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1 – 2 of 2While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional…
Abstract
Purpose
While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional labor is less understood. With this contribution, I aim to unveil “the good, the bad and the ugly” of emotional labor as a dynamic theatrical performance.
Methodology/Approach
Focusing on three geriatric long-term care units within a French public hospital, this qualitative study relies on two sets of data (observation and interviews). Deeply rooted within the field of study, the chosen methodological approach substantializes the subtle hues of the emotional experience at work and targets resonance rather than generalization.
Findings
Using the theatrical metaphor, this research underlines the role of space in the practice of emotional labor in a unique way. It identifies the main emotionalized zones or emotional regions (front, back, transitional, mixed) and details their characteristics, before unearthing the nonlinearity and polyphonic quality of emotional labor performance and the versatility needed to that effect. Indeed, this research shows how health-care professionals juggle with the specificities of each region, as well as how space generates both constraints and resources. By combining static and dynamic prisms, diverse instantiations of hybridity and spatial in-betweens, anchored in liminality and trajectories, are revealed.
Originality/Value
This research adds to the current body of literature on the concept of emotional labor by shedding light on its highly dynamic and interactional nature, revealing different levels of porosity between emotional regions and how the characteristics of each type of area can taint others and increase/decrease the occupational health costs of emotional labor. The study also raises questions about the interplay of emotional labor performance with the level of humanization/dehumanization of elderly people. Given the global demographics about an aging population, this gives food for thought at a social level.
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Jessica Vredenburg, Sommer Kapitan and Sharon Jang
This paper aims to formally conceptualize service mega-disruptions as any far-reaching and unforeseen general environmental stressor or threat that impacts a service…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to formally conceptualize service mega-disruptions as any far-reaching and unforeseen general environmental stressor or threat that impacts a service organization’s ability to provide a desired level of service. The authors differentiate sudden large-scale general environmental threats from traditional service failures in scope and scale of impact via number of customers and sectors affected and duration and speed of the disruption.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws from service recovery theory to build a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions. The resulting conceptual model maps service failure recovery strategies against a service mega-disruption recovery approach to examine consumer response to changes in service value. This work further articulates additional research needs including conceptualization, measurement and methods as traditional drivers of service recovery and the value of the service experience change in response to service mega-disruptions.
Findings
This work proposes a research agenda to investigate whether service mega-disruptions can bypass the need for service recovery due to a consumer self-moderating process. As past research shows, the less control a service provider has over a failure, the more customers attribute fault to the situation and transfer blame away from an organization. This paper suggests that this self-moderating process disrupts the need for service providers to court forgiveness for a failure with perceptions of similarity and controllability providing an alternate pathway to customer forgiveness. Similarly, it is suggested that service mega-disruptions play a role in transforming service ecosystems into tighter, more contractual systems with less agency for service providers and poorer ability to adjust to market conditions. The duration and longevity of effects on service providers’ control, agency and ability to adjust following a service mega-disruption must be researched further.
Originality/value
This paper builds theory to develop a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions and their role in customer engagement and reshaping the service ecosystem. This paper culminates in the proposition of a research agenda that aims to build research capacity among services marketing scholars as service providers’ coordination and market conditions are challenged by service mega-disruptions.
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