A Postdigital Perspective on Service Work: Salespeople’s Service Encounters in the Connected Store

Covid-19 has disrupted global markets, accelerated the digital transformation of frontline service, and changed how service organisations, frontline service employees, and consumers interact. This article explores how digitalisation is changing retail service work from a postdigital perspective. The article draws on an ethnography of salespeople’s service encounters in speciality chain stores between July 2015 and August 2021. Using a practice theory framework (the theory of practice architectures), the article explores what conditions form salespeople’s service encounters in connected stores and how retail organisations’ digitalisation of frontline service changes salespeople’s practice of service encounters. The contributions of this article to the ongoing debate over the digitalisation of service work are twofold. On the theoretical plane, the article provides an alternative framework to labour process theory for exploring and describing service work organised around digital technologies. Secondly, it uncovers the conditions that are changing salespeople’s practice of service encounters, along with attributes associated with service work and emotional labour skills. The research shows that the connected service encounter is characterised by postdigital dialogue that involves new roles and skills in frontline service work. Overall, the findings contribute to a better understanding of how digitalisation changes action and interaction in service encounters from an employee perspective.

Analisis Kualitas Pelayanan Penerbitan Rekomendasi Izin Usaha Mikro Pada Kantor Camat Lae Parira Kabupaten Dairi

The purpose of the study was to determine and analyze the quality of service for issuing micro business license recommendations and their constraints at the Lae Parira sub-district office, Dairi Regency. The research method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method, which is a method that only describes situations and events that aims to systematically describe the characteristics of a population or certain fields in a factual and accurate manner without looking for or explaining a relationship. The results of the study found that the quality of service for issuing recommendations for micro business licenses at the Lae Parira District Office of Dairi Regency was still not good. This can be seen from the complaints of the public or micro business actors who require licensing recommendations so that the general public has a negative view or picture of the agency. The constraint factors faced in improving the quality of services for issuing recommendations for micro business licenses are: the presence of officers who seek to obtain personal benefits from the licensing recommendation service process, employees do not try to avoid a negative public image of the institution so that many people are reluctant to deal with business administration, and lack of employee commitment to improving service quality so that employees tend to prioritize personal matters over service work to the community

Keeping the master cool, every day, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India

This article studies how the distribution of the work of punkah-pulling in European households and barracks of colonial India involved European masters making gradually multiplying claims on their servants’ labouring time and how these claims fared in practice. The laborious task of punkah-pulling in such establishments was often resisted by native servants on counts of caste, custom or simply exhaustion. In the context of such conflicts, this article tries to understand how the colonial state and its legal and regulatory functions mediated the contested terrain of domestic and service work over the nineteenth century. Over the latter half of this century, punkah-pulling became a separate occupation, even as this occupation slid down the hierarchy of service work and became a more pronounced target of recurring racial violence. Against this background, the article also tries to grapple with the material limits encountered by the regimes of work involved in the cheap, day-and-night conduct of punkah-pulling that eventually led up to the acceptance of mechanised alternatives.

Individuals

This chapter argues against constraining education by considering society’s needs for particular types of workers. Ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, individual development has been confined (and distorted) by the demands of the labor market. Although standard economic defenses of liberal education fail, contemporary shifts in that market offer opportunities for attuning education to individual needs. Specifically, with increasing automation, a revaluation of service work can offer young people far greater chances for leading fulfilling lives. This theme is developed by arguing for widespread involvement of adults in the education of younger generations.

Crowd-Based Accountability: Examining How Social Media Commentary Reconfigures Organizational Accountability

Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era.

The ethics of service work in a neoliberal healthcare context: doing embodied and “dirty” emotional labor

PurposeThe authors explore how service workers negotiate emotional laboring with “dirty” emotions while trying to meet the demands of neoliberal healthcare. In doing so, the authors theorize emotional labor in the context of healthcare as a type of embodied and emotional “dirty” work.Design/methodology/approachThe authors apply interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to their data collected from National Health Service (NHS) workers in the United Kingdom (UK).FindingsThe authors’ data show that healthcare service workers absorb, contain and quarantine emotional “dirt”, thereby protecting their organization at a cost to their own well-being. Workers also perform embodied practices to try to absolve themselves of their “dirty” labor.Originality/valueThe authors extend research on emotional “dirty” work and theorize that emotional labor can also be conceptualized as “dirty” work. Further, the authors show that emotionally laboring with “dirty” emotions is an embodied phenomenon, which involves workers absorbing and containing patients' emotional “dirt” to protect the institution (at the expense of their well-being).

Creating Meaningfulness in Public Service Work: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Public and Nonprofit Managers’ Experience of Work

Public service work and public-serving institutions are evolving by incorporating neoliberal modes of working more and more. Contemporary research oftentimes neglects to account for these changes in how we understand public service work, however. This article draws on the meaningfulness in work and public service motivation literature to explore how public service workers are making sense of their work and work environments to create meaningful work experiences under evolving conditions. The findings from 45 interviews with public and nonprofit managers are presented and compared. The changing world of work has implications for how public and nonprofit workers narrate and find meaningfulness in work but not what they find meaningful about their work. The findings suggest that both public and nonprofit workers create positive meaningfulness in work but in dissimilar ways. The findings also suggest that organizational leaders play a substantial part in workers’ meaningfulness-making process. The findings hold theoretical and practical implications for understanding the role workplaces and organizational leaders play in workers’ experience of meaningful public service work.