Service work scholarship has insufficiently acknowledged the diversity of interactive frontline occupational categories within organizations. Nor has it paid enough attention to how frontline workers act collectively to deal with the structural contradictions in the service labor process to actually produce a service. This article studies both these questions using Anselm Strauss’ conceptual framework, articulation work. Based on in-depth qualitative research in a major French bank, this article highlights the power relations between two distinct groups of frontline employees responsible for managing customer complaints. It shows how these groups arrange temporary solutions to the structural tensions underpinning their activities. In doing so, this article makes two contributions to service work theory. First, it provides a more detailed picture of the service triangle which is enlarged by these arrangements between different groups of frontline workers. Second, it shows how lateral relations between frontline workers can contribute to the making of a “fragile service social order.”

The article discusses the impact of organizational configurations on employees’ training capabilities. Inspired by the capability approach, it uses qualitative data to question under what organizational conditions firms in France provide their employees with the opportunities and means to participate not just in training programmes, but in those programmes they have reason to value. The results suggest the existence of three different training models – skill-updating, skill-developing and capability-enhancing – depending on the choice processes involved, the importance they accord to employee agency, and the training outcomes. While human resource policies offering training opportunities are important in French organizations, enabling individual capability ultimately depends on employee participation schemes. The article further argues that this goal cannot be achieved through collective voice alone; in vocational training, individual voice plays an equally central role.

No abstract

Research on interactive service work has paid close attention to how organizations and frontline employees deal with the inherent complexity of the customeremployee-employer triangle. This raises questions about the agency of interactive service workers with respect to the indeterminacy of service interactions.Our meta-narrative review finds that the theorization of worker agency in service interactions remains underdeveloped in the two dominant research streams of mainstream management and labour process theory studies. Implicitly or explicitly, these streams either subsume agency under managerial prescription or view it through the binary polar of control and resistance. There has been less focus on service workers' efforts to overcome practical difficulties in everyday service interactions. To address this lacuna, we offer a conceptual framework that draws on a less prominent, third research stream, which we label pragmatist. This stream includes scholarship largely unfamiliar to the international Englishspeaking community, published mainly in French and German academic journals. We propose three contributions in this paper. First, we contribute to the interactive service work literature by mapping the theoretical plurality within and beyond the English-speaking community. Second, we problematize established streams of research by articulating the intellectual axes of the field; this allows us to present a new research area to account for the concrete dynamics of service interaction and to capture frontline employee agency. Third, we propose a pragmatist research framework coupled with a future research agenda more attentive to the embeddedness and materiality of frontline workers' situated actions. This way, we address the indeterminacy of interactive situations.

Purpose -The aim of this paper is to introduce the special issue of the International Journal of Manpower on capabilities, work and human resource policies and practices. After presenting the main concepts of the capability approach, inspired by Amartya Sen's work, the paper goes on to review the major findings of the contributions to this issue. Design/methodology/approach -Bringing together economists and sociologists, the special issue develops a relevant range of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Findings -The special issue adopts the capability approach as a yardstick to assess corporate policies from the combined perspective of economic and human development. It asks how firms can contribute to developing sustainable human capabilities at work. Originality/value -Human resource management is mainly oriented towards optimising workers' labour for the benefit of employers and shareholders. The papers in this issue provide some well-documented suggestions on how to break with a reductionist understanding of employees as "human capital", considered from the sole viewpoint of economic efficiency, by introducing a shift in perspective towards an integrated approach, embracing both economic and human development.