Customers at Work New Perspectives on Interactive Service Work

by Dunkel, Wolfgang; Kleemann, Frank

• ISBN13: 9781137293244
• ISBN10: 1137293241
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-07-26
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Customers at Work is about 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 between customers and service providers as they interact in any kind of service relationship. It presents sociological approaches that provide new insights into the debates about service proletariat and internet-based knowledge work. Recent research on service interaction, informed by the German sociology of work tradition, highlights profound changes in service relationships that will shape the quality of future service work. The authors of this volume bring together many of these recent core findings and offer them in a combination of theoretical exploration and empirical analysis to an international audience for the first time.

Author Biography

Wolfgang Dunkel is a Researcher at the Institute for Social Science Research, ISF München, Germany. He studied sociology at the University of Munich and has published widely in the field of interactive service work. His research interests also include service science, work and health, and methods of qualitative research.

Frank Kleemann is Visiting Professor of the Sociology of Work, Occupations and Organizations at the Department of Sociology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He is a sociologist of work and was educated at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on service, knowledge and communication work in its daily practice.

Table of Contents

PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Customers in Service Relationships: About This Book; Wolfgang Dunkel and Frank Kleemann
2. Social Research on Services and Service Work in Germany – From the 'Service Gap' to Service Professionalism; Heike Jacobsen
3. The Structure of Institutional Support For German Service Research; Bernd Bienzeisler and Wolfgang Dunkel
PART II: CUSTOMERS AND SERVICE WORKERS AT WORK
4. Interactive Work: a Theoretical and Empirical Approach to the Study of Service Interactions; Wolfgang Dunkel and Margit Weihrich
5. Management by Customers and Customer Control: (Im-)Balances of Power in Interactive Service Work; Tom Birken, Wolfgang Menz and Nick Kratzer
6. Interaction in Service Relationships: the Customer's Point of View; Anna Hoffmann and Margit Wehrich
PART III: WORKING ON CUSTOMERS
7. The Functional and the Personal Customer; Stephan Voswinkel
8. 'Subjectifying Action' as a Specific Mode of Working with Customers; Fritz Böhle
PART IV: WORKING CUSTOMERS – SELF SERVICE AND WEB 2.0
8. The Working Customer – a Fundamental Change in Service Work; Kerstin Rieder and G. Günter Voß
9. Customers Working for Customers: Collaborative Web 2.0 Services; Heidemarie Hanekop, Volker Wittke
10. Prosumption of Social Context in Web 2.0: Theoretical Implications for the Prosumer Concept; Tabea Beyreuther, Christian Eismann, Sabine Hornung and Frank Kleemann