The Customer as Contested Terrain

2.9 The Customer as Contested Terrain

The idea that the delivery of emotional labour adds to workers’ sense of self and helps to shape their values, ethics and interconnections with others, suggests that workers construct their own meanings of the customer and customer service. If management seek to inculcate certain norms, workers are also active in the creation of customer-related norms (Korczynski, Shire, Frenkel and Tam 2000). Korczynski et al (2000:

671) argue that in seeking to achieve the dual goals of “customer-orientation and efficiency management will prefer workers to identify with a collective, disembodied concept of the customer”. Conversely, workers “may be more likely to identify with embodied, individual customers, for service workers interactions with specific customers may be an important arena for meaning and satisfaction in work” (ibid).

This idea that workers want to connect with individual customers was supported by Korczynski’s (2002) research into call centres in Australia, Japan and the USA. He found that a very clear pattern emerged of workers volunteering that they enjoyed the job best when they could help people and that:

When asked for particular examples of satisfying incidents, front-line workers tend to talk of ‘this old man’, or ‘this nice woman’. In other words, they are relating to the service recipient primarily as socially embedded people, rather than as customers (Korczynski 2002: 77).

Korczynski et al (2000: 684) noted that this tension between managements’

“disembodied customer” and workers’ “embodied customer” became particularly apparent when management attempted to introduce elements of sales into the predominately service jobs. The result, quite frequently, was a heightened degree of conflict and resistance within the employment relationship. They argued that this is because sales work involves a more instrumental approach to the customer which is much more in line with management’s disembodied concept of the customer (2000:

672). The move to a sales focus in a number of areas of front-line service work,

including retail banking, has implications for the “experience of work in consumer capitalism in terms of satisfaction, control and resistance” and needs to be further analysed (Korczynski et al 2000: 672).

Indeed, very little research has been conducted into the ways in which workers resist management’s attempts to reshape notions of customer service and re-conceptualise the ‘customer’. Wray-Bliss and Willmott (1999: 387) have identified how call centre workers wanting to resist management’s increased emphasis on sales drew on a ‘discourse of customer service’ as a counter-argument to the pressures of meeting sales targets. Similarly, in their study of a large supermarket chain, Rosenthal et al (1997) uncovered evidence that employees used the language and concepts of the recently instigated ‘Service Excellence’ program to bring managers into line with worker expectations. In both cases workers were drawing on managerial discourses of the customer to resist changes in management strategy. Wray-Bliss and Willmott (1999: 387) suggest that, by drawing on management discourse, workers continue ‘to tie’ themselves to the image of the sovereign customer and to privilege customer needs over their own needs. Yet Rosenthal et al (1997: 499) conclude that when the supermarket clerks in their study drew on the managerial discourse of ‘service excellence’:

It was management’s treatment of staff, as opposed to customers, that employees typically said they resisted through the language of Service Excellence. Thus the quality discourse had not had the effect of replacing employees’ self-concern with a monolithic attention to customers.

In this way the supermarket workers were able to use the ‘service excellence’

discourse to promote their own needs and expectations as workers.

It can be argued that the ideal of the ‘embodied customer’ offers workers both a source of job satisfaction and a discursive tool with which to resist changes to their role which are the result of managerial strategy that is centred around notions of a

‘disembodied customer’. This would seem to be particularly the case when management is seeking to privilege the sales role above the service role. It could be argued that rather than wholeheartedly embracing the managerial discourse of the

‘sovereign customer’ the call centre workers in Wray-Bliss and Willmott’s (1999) study were drawing on the concept of an ‘embodied customer’. Indeed, Wray-Bliss (2001: 53) has recently suggested that it is possible to view the call centre clerks’ use

of an oppositional ‘discourse of customer service’ as a result of being “emotionally involved and feeling the need to resist” and that this moral/political discourse is potentially radically unsettling for organisations. This reaffirms the idea that service workers’ preferred concept of an individual, ‘embodied customer’ offers them the possibility of both satisfaction from their work and an ethical position from which to resist changes to their role, which could undermine a sense of identity. By identifying the contradictions within a management discourse that centres around the concept of the ‘disembodied’ customer, workers can secure a sense of their own significance by drawing on their own concept of an ‘embodied’ customer. In their study of the introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM) into a British bank, Knights and McCabe (2000: 429) found that workers were able to exploit the inconsistencies and contradictions in management strategy and practice and that these acts of resistance enabled them to secure alternative identities that “facilitated resistance to the transformation of their subjectivity in line with corporation’s demands”. Despite the fact that Knights and McCabe’s (2000) appear to use identity here as if it was something independent of the subject, something to be taken up and used in its own right, their findings make an important link between resistance and subjectivity.

Understanding that worker resistance can be a response not just to changing work practices but also to attempts to reshape worker identity enables us to identify the complex range of responses that such resistance can take.

Since resistance to attempts by management to reshape worker subjectivity is unlikely to take the form of open and overt conflict, we need to be alert to more subtle and covert forms of resistance. As Fleming and Sewell (2002: 863) argue, “now that corporate power takes special care to target the informal and normative aspects of workers’ lives we could expect that to be a site of resistance too”. A number of studies have shown how resistance can take the form of cynicism (Fleming and Spicer 2003, Sturdy and Fineman 2001), irony and guile (Fleming and Sewell 2002), internalised stress-based reactions (Sturdy and Fineman 2001), alternative interpretative repertoires (Knights and McCabe 2000), and humour (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999).

Workers may also draw on past discourses in order to resist present practices that threaten their identity. For example, in their study of the introduction of a re-engineering program into a manufacturing plant in Northern England, Ezzamel,

Willmott and Worthington (2001) illustrated the power of identity-investments in fuelling and directing workers’ understanding of, and response to, lean production initiatives. They argue that the worker resistance “sprung from an antagonism to practices that were sensed, or anticipated not only to intensify work but to impugn a valued sense of self-identity that had developed during a previous era” (Ezzamel et al 2001: 1074). In resisting the changes being introduced through the re-engineering program, the workers were defending a past self that they considered to be more preferable.

Gabriel (1993) has observed that organisational members often adhere tenaciously to images of a ‘golden past’ when their identities are challenged as a result of the introduction of corporate change programmes or organisational restructures: However, “nostalgia is not a way of coming to terms with the past, but an attempt to come to terms with the present” (Gabriel 1993: 132). According to Strangleman (1999), it is not only workers who draw on nostalgia for a past, ‘golden age’: the past is passively and actively invoked by management as well. His research into the contemporary British railway industry demonstrates how “history and heritage are selectively annexed negatively in order to win consent for change, and positively as an attempt to recapture the ‘golden age of railways’ for marketing purposes” (Strangleman 1999: 725). As this thesis also demonstrates both management and workers draw on symbols, images and meanings from an imagined past in order to understand and shape present practices and to reposition the employment relationship itself.

In sum, while management draws on discourses from the past and present to construct ‘customers’, introduce new work practices, and shape worker identity, workers themselves are not simply passive recipients of these managerial discourses.

We need to recognise the active agency of workers in using their own and managerial discourses of the customer to add meaning to, and resist changes in, their roles and reinforce a preferred identity.

2.10 Conclusion

This chapter has provided an overview of a range of images and metaphors of the customer, with a particular emphasis on the way that these ‘customers’ influence managerial strategy, the employment relationship and worker identity. In many organisations the increasing focus on a ‘service culture’ has expanded the range of roles customers can either be given or choose to assume. Indeed, the literature examined in this chapter points to a set of diverse, fluid, contradictory and contested customer roles. As Rosenthal et al (2001: 30) argue: “these contrasting images reflect the potential complexity of the role played by the customer in contemporary organisations".

It is the image of the ‘sovereign customer’ that has been most influential in shaping managerial strategy over the past two decades. Conceptualising the ‘customer as king (or queen)’ is meant to create a culture in which staff are motivated to provide

‘excellent’ customer service, the idea being that this will give firms the competitive advantage they require. However, the experience of many customers falls well short of the ideal of the sovereign customer and the emphasis on ‘service excellence’ can have negative outcomes for service workers. For these reasons, a range of competing images of the customer has also begun to take hold in and around organisations.

The image of the ‘customer as ally’ has been drawn upon by customer advocacy groups and trade unions and this ideal of collectivised customers contrasts directly with the image of the individualised customer that lies at the heart of the notion of the

‘sovereign customer’. However, as we have seen the literature suggests that the potential influence of customers as allies is limited by their ability to act collectively and by the nature of the organisations in which they seek to bring about change.

Drawing on evidence from Australian retail banking this thesis highlights both the potential and limitations of a discourse that draws on the notion of the ‘customer as ally’.

Those writing in the service management literature have suggested that the customer can occupy the role of ‘co-producer’. In service work simultaneous production and consumption occur and this brings the customer in as a ‘co-producer’.

Whereas the service management literature focuses on ways in which management can increase the efficiency of the customer as ‘co-producer’, Bellemare (2000), writing from a critical perspective, highlights how customers may seek to influence

the consumption/production process in ways that best suits them and may in fact conflict with management’s goals.

A further body of literature primarily explores issues of customer presence and work control and highlights how in the three-way interaction between worker, customer and management, customers may take on the role of the ‘other boss’ in the service exchange. Examining how customers can take on the role of ‘co-producer’, or become the ‘other boss’, highlights the particular demands service work places on workers.

The contradictory effects that customers can have on workers is further highlighted in studies that identify the ways in which workers can be both constrained and empowered by their interactions with customers. Customers can help to simultaneously create tensions and spaces for workers (Korczynski 2002) and in this way be both a “friend and enemy” to customer service workers (Benson 1986: 6).

The complexities of and contradictions within the customer/worker/management triangle are also highlighted in the emotional labour literature, which shows how management can expect both customers and workers to ‘perform’ in certain ways during the service exchange. These ‘performances’ which are often informed by gender, ethnicity, and sexuality may either be highly staged-managed or spontaneous and impromptu, providing service workers with a great deal of job satisfaction and a positive sense of self. Building on these insights this thesis seeks to provide a better understanding of the links between workers desire ‘to do’ for the customer and worker identity.

There is also a growing body of evidence that workers’ do not simply draw on managerial discourses of the customer and customer service, but, rather are active in the construction of their own discourses of the customer. Korcyznski et al (2000) have highlighted how management would prefer workers to draw on a “collective, disembodied customer” whereas workers’ prefer to identify with an “individual embodied customer”. This idea of competing discourses of the customer helps us to identify how workers draw on their interactions with these ‘customers’ not only to reinforce their sense of who they are but also to resist management attempts to influence worker subjectivity. Identifying how customer and management discourses of the customer may either coincide or collide stands to enrich our understanding of worker subjectivity and resistance.

In considering the various concepts of the customer, attention has been drawn to the range of metaphors used by academics to assist them in presenting their particular concept of the customer. The chapter has identified a range of metaphors and images of the customer: some complementary, others contradictory. Rosenthal et al (2001:

32-33) suggest that the proliferation of metaphors of the customer in the literature may have as much to do with academic identity construction and differentiation as it does with seeking the “truest” or most “useful” metaphor of the customer. This may well be the case, but as they also argue, these differing images represent something rather more substantive than academic game playing. Their importance lies in the way that these multiple and shifting metaphors and images offer meaningful insights on organisations (Rosenthal et al, 2001: 33).

The following chapters in this thesis identify a range of metaphors of the customer used by management and workers in the large retail banks, credit unions and community banks. The thesis shows how use of a particular metaphor of the customer by management influences not only customer service strategy but also employment relations and worker identity. Workers within the case study organisations also drew on alternative metaphors of the customer to promote their preferred concepts of the customer and, at times, to resist the changes occurring to their customer service roles. The use of both complementary and contradictory metaphors of the customer by management and workers in the case study organisations highlights how the different organisations have adjusted to the significant structural change that has occurred in the retail banking industry. As we shall see, it also helps us to uncover emotions associated with organisational change (Dunford and Palmer 1996).

CHAPTER THREE