European Journal of Service Management

The contemporary economy, including the service sector, is exposed to strong, violent and unexpected impacts (shocks, crises, challenges, opportunities) of an internal and external nature. The purpose of the paper presented here is to attempt to characterize and classify service activities in the light of Taleb’s concept, who divided all existing real things into three categories: fragile, robust, and antifragile. Each of these types of things react differently to changes, especially those least expected and leading to fundamental changes, called by Taleb “black swans”. The conditions of such changes in relation to the service activities were given. Also were determined general features of consumer, business, and public services according to fragility, robustness and antifragility, as well as some examples of them. The statements contained in the article are hypotheses, but according to the author, sufficiently justified by the current state of knowledge.