Designing servicescapes for transformative service conversations: lessons from mental health services

Purpose Dyadic services research has increasingly focused on helping providers facilitate transformative service conversations with consumers. Extant research has thoroughly documented the conversational skills that providers can use to facilitate consumer microtransformations (i.e. small changes in consumers’ thoughts, feelings and action plans toward their well-being goals). At the same time, extant research has largely neglected the role of servicescape design in transformative service conversations despite some evidence of its potential significance. To redress this oversight, this article aims to examine how servicescape design can be used to better facilitate consumer microtransformations in dyadic service conversations. Design/methodology/approach This article is based on an interpretive study of mental health services (i.e. counseling, psychotherapy and coaching). Both providers and consumers were interviewed about their lived experiences of service encounters. Informants frequently described the spatial and temporal dimensions of their service encounters as crucial to their experiences of service encounters. These data are interpreted through the lens of servicescape design theory, which disentangles servicescape design effects into dimensions, strategies, tactics, experiences and outcomes. Findings The data reveal two servicescape design strategies that help facilitate consumer microtransformations. “Service sequestration” is a suite of spatial design tactics (e.g., private offices) that creates strong consumer protections for emotional risk-taking. “Service serialization” is a suite of temporal design tactics (e.g., recurring appointments) that creates predictable rhythms for emotional risk-taking. The effects of service sequestration and service serialization on consumer microtransformations are mediated by psychological safety and psychological readiness, respectively. Practical implications The article details concrete servicescape design tactics that providers can use to improve consumer experiences and outcomes in dyadic service contexts. These tactics can help promote consumer microtransformations in the short run and consumer well-being in the long run. Originality/value This article develops a conceptual model of servicescape design strategies for transformative service conversations. This model explains how and why servicescape design can influence consumer microtransformations. The article also begins to transfer servicescape design tactics from mental health services to other dyadic services that seek to facilitate consumer microtransformations. Examples of such services include career counseling, divorce law, financial advising, geriatric social work, nutrition counseling, personal styling and professional organizing.

‘What is immediate and obvious feels real’: National identity and emotional vulnerabilities in the field

This article provides a critical reflection on methodological issues at the interface of researcher national identity and emotional vulnerability. This aspect of social research is often neglected in discussions of positionality, primarily in relation to emotional risk in the field, and here we address this gap in the literature. Rather than reflecting on access and rapport, or issues related to the complexities of insider or outsider research, the national identity of the researcher is considered alongside emotional entanglements experienced in the field. The emotion work that is performed, and the emotional risks that are experienced by the researcher as a consequence of nationality reveal much about the complexities of identity and power relations in the field. The fieldwork informing this article was undertaken as part of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study (ES/N019423/1) that examined how seafarers from different ethnic and faith backgrounds interact with each other on board and how their religious/spiritual and welfare needs are addressed ashore.

Emotional risk assessments in the field: Leaving Tanzania during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article provides a narrative account of one anthropologist's experiences in the field at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The account is based on the researcher's field diary and digital communication, supplemented by online news reports from the period March to May 2020. The researcher's emotional assessments of the risks that COVID-19 posed to herself and others around her stood in sharp contrast to the way her interlocutors in the field responded to the virus. The article makes a case for the empirical value of a researcher's emotions, especially in moments of confusion and feelings of disconnection, in order to understand varying risk perceptions. This article moreover draws attention to the experiences of people living outside the initial epicentres of the pandemic. Many Tanzanians perceived COVID-19 as just one risk among many in their already uncertain daily lives.

The development of personality qualities of future officers of law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation

The article is devoted to the problems of the development of the emotional and volitional sphere within the framework of the formation of the personal subjectivity of the future officers of Russia. The authors draw attention to the area of concern of appropriate assessment of the situation in conditions of constant changes and the dependence of the subjectivity on rational and emotional risk factors when making a decision by the commander. The main methods were studying. systematizing and making conclusions on literature sources concerning the stated problem of the study. preparing proposals. The article presents an analysis of the data of various researchers on the problem of the formation of personal subjectivity of a person.

Vulnerability and Trust

The paper outlines an attempt at phenomenological description of two intermingled dimensions of human vulnerability. First, vulnerability understood as an essential dimension in the constitution of embodiment and second, vulnerability in regard to trust, as a form of emotive interpersonal disposition. In either case, vulnerability does not only refer to mere physical fragility but to the situational horizon where from emerge progressive anticipations of “possible harm”. According to this account, vulnerability appears as a practical horizon of emotional awareness of risk involving not only bodily fragility but a dimension of concrete existence of individual persons, namely, the intimate affectation of being harmed, injured or deprived or a practical aim. In this context the paper claims for a second and more radical sense of vulnerability that problematize the classical account of emotive protentionality, following Anthony Steinbock´s description of moral emotions. In this regard, vulnerability of trust involves an emotional risk and fragility that opens to consideration a dimension of human existence revealing human persons in their absolute and individual concreteness.