to a field

In this article the author provides an overview and a retrospective analysis of his over three-decade-long academic career and the evolution of his research during the course of that career. Within the broad overview and analysis of his career, he singles out and elaborates on his fifteen-year collaborative research on service quality (with colleagues Valarie Zeithaml and Len Berry), in order to illustrate the nature of a programmatic research stream on an important topic and the significant impact that such a research stream can have on a discipline’s knowledge base and practice. The author also derives a number of personal lessons from his reflections about his career and research, and discusses the implications of those lessons for researchers. He concludes the article with some general observations and recommendations about making significant contributions to a field