ILPC 2026

The paper directly responds to Korczynski's (2009) call for the customer perspective to be included in service work research. The aim of the paper is to highlight the dynamic nature of triangular relations (Leidner, 1993: 41) and to demonstrate the concept as a useful way of exploring how the customer shapes, and is shaped, in service work. The study uses the case of the retail industry and includes four organisations in the clothing and electrical product markets, and each of which reflecting diverse market positions. It draws on 37 semi-structured interviews with managers and employees plus 18 customer shopping reports (based on the qualitative diary method). The findings support Brook (2009) in alluding to the complex and contradictory nature of emotional labour in the workplace where management control is only a partial explanation of relations (p12). The findings show that employees have their own expectations of customer service and this helps explain some of the reframing of emotional labour in the service interaction; for example, employees in a low cost clothing retailer did not feel obliged to play out the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty (Korczynski and Ott, 2004) because of their pre-existing expectations of power relations in this context. Analysis of the customer perspective emphasised the unpredictability of service expectations in which the customer responded to diverse factors in the service interaction and these were specific to a single point in time. This helped explain the reframing of emotional labour where customers shaped the employee in the service interaction and in a way that was not dictated by management. These findings have important contributions for our analyses of service work because the addition of the customer perspective helped demonstrate some value for the concept of triangular relations, which was recently criticised by Belanger and Edwards (2013), in helping explain some of the nuances of service work in association with the dynamics of workplace relations across different organisational contexts.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Belanger, J. and Edwards, P. 2013 The nature of front line service work: distinctive features and continuity in the employment relationship. Work Employment and Society,  27 (3) pp.433-450.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Brook, P. 2009 In critical defence of emotional labour: Refuting Bolton's critique of Hochschild's concept. Work Employment and Society, 23 (3) pp.531-548.                                   Korczynski, M. and Ott, U. 2004 When production and consumption meet: Cultural contradictions and the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty. Journal of Management Studies, 41 (4) pp.579-599.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Korczynski, M. 2009 The mystery customer: Continuing absences in the sociology of service work. Work Employment and Society,  43 (5) pp.952-967.                                    Leidner, R. 1993 Fast food, fast talk: Service work and the routinization of everyday life. Berkley: University of California Press.