Situating service work in action: A review and a pragmatist agenda for analysing interactive service work

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.

Social interactions at work: why interactive work should be an analytical category in its own right

“…This plea is in line with the recent work of Vincent et al (2020) highlighting the benefits of combining different (theoretical) approaches with a view to developing a better and more contextualised understanding of practices governing the world of work and involving contexts at different analytical levels. It is also in line with the recent demand of Schneider et al (2022) to advance theorybuilding on interactive work.…”

“…First, the scope to engage with questions of worker agency and the ways in which workers deal with the uncertainty inherent to social interactions with customers is quite limited (Subramanian and Suquet, 2018). Second, the debates mainly focus on the social order, sometimes neglecting the interaction order embedded in this social order (Schneider et al. , 2022).…”

“…According to Böhle and Weihrich (2020), the best way to reduce the uncertainty and imponderability inherent to interactive work is to develop “experiential knowledge” helping workers to gauge what customers demand – a precondition to successful service transactions. In the same vein, in a recent paper, Schneider et al. (2022) introduce the concepts of sensemaking and resourcing to describe how interactive workers perform their work.…”

“…According to B€ ohle and Weihrich (2020), the best way to reduce the uncertainty and imponderability inherent to interactive work is to develop "experiential knowledge" helping workers to gauge what customers demanda precondition to successful service transactions. In the same vein, in a recent paper, Schneider et al (2022) introduce the concepts of sensemaking and resourcing to describe how interactive workers perform their work. The former refers to the constant decoding of structures throughout the course of the interaction with a view to adopting a certain path or action, while the latter highlights worker agency and their ability to draw upon structures to legitimise their action.…”

“…A similar demand was recently voiced by Schneider et al (2022). Contending that worker agency has remained under-theorised in existing service work research, their meta-narrative review introduces the concepts of sense-making and resourcing to describe how interactive workers skilfully deal with the contingencies of working with other people.…”