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This research attempts to understand why – or why not – customers resist switching service providers when a critical incident occurs. The paper examines how service relationship perceptions, such as perceived equity, trust (perceived reliability and benevolence) and relationship commitment (affective and calculative), enhance relationship maintenance and CSR in many critical situations.

A survey was conducted in the financial service industry on a sample of 1,999 consumers (retail banking) and then conceptualized and measured CSR in several critical situations.

The paper demonstrates that perceived equity, perceived reliability, perceived benevolence, affective commitment, and calculative commitment do not influence CSR the same way. CSR mainly depends on the type of critical incident which occurs. For instance, calculative commitment, which is an evaluation of the costs associated with leaving the service provider, enhances CSR in three critical situations (service encounter failures, employee responses to service failures, pricing problems), whereas it leads to relationship disengagement in two other critical situations (inconvenience, changes in the consumer or service provider situation).

This research highlights the need to better take into account the different types of critical incident discussed in the relationship marketing literature and to better consider the complementary roles of perceived equity, trust and relationship commitment in the service switching literature.

This research implies that service companies have to anticipate the critical incidents and to develop specific “shock absorbers” to continue doing business with their current customers.

This chapter analyzes the dynamics of crises. A crisis typically begins with the emergence of a critical situation, followed by poor leadership and mismanagement that precipitates the crisis itself. The causes of crises may be classified as natural, political, economic, financial, industry-specific and firm-specific. This chapter examines the causes and consequences of poor leadership and management in crises of different kinds. Firm-specific crisis is a surprisingly neglected topic. The failure of a firm may reflect external factors, for example, the decline of an industry, or internal factors, for example, management failures, or a combination of the two. The chapter explains firm-specific crisis in terms of firm-specific disadvantages, which are the opposite of the firm-specific advantages identified in internalization theory.

Worker perceptions of their emotional response to a supervisor, during an incident identified as of critical significance, are described and analyzed in this study. We invited 14 participants, aged from 39 to 56 years to share their stories with us in semi-structured interviews. The organizations represented by the workers’ stories included private business government and educational institutions. A grounded-theory approach was adopted to allow key themes to emerge (Locke, 1996). We encouraged participants to allow “buried perspectives” (Hochschild, 1983) to surface: as they interpreted the relational effects of “what happened” in retrospective sense making. As they explored their perceptions of these interactions, participants revealed the complex and disturbing array of emotions and frustrations that lay beneath the veneer of rationality and control they chose to present during the incident. Felt emotions, whether expressed, repressed or edited, were overwhelmingly negative; and awareness of power issues emerged as a key driver in the “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1983) workers perceived as needing to be observed. Worker tension was seen to be exacerbated by adherence to these rules because “the rules” conflicted with their own personal values and beliefs. Emotional dissonance resulted from this. The role of the organizational community within which workers coped with their experience, and subsequent emotional response, was also explored.

Service guarantees have been attributed the benefit of improving the overall service of a service provider. However, little research has been carried out within the area. This article focuses on one aspect of the service guarantee, the effects that service guarantees may have on service recovery. Critical incident data were collected using the critical incident interview technique with customers of RadissonSAS, a worldwide hotel chain using a service guarantee. One contribution of this article is that the interviews convey that the implicit guarantee may serve as a risk reducer, which contradicts and adds to previous research. Previous research states that only the explicit guarantee has these benefits. In this case, the guarantee does not reduce risk in the purchase or consumption stage, but after the consumption when the service has failed, as the customer finds out about the guarantee in the recovery situation. Another contribution of this article is that service guarantees are found to influence the outcome of service recovery as they affect how employees behave to recover the customer.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for and an initial understanding of critical times in business relationships.

The authors define “critical time” as a period of time with increased sensitivity in a business relationship that may change the actors' attitude and/or behaviour in the relationship. The authors review previous research, present the theoretical framework and present the findings from two explorative empirical studies concerning companies' relationships with information technology consultants and advertising agencies. The focus is on the factors driving the flow of critical times.

This authors introduce the concept “critical time” as a period of stress and raised sensitivity in a relationship that may change it. Critical times are built up by three elements: initial state of the relationship, the flow of critical time and outcome state of the relationship. The authors contribute with the critical C‐model: competence, communication, and clock.

This is the first study focusing on critical times in business relationships. The authors study two categories of knowledge intensive professional services. A new theoretical framework for, and an initial understanding of, critical times in business relationships are suggested.

Travel behaviour depends on the travellers' perception of the trip characteristics. The uncertainty of the journey time is one of the determinants of the choice. Studies of decision behaviour in uncertain conditions show the limited validity of the common assumptions in traffic models. Decision making under uncertainty has to be considered as a contingent process, depending on the objectives and conditions with which the choice is made. Expected utility is one of the many possible criteria used by people to decide. There is a discrepancy between the objective and subjective value of this concept. This is due to the bias with respect to the perception of very likely and very unlikely events. In many cases the expected utility is a less applicable objective, e.g. because people want to arrive before a certain deadline and maximize the probability to achieve that. The fact that probabilities of travel times have to be learned from experiences introduces a dynamic character of choice behaviour.

Most of the reported properties of decision-making under uncertainty still have to be verified for travel behaviour.

Ambulance personnel face a diversity of stressful events that could be potentially traumatic, putting their health and well-being at risk. The purpose of this paper is to explore, from this group perspective, sources of stress, coping strategies and support measures.

The authors interviewed 14 ambulance workers of Portuguese Red Cross local structures from the north of Portugal. Data were analyzed according to thematic analysis procedures.

The authors identified three themes: operational and organizational factors, control and predictability; anticipating scenarios, focusing on procedures and dealing with reactions; and from undervalued support to support as routine. Dealing with human lives, the unpredictability of calls and working under pressure are the main sources of stress, causing, in some of them, insomnia, fatigue, anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Road accidents, situations involving children and cardiac arrest are the most distressing events. During events, they cope focusing on technical procedures, but after them they prefer to talk with colleagues and seek support from family and friends. All participants emphasize the inexistence of structured support measures.

It is important to develop support measures tailored to ambulance personnel’s needs, leading to enhancements of theirs work performance, health and well-being.

Contrarily to most of the studies that explore mostly PTSD and/or burnout, the authors explored, from the perspective of professionals, other dimensions such as sources of stress, coping strategies and support measures, adopting a qualitative approach, which has been rarely used.

In a context of critical transition such as the COVID-19 pandemic, moral semantics take a prominent role as a form of self-description of society. However, they are not usually observed, but rather assumed as self-evident and necessarily “good.” The purpose of the article is to summarize the theory of morality from the social systems' perspective and illustrate with concrete examples the polemogenous nature of moral communication.

This article presents an analysis of the role of morality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. Applying the method of second-order observation, it describes three cases of moral semantics disseminated via mass media and social media, and it examines their connection with the structural situation of subsystems of society during the pandemic crisis (particularly healthcare, politics and science).

Second-order observation of moral communication demonstrates to be fruitful to describe the conditions and consequences in which moralization of communication occurs, particularly in a situation of critical transition around the healthcare crisis. The three examples examined, namely, the hero semantics directed to healthcare workers, the semantics of indiscipline and the controversies around pseudo-sciences and conspiracy theories, show how they are based on social attribution of esteem and disesteem, how they try to answer to troublesome situations and contradictions that seem difficult to cope, and how they are close related to the emergence of conflicts, even when they seem positive oriented and well intentioned.

This paper is an attempt to test the usefulness of Luhmann's theory of society to understand the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and particularly the role of moral communication in concrete examples.

Information literacy (IL) within the everyday life context is regarded as an important condition for civic participation and engagement, informed citizenship, health and well-being. However, compared to the significant amount of IL research within educational and workplace settings, there has been relatively little research in relation to the value of IL within everyday life situations. The purpose of this paper is to explore existing empirical research that addresses aspects of IL within the context of everyday life, identifying current gaps in the literature, highlighting key theoretical positions, and mapping trends.

The review has been conducted in the form of a scoping study that aims to map the key concepts underpinning this research area and the main sources and types of evidence available. It is based on journal literature reporting primary research, published from 2000 to 2016 and sourced from a range of different databases covering IL research.

IL practices take place within diverse everyday life contexts. The key research directions have been categorised into four broad contextual areas, encompassing leisure and community activities, citizenship and the fulfilment of social roles, public health and critical life situations. These point to the need for developing an IL mind-set which is discussed as an adaptive, transferable and ongoing activity that transgresses the boundaries of prescribed skills within the specific contexts of work and education.

This research area is still in its infancy and more varied contexts need to be explored to nurture a robust understanding of the use and impact of IL in people’s everyday lives. The paper also highlights the implications of the lack of IL and identifies the key players in the advocacy of IL within different everyday life settings.

In this chapter, we outline an approach to structuring a collaborative self-study that supports the sharing of individual experiences in a way that enables collective analysis and personal reflection. We share examples of how this approach enabled eight Brazilian teacher-researchers to work collectively to investigate their own social justice pedagogies. To do so, we used a four-phase process. First, each coauthor identified and wrote about a critical incident from their teaching that they shared electronically. In the second phase, We used email to comment on each other’s written pieces. Email exchanges scaffolded reflection. In the third phase, each person analyzed the comments and presented them back to everyone at a group meeting. Finally, through discussion, the group identified the recurring themes that permeated the different critical situations. The chapter provides a methodological overview based on our empirical work about teaching themes which are entangled with socially just PETE (Physical Education Teacher Education). We have found that being a teacher-researcher has some commonalities related to criticality whether one is teaching in K-12 schools or higher education.