Customer oriented militants? A critique of the `customer oriented bureaucracy' theory on front-line service worker collectivism

Abstract

This critique challenges the Customer Oriented Bureaucracy (COB) theory's argument that the experience of customer service is pivotal to the formation of front-line service worker collectivism. COB's rejection of the major tenets of Marxist analysis, thereby denying the exploitative and class nature of service work, results in Korczynski theorising front-line worker collectivism as based only on the shared experience of doing customer service rather than as workers per se. As a neo-Weberian theory, COB argues 'consumer capitalism's' ideology of 'customer sovereignty' is a contemporary ideological 'iron cage' of value rationalisation in a unified, contradictory relationship with bureaucratic rationalisation. COB theory, consequently, allows only for a trade unionism that is limited to contesting the terms of customer service rather than challenging the deepening commodification of social relations.

Discourses of Professionalism in Front-Line Service Work: Insights from a Case Study in an Italian Bank

“…Accordingly, Korczynski (2013) proposes a revision of the classic dyadic relation between employers (or, more commonly, managers considered as agents of employers’ will) and employees whereby customers are included as significant new actors in a triadic employment relationship model. Although not all authors agree with the conceptualization of the employment relationship in service work as a triad (for a critique see, for example, Bélanger and Edwards, 2013; Brook, 2007), there is substantial agreement in the literature that the introduction of a third figure opens up possibilities for multiple configurations of the relations among the actors involved in the provision and consumption of personal services. In particular, authors in this stream of inquiry talk of ‘varied alliances’ and ‘shifting coalitions’ among managers, front-line service workers and customers in service organizations (Lopez, 2010).…”

End-users, Public Services, and Industrial Relations: The Restructuring of Social Services in Ontario

“…Building on previous scholarship which has explored the role of end-users as industrial relations actors (Bellemare, 2000;Kessler and Bach, 2011) this study deepens our understanding of the role and impact of end-users on the process and outcomes of industrial relations in the social services sector. The current study adds to this foundational theoretical work by connecting this literature to similar studies of service users in the sociology of work (Brook, 2007;Lopez, 2010), disability studies (Barnes and Walker, 1996;Sanders, 2012), and critical social work theory (Beresford and Croft, 2004;Carr, 2007;Smith et al, 2011).…”

Speaking of Contradiction

“…Triangular relationships colour, and often cloud, the competing demands on workers, but they cannot condone the actions of management. Put differently, management should not be let off the culpability hook (Brook, 2007: 370). This is not to gainsay that some firms lose at the expense of others, rather to emphasize that capitalist firms, especially the dominant TNCs, are the architects and beneficiaries of changes to the system (mode of production) (Brook, 2007: 372).…”