Customers at Work

New Perspectives on Interactive Service Work

W. Dunkel, F. Kleemann, W. Dunkel, F. Kleemann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137293244
• eBook ISBN: 9781137293251
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Explores the ongoing transformation of service relationships, focusing on the incorporation of the customer's active contribution to virtually all aspects and stages of the production process. This volume illuminates social relations and interaction between customers and service providers as well as between the users of web-based services.

Part I

Introduction

1

Customers in Service Relationships: About This Book

Wolfgang Dunkel and Frank Kleemann

In the pre-industrial age, production was controlled by guilds and quality standards were determined by the richest. In those days, a king as customer was the supreme goal of the guildsman producer, but with the emergence of mass production for mass markets in the late nineteenth century, the relationship between rich and poor consumers was turned on its head. Suddenly, there was much more money and prestige to be gained in selling middling goods to the masses than exceptional goods to the rich. This was the first great transformation of the relationship between producers and consumers – the era when the great mass of customers became ‘king’ and when serving this new king’s wishes became the supreme goal of producers.

This first transformation entailed a separation of the consumer from the production process, for traditionally the customer told the craftsman face-to-face what he needed. Hardly any pre-industrial age products existed that were not the product of this kind of personal interaction. Early manufacturers, however, knew only vaguely what kinds of products would sell. Innovators interested in designing new products were forced to turn to new survey techniques developed by pioneer social scientists such as Charles Coolidge Parlin (the man who coined the phrase ‘the customer is king’) for ascertaining the preferences of the masses. With the perfection of mass manufacturing of goods designed to satisfy scientifically assayed consumer preferences, the first transformation of the social relations of production and consumption had reached the end of its development by the 1920s.

This book is not about that first transformation of the relationship between the producer and consumer. It focuses rather on the second great transformation, which followed and is still underway: the incorporation of the customer’s own work into all aspects and stages of the production process. After the perfection of mass production in the 1920s, when the customer was enthroned as a passive consumer of goods produced in a physical location, we now find everywhere that the customer has been integrated into the production process. Customers no longer passively consume things made by others but very often consume products that they produced themselves in part. Although this striking development has much to do with the rise of the service sector and the accompanying rise of self-service innovations, the second transformation of the customer is in no way confined to familiar forms of self-service. Yes, the second transformation has the ‘king’ consumer getting out of his car to fill his own gas tank, has her following step-by-step the pictorial instructions for assembling her new IKEA shelves, and has her carrying her own food tray back to the kitchen after lunch. But it also has him – and millions more like him – designing his own computer at Dell Inc., contributing ideas in a ‘crowdsourced’ design contest, and writing product reviews that greatly enhance the value of the amazon.com website. The customer is still king, but someone has persuaded these kings to do much of the work of production. Moreover, the customer is still interacting with service providers directly, for example in personal services such as caregiving, consulting, hairdressing, teaching, and so on. Yet, the service relationship has changed in many ways, giving rise, for example, to the situation in which increasingly ‘professionalized’ customers interact with ‘de-professionalized’ professional service providers. A good example is the physician who interacts with patients who are increasingly able to obtain scientific information over the Internet about their ailment, becoming experts on their own disease. In these and many other ways, service providers and service receivers are constantly creating new forms of cooperation.

This book is about service interactions as they are integrated into the production and delivery of services today. In a combination of theoretical exploration and practical illustration, its focus is on the relationships of service work. It looks not at the outputs of the service sector per se but at the wider processes of producing goods and services through the combined interaction of service workers and service consumers. Recent research on service interaction, informed by the German sociology of work tradition, has shown that these relationships are undergoing a profound change and that these changes will most definitely shape how we will work in the future, for two reasons.

First, service work is an interactive, cooperative process between customers and service workers. It is an important means of creating efficiencies of production and of increasing profits. The fact that successful cooperation is not at all easy to achieve, given that it must arise in the absence of employment contracts and hierarchies, makes it all the more valuable for those few organizations who figure it out. One of the main causes of the difficulty in customer–worker cooperation stems from the fact that this is a form of social interaction with its own laws and peculiar set of hurdles. This book thus places a special focus on precisely the social aspects of interactive work in the service relationship from the point of view of the service worker, the service company, and the customer. We highlight the basic social challenges impeding successful interactive service work and review cases in which these challenges are overcome.

Second, interactive service work, which allows customers to participate in design and production, is changing traditional thinking about the definition and boundaries of industrial production. Service sector companies were the first to take customer interaction seriously, but as it turns out, service interactions represented a kind of gate through which customers began to enter into the halls of production, even industrial production. After innovations in web communication technology and social norms made it possible for thousands of consumers to collaborate virtually, interaction with (potential) customers is now a widespread reality at all levels and stages of production for many firms. Companies increasingly understand the implications of this shift and are learning to utilize the work effort of customers systematically. Being deliberately integrated into an organization as ‘informal’ workers, customers are obtaining an historically unparalleled role in the process of value creation. Web-based, self-service structures, in particular, create opportunities for both a new kind of company–customer relationship and enhanced possibilities for customer-to-customer interaction.

This book brings together work conducted by many of the researchers who have been instrumental in putting customer-related topics onto the agenda in the sociology of work in Germany. Traditionally, industrial sociology and the sociology of work have paid little attention to customers, being focused more narrowly on industrial production, the corporate regulation of work processes, or employment. Researchers became curious about the role of customers only after they stopped seeing services as distinctly separate from goods, important only as a support for production. Services came to be understood as a productive process in their own right, as a cooperative process in which different actors, including customers, participate. For this reason, customers have become interesting for everyone who wants to understand the social relations of modern economies because they are quite clearly a key actor for the production and delivery of services.

The contributions to this volume draw from and contribute to five separate international debates. First, they broaden the discussion of ‘service work,’ which has focused in the past on personal services performed by untrained or company-trained employees at the bottom of the careerstatus hierarchy. These workers have been called the ‘service proletariat’ (Macdonald and Sirianni, 1996), whose tasks are regarded as ‘front line work’ (cf. Frenkel et al., 1999) or as ‘interactive service work’ (Leidner, 1993). Second, because the contributions make repeated reference to issues of the corporate regulation of service work, they are linked to the labor process debate (cf. Warhurst et al., 2009; Thompson and Smith, 2010), to the ‘emotional labor’ approach (Hochschild, 1983), and to Korczynski’s ideas about the ‘enchanting myth of customer sovereignty’ (2002, 2009a). All of these approaches explore the consequences of corporate strategies for service interaction. Third, because some contributions analyze relevant aspects of work processes, they also touch on bodily and habitual aspects of service work that have been the subject of recent discussion (cf. Nickson et al., 2001, 2005; Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006; McDowell, 2009). Parallels exist also with theories of social change such as Alvin Toffler’s (1980) ‘prosumer’ concept or George Ritzer’s (1993) ‘McDonaldization of Society.’ Finally, a theme running through many contributions is the significant impact on services brought about by the Internet and Internet-related phenomena. The relevant debates have centered on the potential for harnessing customers for innovation and have focused on ‘open innovation’ (Chesbrough, 2003), ‘user innovation’ (von Hippel, 2005), consumers’ constitutive role in innovation (von Hippel, 1988), and the new quality of networking and social production by users of web 2.0 technology (cf. Benkler, 2006; Tapscott and Williams, 2006).

Sociologists are by no means the only ones debating the changing role of customers in service work. In the past few years, an international movement to establish an interdisciplinary field of service science has been gaining momentum, spurred by IBM’s Service Science, Management, Engineering (SSME) initiative (Spohrer et al., 2007) and inspired by discussions of ‘service-dominant logic’ (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008). Milestones in the development of this proposed discipline include the programmatic Cambridge White Paper (IfM and IBM, 2008), several new handbooks (see, for example, Maglio et al., 2010; Gallouj and Djellal, 2010) and the new journal, Service Science.

From the perspective of service research as practiced in the social sciences, however, the new ‘service science’ has a few deficits. In its search for solutions to the challenges arising from the current transformation of service-based economies, it focuses narrowly on the fields of technology, especially on information technology, and on the role services play in business productivity. Service science also tends to focus on a narrow range of services, namely knowledge-intensive, technology-based services provided by large corporations. The perspectives, interests, and options of individual companies are the driving interest; the perspectives, interests, and options of other actors involved in service provision, including employees and customers, and issues related to general social relations are less well illuminated.

In this book, we offer a social science approach to service work that is not limited to the service proletariat or to Internet-based knowledge work. Its ambition is to shed light on social relations between customers and service providers as they interact in every conceivable kind of service relationship. All the contributions in this volume have been materially or ideally supported by the Social Science Service Research initiative or ‘3sR’ (www.3sresearch.de; see also the contribution in this volume by Bienzeisler and Dunkel). 3sR is an informal initiative of social scientists highly active in the field of service research. Recent publications of 3sR contributors, in German and English, include Service as Interaction (Dunkel and Voß, 2004), The Working Customer (Voß and Rieder, 2005), The Customer in the Service Relationship (Jacobsen and Voswinkel, 2005), The Corporeality of Social Action (Böhle and Weihrich, 2010), Management of Hybrid Systems of Value Creation (Ganz and Bienzeisler, 2010), New Forms of Collaborative Innovation and Production on the Internet: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Wittke and Hanekop, 2011), Enterprises in Web 2.0: The Strategic Integration of Consumer Activities through Social Media (Kleemann et al., 2012), Interactive Work: The Theory, Practice, and Design of Service Relationships (Dunkel and Weihrich, 2012). The 3sR initiative promotes service research that draws on theories and methods of the social sciences and helps to develop a critical view of current trends in the service economy. A first step toward this goal was the organization of a large conference in early 2012 to discuss the state of current social science research on services. This book brings together many of the core findings of the 3sR group and offers them for the first time to an international audience.

Chapter contents

This first, introductory section of the book is continued in Chapter 2 by Heike Jacobsen with her overview, ‘Social Research on Services and Service Work in Germany.’ She argues that we are seeing a diminishment of the earlier, single-minded focus on production, which had been particularly evident both in German society and in German social science. New ways of looking at services and at the role of customers and users of services are now common. Looking back on the milestones in this development beginning in the early 1980s, the author answers three questions. First, how has the increasing dominance of the tertiary sector been measured and explained? In her answer, she discusses the critical reception of Berger and Offe’s thesis that services are best analyzed in terms of their supportive function for production. Second, how does Germany stand, in international comparison, in terms of the development of its service sector? In the recent past, Germany’s service sector was usually characterized as relatively backward, but today, the good economic performance of the German model has thrust attention upon the success that German companies have had in combining industry and services. This success, she argues, has been purchased at the price of poorer working conditions, especially in service jobs. Third, how has the sociology of work treated the subject of service work? The author reviews this history, beginning with issues related to salaried employees and the improvement of service efficiency and going on to a discussion of the current research topics of interactive and knowledge-based work. She argues that research on services has arrived in the mainstream of industrial sociology and of the sociology of work and closes with recommendations regarding the elements that should be included in any sociological theory of services.

Part I of this book concludes with a short overview of the institutional basis of service research in Germany and the position of German social science resources within these structures. Bernd Bienzeisler and Wolfgang Dunkel discuss, in Chapter 3, the rationale underlying the German national government’s financial support for service research, arguing that it is motivated mainly by the goal of strengthening Germany’s service sector but is nevertheless open to funding a variety of social science topics, including many that harmonize well with the goals of the 3sR initiative. The 3sR research program is described here, too, in some detail.

The remaining chapters of the book are grouped into three more parts, each addressing an important aspect of the transformation of service relations. Part II concerns itself with customers and service workers in the work setting. The authors of its three chapters present results from a research project on service work in the hotel industry, elder care, and infrastructure services for train stations. In each case, work tasks are investigated from the perspective of each member of the service triangle: the service company, the service-providing employee, and the service receiver. The focus of study, however, is the characteristics and framing conditions of direct contact between service provider and service receiver. What defines this relationship is that the service provider and the customer must cooperate if they want a service to be performed. This cooperation is addressed by the notion of ‘interactive work.’¹ Customers are viewed as autonomous agents in the service relationship, an important subject for research in their own right. This corrects the tendency, common in earlier sociological studies of service work, of overlooking the customer’s contribution to work outcomes (Korczynski, 2009b).

In Chapter 4, the opening contri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Customers and Service Workers at Work
• Part III: Working on Customers
• Part IV: Working Customers – Self-Service and Web 2.0
• Author Index
• Subject Index