Description
Study Reports On Service Marketing And Subjectivity: The Shaping Of Customer-Oriented Employees, Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service. It is a critical business function for attracting customers.
Study Reports On Service Marketing And Subjectivity: The Shaping Of Customer-Oriented Employees
ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward customer-orienting employee subjectivity. It reports a case study of a service firm the FI - which has been drawing on service marketing practices in order to manage the organization. By analyzing the case of the FI, based on Foucault's notions of disciplinary and pastoral power, the paper suggests that service marketing practices contribute toward making the subjectivity of front-line employees (FLEs) more proactive. More specifically, the paper suggests that the disciplinary power of service marketing practices generates knowledge of the FLEs - in the present case, that they are reactive but need to be proactive - and that the pastoral power of service marketing practices draw on that knowledge, making the subjectivity of the FLEs more proactive. The paper concludes that service marketing practices are translated when they encounter organizational practice. Based on this conclusion, the ideal that marketing research is able, and meant, to formulate general managerial practices, which organizations should strive to mirror, is found to be unachievable.
Keywords: Critical marketing, Disciplinary power, Foucault, Pastoral power, Service marketing, Subjectivity.
INTRODUCTION
Marketing is largely a positivistic and managerially-prescriptive discipline. Academic marketing has focused on developing practices intended to realize the customer orientation of the marketing concept but it has largely neglected empirically studying the effects of these
practices in organizations (Marion 1993; Svensson 2007; Webster 2002). One reason for the lack of research in this area might be that marketing, outside of consumer research, largely lacks a critical empirical research program (Bradshaw and Fuat Firat 2007; Brownlie and Hewer 2007; Burton 2001). While critical perspectives aiming to question the managerial hegemony and "to reveal the power relations and contested interests that are embedded in knowledge production" (Saren et al. 2007a: xviii) have been thoroughly introduced into marketing1, it is now, in the words of Brownlie and Hewer (2007: 59), "time to put critical aspirations into action" in order to tease out the full potential of critical marketing. In this paper, I achieve this by empirically studying how marketing practices strongly associated with academic marketing research order organizations and their members. I draw on a case study of a Swedish financial service firm, referred to as the Financial Institute (FI), which has been using marketing practices clearly associated with service marketing research, particularly measurements of service quality and relationship marketing, in order to manage the organization. Taking a stance in previous conceptual analyses of service marketing (see Skålén et al. 2006; 2008) reviewed in the next section, I focus on the role that the service marketing practices utilized at the FI play in ordering employee subjectivity, especially the subjectivity of front-line employees (FLEs). Theoretically, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault whose understanding of power as being discursively embedded and whose studies of how discourse, including academic discourse, orders subjectivity have been informing critical management studies since the late 1980s (see, for instance, Burrell 1988). By adopting a
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Foucauldian framework and by focusing on the relationship between academic marketing discourse and subjectivity, the paper addresses one of the three major research gaps that Morgan (2003), in his review of marketing research, suggested critical marketing might be able to fill. Morgan (2003: 123, emphasis added) argued that "a more critical understanding of the consequences of marketing and its proliferation for the constitution of the self" is needed in marketing. Hence, the aim of this paper is to study empirically how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees, especially FLEs, into customeroriented subjects. By focusing on this issue, the paper contributes toward articulating an empirically-informed critique of the relationship between academic marketing research and marketing practice. I proceed by reviewing Foucault's works on subjectivity and power as well as previous marketing research that has drawn on these notions. Then, I turn to the method used to conduct the present research, followed by the case description which is intertwined with an analysis of the relationship between service marketing practices and FLE subjectivity. A concluding discussion ends the paper.
SERVICE MARKETING, SUBJECTIVITY, AND POWER/KNOWLEDGE
For Foucault (see, for instance, 1977; 1981), subjectivity is formed in relation to discourse or systems of "truths", e.g. marketing. The word "truths" is in quotation marks because Foucault took a political perspective on truth: his critical studies suggest that truth is conditional. But he also acknowledged that many people believe in the existence of and is affected by truths. This implies that knowledge is intertwined with power and that regimes of power/knowledge - discourses - order the subjectivity of humans. In contrast to traditional power theories (see,
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for instance, Clegg et al. 2006), Foucault sees power neither as possessed by someone nor as something that agents or institutions can use to force people to do things against their will; rather he sees power as embedded in knowledge and as regulating the relationship between people. The subject, Foucault argued, exists as a discursively articulated "position that can be filled in certain conditions by various individuals" (Foucault 1977, quoted in Bergström and Knights 2006: 354). Discourses of truth or regimes of power/knowledge promote discursive practices that facilitate the construction of subjectivity. Previous Foucauldian research has explicated which subject positions are ascribed to individuals by the discursive practices promoted by various types of regimes of power/knowledge - including academic regimes such as criminology (Foucault 1977), psychology (Rose 1996), economics (Rose 1999), total quality management (Quist et al. 2007) and, indeed, marketing (Skålén et al. 2008). However, these studies have also been critical in their orientation. In line with Foucault's view of critique, they have made explicit the political nature of systems of truths and problematized the subject positions they prescribe with the aim of 'insure[ing] the desubjugation of the subject' (Foucault 1997: 32). By elaborating on previous conceptual Foucauldian marketing research, the empirical analysis in the present paper aims to contribute toward advancing such a critique of academic marketing, and service marketing in particular.
Service marketing and subjectivity Skålén et al. (2006; 2008) have analyzed academic marketing discourse as a regime of power/knowledge. One of their key arguments is that the object of the customer orientation type of managerial rationality promoted by academic marketing discourse has shifted its focus from the products that a company makes in marketing management discourse to the employees who make the products and offer the services in service marketing discourse.
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Employee subjectivity, and in particular FLE subjectivity, they argue, has become one - if not the - central object of customer orientation in service marketing discourse. As pointed out by Skålén et al. (2006; 2008), service marketing originally emerged as a critique of the marketing management school of thought. Even though subjectivity was not explicitly mentioned, the discussion revolved around the need to customer-orient employee subjectivity as well as the lack of managerial practices for accomplishing precisely that offered by marketing management discourse. In an early discipline-shaping paper, Shostack (1977: 73) argued that "marketing [management] offers no guidance, terminology, or practical rules that are clearly relevant to services ?[because] [t]he classic marketing 'mix', the seminal literature, and the language of marketing all derive from the manufacture of physical goods." In a series of other discipline-shaping service marketing papers, Grönroos (1978; 1982; 1984) argued that services - but not products - are consumed and produced simultaneously, implying that customers to some extent always co-produce services with employees. Consequently, customers of service organizations not only evaluate what they get - the outcome of the production process, i.e. the product - but also, more importantly, how they get it - the production process itself and, in particular, the employees involved. As Shostack (1977: 79) argued: "services are often inextricably entwined with their human representatives. In many fields, a person is perceived to be the service." Therefore, marketing needed to develop managerial practices that facilitated the customer-orientation of the employees rather than the products. The call for a change of direction in marketing research was heard. Marketing scholars who later formed the service marketing field, as well as closely related fields, such as that of relationship marketing, either developed managerial practices or knowledge which was translated into managerial practices, e.g. service quality surveys, service and market orientation change models, and relationship marketing databases. The power/knowledge of
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these practices targeted subjectivity by focusing on human characteristics such as empathy, trust, responsiveness, and appearance. Based on the body of knowledge emerging over the years, Vargo and Lusch (2004, see also, for instance, Lusch et al. 2007) recently argued that service marketing provides the central input for a new dominant logic of marketing - "the service dominant logic" - provoking a shift in perspective for marketing scholars and practitioners from focusing on operand resources - "land, animal life, plant life, minerals and other natural resources" - to focusing on operant resources - "skills and knowledge" (Vargo and Lusch 2004: 2). The service dominant logic, and indeed the service marketing discourse as a whole, can thus be seen as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense of the word: it is a regime of power/knowledge which targets the subjectivity of employees by producing practices that foster customer-oriented "skills and knowledge". Despite the general lack of systematic empirical studies concerning how and to what extent marketing and service marketing practices order organizations within marketing (Marion 1993; Svensson 2007; Webster 2002), the dominant position seems to be that marketing practices have not ordered organizations and their members significantly (see, for instance, Hollander et al. 2005; Hunt 1983; 1994; Wind 1983). However, some empirical studies of marketing and service marketing within the field of management studies suggest otherwise. Peccei and Rosenthal (2000; 2001) have shown that customer-orientation practices, including service marketing practices, have affected organizations and FLEs deeply. A weakness in Peccei and Rosenthal's studies, in relation to the present paper, is that service marketing practices are grouped together with other customer-orientation practices. Harris and Ogbonna (2003: 503) show that the organization they were studying was "driven by parttime-marketers who either use a traditional mix-management approach or a relational approach" (see also Morgan and Sturdy 2000). The latter approach "focus[es] on long-term
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relationship formation" (Harris and Ogbonna 2003: 503) and fosters a customer-oriented subjectivity among the FLEs. In spite of these studies, how and to what extent academic service marketing practices order employee subjectivity, as well as what critical implications this has, remains obscure. When this is studied from a Foucauldian perspective, it is essential to understand that the subject is located in regimes of power/knowledge: the subject is not a function of stable constellations of attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experience residing in the individual but a position embedded in service marketing discourse. Therefore, the focus of the present paper is whether or not the employees behave, talk about, and define themselves, as well as whether or not they are talked about and defined by others, in the language of, or one aligned with, service marketing discourse; not whether they have internalised the values and norms promoted by service marketing discourse.
Disciplinary and pastoral power Foucault (1977; 1981; 2007) postulated a critical difference between two forms of power/knowledge during processes of subjectification: disciplinary power and pastoral power, both of which are pivotal as regards analyzing how service marketing practices contribute toward customer-orientating the subjectivity of employees in the present paper. Differentiating between the two forms is based upon what kind of notion of "truth" or epistemology they presuppose in order to subjectify. Disciplinary power presupposes a positivistic epistemology. True and correct statements about subjectivity - i.e. objective statements - are those corresponding with empirical reality as perceived by our sensory organs. Regimes of disciplinary power, such as the modern social and behavioral sciences, including marketing, make claims about subjectivity based on objective truths about normality: they subjectify people by objectifying them. In order to accomplish this form of
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subjectification, argued Foucault (1977; 1981), the practices associated with disciplinary power function as examinations. Through examinations - such as the service quality surveys studied in the present paper - people are turned into objects of knowledge. Examinations embody the norms associated with the regimes of power/knowledge they are embedded in and reveal gaps between the person's present state and these norms. This enables a management that fosters a movement toward the norm: By closing gaps between the actual self and the ideal self, the person becomes, through disciplinary power, both a subject of knowledge and subjected to knowledge. Pastoral power is founded on what could be referred to as a transcendental understanding of "truth" or epistemology. Here, "truth" is represented by a belief system such as the Bible or a formalized ethic such as the Ten Commandments. Indeed, the very word pastoral is usually associated with Christian practices. Foucault's point, however, is that the key function of the pastoral - confession and avowal - illuminates how subjectivity is constructed in many societal domains (Foucault 1977; 2007). Foucault argued that people not only confess their sins to pastors representing the Christian belief system, but also to "pastors" representing other ethics, e.g. employees avowing their "sins" to their managers who interpret this information in relation to a common ethic such as that of customer-orientation promoted by marketing discourse. By means of the avowals that confessional practices generate, it is possible for managers to guide and lead confessors toward the ethic governing the situation. However, confessing and avowing subjects can also subjectify themselves without the support of an outside force. In speaking about themselves, they become aware of what type of people they are (Covaleski et al. 1998) and, if they find themselves deviating from the ethic that promises them "salvation", they may try to change themselves. Accordingly, pastoral power facilitates reflexive self-subjectification.
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METHOD
Because there has not been any previous systematic empirical analysis of how and to what extent academic service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees into customer-oriented subjects, I adopted an exploratory single-case study design (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 1984). I deliberately chose to study an organization - the FI - whose management has a track record of drawing on service marketing practices. The FI has collaborated, for instance, with researchers and consultants specializing in the field of service and relationship marketing in order to develop the organization along these lines.
Data collection My main data collection technique was interviewing (see Glazer and Strauss 1967; Spradley 1979). In total, I conducted 41 interviews between March 2006 and December 2007. Each interview lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. In total, I interviewed 13 managers, 6 back office staff, and 22 FLEs. Seven of the respondents - 3 managers, 2 back office staff, and 2 FLEs were interviewed twice. These are my main informants and some of them have fictitious names in the case description. In total, 34 respondents were interviewed, 24 of whom were women and 10 men. At first, the interviews were rather unstructured. However, as themes started to emerge (see next section), these were probed during subsequent interviews. An initial round of interviews was conducted between March and June 2006. After having transcribed all the interviews verbatim and made a thorough categorization, I returned to the organization in August and December 2007 for a second and third round of interviews devoted to probing the themes that had emerged. In addition to interviews, I also collected internal documents such as strategic plans and customer quality survey forms.
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Data analysis Complying with the suggestions given in grounded theory regarding data analysis (Glazer and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1998), I transcribed and coded the interviews as soon as possible after conducting them; Nvivo 7 was used as the data analysis software. This first order coding focused on in vivo codes (Glazer and Strauss 1967) or simple descriptive phrases (Van Maanen 1979) which seemed relevant to understanding the role of service marketing in the ordering of employee subjectivity. I soon discovered that the first order codes associated with change, or with management's ambition to bring about change, were clearly related to service and relationship marketing practices. Therefore, it seemed plausible to draw on the case in order to explain how and to what extent service marketing practices trigger processes of subjectification.
THE CASE STUDY
The FI specialises in home loans, having approximately 10% of Sweden's home loans market. It has a net annual profit of SEK462m (approx. €50m). In 2006, it had 410 employees, of whom approximately 65% were women (Annual Report 2006). The FI has three divisions: borrowing, business-to-business loans, and consumer loans. The present paper focuses solely on the consumer loans division, which is the FI's largest with approximately 210 employees. Basically, this division consists of back office functions such as IT and HRM and a front office customer service function arranged as six groups of approximately 15 FLEs and headed by a team leader. Communication with the customer is mostly conducted by phone, but also by e-mail and fax. No face-to-face interaction occurs with the customers.
Measuring service quality: generating a customer-oriented subject position
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Due to increasing market competition during the early years of the new millennium, the management of the FI decided to improve customer service by relying on a service quality approach. Service quality is one of the major research fields of service marketing (Schneider and White 2004). Several models have been developed for measuring customer-perceived service quality. These models focus on measuring how the service is rendered - the "functional quality" - rather than what the customer gets - the "technical quality" (Grönroos 1982; 1984) - suggesting that the subjectivity of the staff, and of the FLEs in particular, is a key object of measurement (Skålén and Fougère 2007). This argument is supported by an inquiry into the "service quality determinants", which models for measuring service quality are based on. The determinants are deemed to be the dimensions having the most influence on the customers' overall perceptions of service quality and are thus thought to account for variances in customer-perceived service quality. Many of these determinants address the behaviors and feelings of the FLEs, e.g. their reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurance, attitudes, appearance, behavior, and expertise. Using standardised measurement scales such as "Servqual" (Parasuraman et al. 1988) and "Servperf" (Cronin and Taylor 1994), based on these service quality determinants, the expressed feelings and behaviors of the FLEs can be measured, enabling systematic comparison between FLE subjectivity and the dimensions of customer-perceived service quality. The quality measurement surveys utilized by the FI are largely based on quality determinants similar to the general scales, as suggested by the following comparison between the Servqual constructs and the constructs of the FI's major quality survey, the customer barometer.
Insert table 1 about here
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Mary, a project leader and manager who had systematically analyzed the results of all the customer surveys, said: "The only general criticism we've had in the quality surveys is that we're not proactive enough." Every single manager I interviewed shared Mary's interpretation of the survey results. The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English defines proactive as "creating or controlling a situation by taking the initiative." This is in line with the meaning attached to the word by the FI employees. FLE Anne, for example, argues that proactive means "Anticipating the customer. You realise the customers have a need before they realise it themselves and then you act on that knowledge". It is the FLEs who are supposed to "anticipate" and "act" on "knowledge". Being proactive is one way of being an FLE; this is a possible and, according to FI managers, preferable subject position for the FLEs. However, when the service quality program was initiated, the bulk of the FLEs perceived themselves as administrators; something which most of the managers argued was the antithesis of a proactive FLE, as exemplified by Mary, who argued that the FLEs "needed to shift from being reactive order clerks to being proactive customer representatives". The results of the surveys were accepted as fact by the managers and back office staff, and this acceptance had a huge effect on the strategic orientation of the FI. As sales manager David puts it: "Since they [the customers] say in the surveys that we are too passive, we have to become more proactive." This "truth", or power/knowledge effect of service quality surveys, is consistent with previous Foucauldian conceptual research, which has perceived service quality measurement practices to be a form of examination shaping subjectivity through disciplinary power (Skålén and Fougère 2007). As explained above, Foucault argued that examinations make people visible, detectable, and known objectively - they establish "truths" about people, e.g. that the FI's FLEs are reactive. Examinations are, furthermore, based on norms of appropriate behavior, referred to as "service quality determinants" in the service quality case. Informed by these norms, the service quality surveys produce knowledge
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which guides perception and action, e.g. that the FLEs need to be more proactive. Consistent with Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power, the FI service quality surveys thus revealed a gap between the FLEs' present reactive subjectivity and their ideal proactive subjectivity. However, the quality surveys did not contribute toward closing this gap. This became evident to FI managers who then, framed by the power/knowledge of the results of the service quality measurement, adopted coaching and customer relationship marketing in order to produce something which, from their perspective, has to be described as the truly customer-oriented FLE; i.e. the proactive FLE.
Coaching and relationship marketing: the shaping of customer-oriented proactive subjects Coaching and the proactive FLE At the FI, coaching is a leadership style which emphasizes strategic social interaction and communication between the coach / manager and the FLEs whereby the former tries to support the latter so that these behave in a customer-oriented and proactive way. As FLE Anne puts it: "The bulk of the feedback we get from the boss deals with the extent to which we have been proactive during our conversations with customers". The approach to coaching used by the FI is consistent with the recommendations given in Delivering Quality Service, which is an entire book, written by influential service marketing scholars Leonard Berry, A. Parasuraman, and Valerie Zeithaml, about how to close the "service quality gaps" which service quality surveys have detected. These authors argue in favor of what they call an "inthe-field leadership style." This type of leadership entails that "excellent? service leaders lead in the field? They are visible to their people, endlessly coaching, praising, correcting, cajoling, sermonizing, observing, questioning, and listening. They emphasise two-way, personal communications." (Zeithaml et al. 1990: 7, emphasis added).
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At the FI, coaching manifests itself most prominently in the form of tele coaching. This involves the team leaders sitting and listening to the FLEs while these talk to the customer by phone, giving them instant feedback afterwards. In this way, the team leaders help the FLEs to become more proactive. As an example, the team leaders, via tele coaching, get the FLEs to ask requirement-oriented questions, which is one way of expressing oneself proactively. Anne explains: "Most of us work by putting requirement-oriented questions to the customer. Right from the beginning of the call, you take charge and ensure that it's not only the customer who talks." Anne makes a direct link between the tele coaching that her team leader Alice has provided here and the practice of using requirement-oriented questions. "Alice does a lot of tele coaching with us and she has pushed hard to get us to work with requirement-oriented questions." Several of the FLEs on Alice's team emphasized this. One of them said: "the tele coaching I got from my boss [Alice] made me use requirement-oriented questions." In the two interviews I conducted with Alice, she confirmed that this was indeed the case. She explained that "requirement-oriented questions are questions concerning what we can help the customer with. They support my staff in finding out what the customer wants? and whether or not we want that customer." By taking charge of the customer interaction by asking requirementoriented questions, rather than letting the customer drive the conversation, the FLEs present themselves proactively to the customer. The proactive subjectivity thus emerges by means of subtle changes in the dialog with the customer. I suggest that coaching drives the formation of a proactive subjectivity through pastoral power. As explained above, managing in a pastoral way is dependent on confessional practices - e.g. tele coaching where the FLEs avow their behaviors and thoughts to their team leaders. These avowals make it possible for the team leader to detect if the FLEs have taken on a proactive subjectivity or not. If this is not the case, the team leader will coach the FLEs towards a proactive subjectivity by, for instance, making them ask requirement-oriented
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questions. Seen from the perspective of pastoral power, the team leaders are "pastors", i.e. people who, through their inner qualities, are appointed to lead and direct a "flock of sheep" the FLEs - in accordance with the ideal of proactivity. Pastors manage by helping "their sheep" reach "salvation", which means, at the FI, being a customer-oriented proactive FLE; only then will the FLEs be richly rewarded, socially (recognition), psychologically (selfesteem), and monetarily (higher salaries). But the FLEs also steer themselves toward proactivity without the direct support of a pastor. When speaking about themselves during coaching sessions, they reveal to themselves what types of FLEs they are and, if they are dissatisfied with who they are (a satisfaction contingent upon the customer-oriented proactive ethic), they will try to change themselves. Accordingly, the coaching stimulates and enables self-management, which is another key feature of pastoral power. Anne exemplifies this: "During tele coaching, you reflect a lot on what you say to the customer. You go through your communication skills yourself." Another FLE said: "tele coaching makes you think for yourself, it's an eye-opener; how you should be conducting the conversation" and thus how you should be conducting yourself. As Alice puts it coaching is "help-to-self-help."
Customer relationship management and the proactive FLE In addition to coaching, customer relationship management (CRM) discourse was drawn on in order to make the FLEs' subjectivity more proactive. Mary, who led the CRM project, saw a clear link, as did her assistant project leader Barbara, between CRM and making the FLEs' subjectivity more proactive. This is consistent with how I interpret the central tenets of research into relationship marketing (RM), departing as it does from the belief that longlasting customer relationships, under many circumstances, are more profitable and better able to realize customer orientation than transaction marketing focused on finding new customers
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(Grönroos 1994). Accordingly, research into relationship marketing has focused on issues such as how to make customers loyal (Reichheld and Teal 1996) and prevent them from switching (Roos 1999) to competitors. A prerequisite for accomplishing this, in line with Mary's argument, is FLEs acting proactively toward their customers - only by (pro)acting before the customers become disloyal, or switch, will the FLEs be able to prevent them from going their separate ways. The fact that the CRM project at the FI, according to Mary, was aimed at "shaping ways of working which ensured that customers applying for loans did not drop out during the handling process and that existing customers stayed longer" is thus very much in line with the central tenets of the RM literature. This would ensure, according to Barbara, that the FLEs went from "being order clerks, without the ability to take the initiative, to being proactive customer representatives." Mary and Barbara, as the appointed project leaders, together with a team consisting of 12 FLEs and one team leader who had all been transferred from their normal duties for a period of six months, began working on developing RM-informed "ways of working". One of the FLEs made the following representative statement about the content of the work carried out by the group: "Through our discussions within the group, it became evident that many of us had experienced that the customers whom we hadn't contacted directly after their loan application had often chosen another bank by the time we'd eventually contacted them?then we realised that this wasn't beneficial to us." Drawing on the notion of pastoral power, I argue that the FLEs confessed and avowed that they had lost many customers during the application process. They also acknowledged that this was bad for business. The FLEs thus confessed that they needed to work differently. Implicitly, they acknowledged that a "way of working" which fostered long-lasting relationships with the customers was something to strive for. Informed by these insights, the FLEs, supported by "pastors" Mary and Barbara, developed new ways of working. One of the FLEs said: "We realised that? we needed to ask questions
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that establish what needs the customers have? is this a customer for us? If so? how can we help that customer in a beneficial way?? We made checklists of how to work this way? it then became obvious that we needed to be more active when dealing with the customers." Hence, the CRM project at the FI encouraged the FLEs to lead themselves toward more proactive ways of working, exemplified thus by one FLE; "Now I assume responsibility and ring customers who have made a loan application and ask if they have any questions ? previously I never did that". One of his colleagues made a similar remark: "The [CRM] project created a new way of thinking? a new mindset." Their team leader agrees: "We keep our customers closer to us now". However, this is not the complete story. Some FLEs only took part in developing the proactive ways of working, but resisted working in accordance with them. Mary explains: "When some of the group members realised that this [the new ways of working] was being demanded of them, things became very, very tough for some of them." These FLEs only adapted their subjectivity to a very limited extent to the proactivity prescribed to them by the RM discourse, as exemplified by one FLE who said: "I chose to drop out of the project after a while. I couldn't see how it would improve the handling process." According to Foucauldian management scholars, resistance to a particular managerial discourse is mobilised via other available countervailing discourses and is especially likely to arise when discourses make contesting claims regarding subjectivity (Covaleski et al. 1998; Quist et al. 2007). It is possible to interpret the resistance of some of the FLEs toward RM at the FI using this reasoning. CRM offers the FLEs subject positions as proactive FLEs, while the institutionalized bureaucratic discourse at the FI fosters reactive subjects. In order to relax these competing, contradictory, and confusing claims, the resisting FLEs draw on their present subjectivity which is colored by the bureaucratic discourse. They refused to align themselves with the proactive subject position inherent in the RM discourse.
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CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
The focus of this paper has been empirically studying how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees, especially FLEs, into customeroriented subjects. While this is an understudied issue in marketing (Marion 1993; Svensson 2007; Webster 2002), the dominant position is that marketing practices have ordered organizations and their members to an insignificant degree (see, for instance, Hollander et al. 2005; Hunt 1983; 1994; Wind 1983). Even though a few empirical studies of marketing and service marketing in the field of management studies suggest otherwise (see Harris and Ogbonna 2003; Morgan and Sturdy 2000; Peccei and Rosenthal 2000; 2001), how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees into customeroriented employees remains obscure. The present paper suggests that service marketing practices contribute toward making the subjectivity of FLEs more customer-oriented. This is consistent with previous research (see Harris and Ogbonna 2003; Morgan and Sturdy 2000; Peccei and Rosenthal 2000; 2001). This paper suggests, furthermore, that service marketing practices make employee subjectivity more proactive. In addition, the present paper also explains how service marketing practices contribute toward making employee subjectivity more customer-oriented and proactive. Based on the Foucauldian power/knowledge framework, the study suggests that service marketing discourse promotes disciplinary and pastoral practices premised upon the rationality of customer orientation. These practices foster certain examinations and confessions which jointly shape the subjectivity of FLEs by generating knowledge about them, e.g. that the FLEs are reactive but need to be customer-oriented and proactive, and by contributing toward working that knowledge into the FLEs - e.g. making them more
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customer-oriented and proactive. However, the paper suggests that it is the disciplinary power which generates the subject position of proactivity and that it is the pastoral power which makes the FLEs more proactive. The paper thus contributes toward shedding light on the relationship between disciplinary and pastoral power in more general terms; a relationship which is unclear both in Foucauldian management studies and in Foucault's own work. Pastoral and disciplinary power seems to be intertwined with each other and do not appear to be two different forms of power. More research is needed on this issue. Moreover, the paper also suggests that service marketing practices order the subjectivity of managers by showing that the managers' strategic intentions are disciplined by the power/knowledge of service quality measurement practices and that coaching and relationship marketing discourse turn managers into "pastors" who guide and lead the FLEs toward salvation. These results, at least at first glance, must seem like a positive surprise for the mainstream marketing scholars who have claimed that marketing practices have had very little impact on organizational practice and who have seen this as unfortunate. However, in addition to the section on CRM above showing that marketing practices are being resisted, the findings suggest that academic marketing practices do not order organizations in the way prescribed by marketing research. This differentiates the present study from previous empirical studies of the effects of marketing practices on organizations; studies which have argued that the customer-oriented rationality inherent in marketing practices has determined organizational practice (cf. Harris and Ogbonna 2003; Morgan and Sturdy 2000). On the contrary, the present study suggests that something takes place, which can be described by drawing on Latour (1987; 2005) as a re-interpretation or "translation" process, when service marketing practices encounter organizational practice (cf. Skålén et al. 2005). More specifically, the present study suggests that the translation process takes place at the point when the "objective" knowledge generated by the disciplinary practices - in the present case
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the results of the service quality measurement - meets the "subjective" knowledge associated with pastoral power; the latter being represented in the present case by the managers / the "pastors" and their images of the FLEs. The latter interpret the results of service quality measurement and reach the conclusion that the FLEs need to be more proactive. This interpretation is not determined by service quality discourse. Rather, proactivity emerges as a subject position to strive toward when the managers' perceptions of the FLEs as reactive order clerks and the results of the quality surveys are combined in order to interpret the situation. Thus, if the results are analyzed a bit deeper, they may not be such a positive surprise to mainstream marketing academicians after all because the conclusion put forward here suggests that the marketing discipline needs to distance itself from the positivism and managerialism it is founded on. More specifically, it questions, in line with previous conceptual critical marketing research (cf. Cochoy 1998; Brownlie and Saren 1997), the idea that academic marketing research is able, and meant, to formulate managerially colored general and objective truths which marketing practice and practitioners should strive to mirror. Because the logical implication of the translation thesis put forward here is that it is unrealistic to expect marketing practices to be able to determine marketing practice and practitioners. Accordingly, the paper problematizes the truth claims inherent in academic marketing discourse and contributes toward desubjugating the subject; something that Foucault (1997) argued was central to critical analysis. Furthermore, the translation thesis suggests that the marketing discipline needs to be re-orientated away from prescribing marketing to practice and toward studying - empirically as well as critically - marketing as practice. A key topic of such a critical research program would be investigating the link between academic marketing and organizational practice in order to find out if the translation thesis put forward here has any support or not.
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TABLES
Table I: A comparison between Servqual and the FI customer barometer Servqual determinants Reliability XYZ provides its services at the When I send an e-mail, do I get a time it promises to do so.* response within the timeframe I expect? Servqual statements FI customer barometer
Responsiveness You do not receive prompt Have we given you prompt service service from XYZ's employees.* regarding your home loan? Assurance Empathy Employees of XYZ are polite.* Have we dealt with you satisfactorily?
Employees of XYZ do not give Have you been treated well by your you personal attention.* contact person?
Tangibles
XYZ's physical facilities are The design of the webpage makes it visually appealing.* easy for me to find the information I need?
*Source: Parasuraman et al. 1988.
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Brownlie, D., Saren, M., Wensley, R. and Whittington, R. (1999), eds., Rethinking Marketing: Towards Critical Marketing Accountings, London: Sage. Burrell, G. (1988), "Modernism, Post-modernism and Organisational Analysis 2: The Contribution of Michel Foucault", Organization Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 221-235. Burton, D. (2001), "Critical Marketing Theory: The Blueprint?", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 35, No. 5/6, pp. 722-43. Clegg, S.R., Courpasson, D. and Phillips, N. (2006), Power and Organizations, London: Sage. Cochoy, F. (1998), "Another Discipline for the Market Economy: Marketing as a Performative Knowledge and Know-How for Capitalism". In: Callon, M., ed., The Laws of the Market, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 194-221. Covaleski, M.A., Dirsmith, M.W., Heian, B.H., and Samuel, S. (1998), "The Calculated and the Avowed: Techniques of Discipline and Struggles over Identity in Big Six Public Accounting Firms", Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 293-327. Cronin, J.J. and Taylor, S.A. (1994), "SERVPERF Versus SERVQUAL: Reconciling Performance-Based and Perceptions-Minus-Expectations Measurement of Service Quality", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 125-31. Eisenhardt, K.M. (1989), "Building Theory from Case Study Research", Academy of Management Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 532-50. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1981), The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1997), The Politics of Truth, New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at Collège de France 19771978, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
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Glazer, B.G. and Strauss, A.L. (1967), The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research, New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Grönroos, C. (1978), "A Service Orientated Approach to Marketing of Services", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 12, No. 8, pp. 588-601 Grönroos, C. (1982), "An Applied Service Marketing Theory", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 16, No. 7, pp. 30-41. Grönroos, C. (1984), "A Service Quality Model and its Marketing Implications", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 36-44. Grönroos, C. (1994), "Quo Vadis, Marketing? Toward a Relationship Marketing Paradigm", Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 10, No. 5, pp. 347-60. Harris, L.C. and Ogbonna, E. (2003), "The Organization of Marketing: A Study of Decentralized, Developed and Dispersed Marketing Activity", Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 483-512. Hollander, S.C., Rassuli, K.M., Jones, D.G.B. and Farlow Dix, L. (2005), "Periodization in Marketing History", Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 32-41. Hunt, S.D. (1983), "General Theories and the Fundamental Explananda of Marketing", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 9-17. Hunt, S.D. (1994), "On Rethinking Marketing: Our Discipline, Our Practice, Our Methods", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 13-25. Latour, B (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lusch, R.F., Vargo, S.L. and O'Brien (2007), "Competing Through Services: Insights From Service-Dominant Logic", Journal of Retailing, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 5-18.
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Marion, G. (1993), "The Marketing Management Discourse: What's New Since the 1960s?". In: Baker, M.J., ed., Perspectives on Marketing Management, Vol. 3, Chichester: Wiley, pp. 143-168. Morgan, G. (2003), "Marketing and Critique: Prospects and Problems". In: Alvesson M. and Willmott H., eds., Studying Management Critically 2nd Edition, London: Sage, pp. 111131. Morgan, G. and Sturdy, A. (2000), Beyond Organizational Change: Structure, Discourse and Power in UK Financial Services, London: Macmillan. Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1988), "SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality", Journal of Retailing, Vol. 64, No. 1, pp. 12-37. Peccei, R. and Rosenthal, P (2000), "Front-line Responses to Customer Orientation Programs: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis", International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 562-590. Peccei, R. and Rosenthal, P (2001), "Delivering Customer-Oriented Behaviour Through Empowerment: An Empirical Test of HRM Assumptions", Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 38, No. 6, pp. 831-57. Quist, J., Skålén, P. and Clegg, S.R. (2007), "The Power of Quality Models: The Example of the SIQ Model for Performance Excellence", Scandinavian Journal of Management, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 445-62. Reichheld, F.F. and Teal, T. (1996), The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Factors Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Rose, N. (1996), Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roos, I. (1999), "Switching Processes in Customer Relationships", Journal of Services Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 376-93. Schneider, B. and White, S.S. (2004), Service Quality: Research Perspectives, London: Sage. Shostack, G.L. (1977), "Breaking Free from Product Marketing", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 73-80. Saren, M., Maclaran, P., Goulding, C., Elliott, R., Shankar, A. and Caterall, M. (2007a), "Introduction: Defining the Field of Critical Marketing". In: Saren, M., Maclaran, P., Goulding, C., Elliott, R., Shankar, A. and Caterall, M. eds., Critical Marketing: Defining the Field, Butterworth-Heinemann: Burlington (MA). Saren, M., Maclaran, P., Goulding, C., Elliott, R., Shankar, A. and Caterall, M. (2007b) eds., Critical Marketing: Defining the Field, Butterworth-Heinemann: Burlington (MA). Skålén, P., Fellesson, M. and Fougère, M. (2006), "The Governmentality of Marketing Discourse", Scandinavian Journal of Management, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 275-91. Skålén, P. and Fougère, M. (2007), "Be(com)ing Normal - Not Excellent: Service Management, the Gap-model and Disciplinary Power", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 109-25. Skålén, P., Fougère, M. and Fellesson, M. (2008), Marketing Discourse: A Critical Perspective, London: Routledge. Skålén, P., Quist, J., Edvardsson, B. and Enquist, B. (2005), "The Contextualization of Human Resource Management and Quality Management - A Sensemaking Perspective on Everybody's Involvement", International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 736-751. Spradley, J.P. (1979), The Ethnographic Interview, Belmont (CA): Wadsworth.
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Strauss, A.L. and Corbin, J. (1998), Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, 2nd edition, London: Sage. Svensson, P. (2007), "Producing Marketing: Towards a Social-Phenomenology of Marketing Work", Marketing Theory, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp.: 271-90. Tadajewski, M. and Brownlie, D. (2008), eds., Critical Marketing: Issues in Contemporary Marketing, Chichester: Wiley. Van Maanen, J. (1979), "The Fact of Fiction in Organizational Ethnography", Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 539-50. Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004), "Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68, No. 1, pp. 1-17. Webster, F. (2002), "The Role of Marketing and the Firm". In Weitz B., and Wensley R., eds., Handbook of Marketing, London, Sage, pp. 66-83. Wind, Y. and Robertson, T.S. (1983), "Marketing Strategy: New Directions for Theory and Research", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 12-25. Yin, R.K. (1984), Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 2nd edition, London: Sage.
Zeithaml, V.A., Berry, L.L. and Pararsuraman, A. (1990), Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, New York: The Free Press.
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See the following edited books (Brownlie et al., 1999; Saren et al., 2007b; Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008), monographs (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Skålén et al., 2008), and journal articles (see, for instance, Alvesson, 1994; Arndt, 1985; Brownlie, 2006; Burton, 2001; Skålén et al., 2006) regarding the introduction of critical perspectives into marketing.
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doc_888568028.docx
Study Reports On Service Marketing And Subjectivity: The Shaping Of Customer-Oriented Employees, Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service. It is a critical business function for attracting customers.
Study Reports On Service Marketing And Subjectivity: The Shaping Of Customer-Oriented Employees
ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward customer-orienting employee subjectivity. It reports a case study of a service firm the FI - which has been drawing on service marketing practices in order to manage the organization. By analyzing the case of the FI, based on Foucault's notions of disciplinary and pastoral power, the paper suggests that service marketing practices contribute toward making the subjectivity of front-line employees (FLEs) more proactive. More specifically, the paper suggests that the disciplinary power of service marketing practices generates knowledge of the FLEs - in the present case, that they are reactive but need to be proactive - and that the pastoral power of service marketing practices draw on that knowledge, making the subjectivity of the FLEs more proactive. The paper concludes that service marketing practices are translated when they encounter organizational practice. Based on this conclusion, the ideal that marketing research is able, and meant, to formulate general managerial practices, which organizations should strive to mirror, is found to be unachievable.
Keywords: Critical marketing, Disciplinary power, Foucault, Pastoral power, Service marketing, Subjectivity.
INTRODUCTION
Marketing is largely a positivistic and managerially-prescriptive discipline. Academic marketing has focused on developing practices intended to realize the customer orientation of the marketing concept but it has largely neglected empirically studying the effects of these
practices in organizations (Marion 1993; Svensson 2007; Webster 2002). One reason for the lack of research in this area might be that marketing, outside of consumer research, largely lacks a critical empirical research program (Bradshaw and Fuat Firat 2007; Brownlie and Hewer 2007; Burton 2001). While critical perspectives aiming to question the managerial hegemony and "to reveal the power relations and contested interests that are embedded in knowledge production" (Saren et al. 2007a: xviii) have been thoroughly introduced into marketing1, it is now, in the words of Brownlie and Hewer (2007: 59), "time to put critical aspirations into action" in order to tease out the full potential of critical marketing. In this paper, I achieve this by empirically studying how marketing practices strongly associated with academic marketing research order organizations and their members. I draw on a case study of a Swedish financial service firm, referred to as the Financial Institute (FI), which has been using marketing practices clearly associated with service marketing research, particularly measurements of service quality and relationship marketing, in order to manage the organization. Taking a stance in previous conceptual analyses of service marketing (see Skålén et al. 2006; 2008) reviewed in the next section, I focus on the role that the service marketing practices utilized at the FI play in ordering employee subjectivity, especially the subjectivity of front-line employees (FLEs). Theoretically, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault whose understanding of power as being discursively embedded and whose studies of how discourse, including academic discourse, orders subjectivity have been informing critical management studies since the late 1980s (see, for instance, Burrell 1988). By adopting a
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Foucauldian framework and by focusing on the relationship between academic marketing discourse and subjectivity, the paper addresses one of the three major research gaps that Morgan (2003), in his review of marketing research, suggested critical marketing might be able to fill. Morgan (2003: 123, emphasis added) argued that "a more critical understanding of the consequences of marketing and its proliferation for the constitution of the self" is needed in marketing. Hence, the aim of this paper is to study empirically how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees, especially FLEs, into customeroriented subjects. By focusing on this issue, the paper contributes toward articulating an empirically-informed critique of the relationship between academic marketing research and marketing practice. I proceed by reviewing Foucault's works on subjectivity and power as well as previous marketing research that has drawn on these notions. Then, I turn to the method used to conduct the present research, followed by the case description which is intertwined with an analysis of the relationship between service marketing practices and FLE subjectivity. A concluding discussion ends the paper.
SERVICE MARKETING, SUBJECTIVITY, AND POWER/KNOWLEDGE
For Foucault (see, for instance, 1977; 1981), subjectivity is formed in relation to discourse or systems of "truths", e.g. marketing. The word "truths" is in quotation marks because Foucault took a political perspective on truth: his critical studies suggest that truth is conditional. But he also acknowledged that many people believe in the existence of and is affected by truths. This implies that knowledge is intertwined with power and that regimes of power/knowledge - discourses - order the subjectivity of humans. In contrast to traditional power theories (see,
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for instance, Clegg et al. 2006), Foucault sees power neither as possessed by someone nor as something that agents or institutions can use to force people to do things against their will; rather he sees power as embedded in knowledge and as regulating the relationship between people. The subject, Foucault argued, exists as a discursively articulated "position that can be filled in certain conditions by various individuals" (Foucault 1977, quoted in Bergström and Knights 2006: 354). Discourses of truth or regimes of power/knowledge promote discursive practices that facilitate the construction of subjectivity. Previous Foucauldian research has explicated which subject positions are ascribed to individuals by the discursive practices promoted by various types of regimes of power/knowledge - including academic regimes such as criminology (Foucault 1977), psychology (Rose 1996), economics (Rose 1999), total quality management (Quist et al. 2007) and, indeed, marketing (Skålén et al. 2008). However, these studies have also been critical in their orientation. In line with Foucault's view of critique, they have made explicit the political nature of systems of truths and problematized the subject positions they prescribe with the aim of 'insure[ing] the desubjugation of the subject' (Foucault 1997: 32). By elaborating on previous conceptual Foucauldian marketing research, the empirical analysis in the present paper aims to contribute toward advancing such a critique of academic marketing, and service marketing in particular.
Service marketing and subjectivity Skålén et al. (2006; 2008) have analyzed academic marketing discourse as a regime of power/knowledge. One of their key arguments is that the object of the customer orientation type of managerial rationality promoted by academic marketing discourse has shifted its focus from the products that a company makes in marketing management discourse to the employees who make the products and offer the services in service marketing discourse.
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Employee subjectivity, and in particular FLE subjectivity, they argue, has become one - if not the - central object of customer orientation in service marketing discourse. As pointed out by Skålén et al. (2006; 2008), service marketing originally emerged as a critique of the marketing management school of thought. Even though subjectivity was not explicitly mentioned, the discussion revolved around the need to customer-orient employee subjectivity as well as the lack of managerial practices for accomplishing precisely that offered by marketing management discourse. In an early discipline-shaping paper, Shostack (1977: 73) argued that "marketing [management] offers no guidance, terminology, or practical rules that are clearly relevant to services ?[because] [t]he classic marketing 'mix', the seminal literature, and the language of marketing all derive from the manufacture of physical goods." In a series of other discipline-shaping service marketing papers, Grönroos (1978; 1982; 1984) argued that services - but not products - are consumed and produced simultaneously, implying that customers to some extent always co-produce services with employees. Consequently, customers of service organizations not only evaluate what they get - the outcome of the production process, i.e. the product - but also, more importantly, how they get it - the production process itself and, in particular, the employees involved. As Shostack (1977: 79) argued: "services are often inextricably entwined with their human representatives. In many fields, a person is perceived to be the service." Therefore, marketing needed to develop managerial practices that facilitated the customer-orientation of the employees rather than the products. The call for a change of direction in marketing research was heard. Marketing scholars who later formed the service marketing field, as well as closely related fields, such as that of relationship marketing, either developed managerial practices or knowledge which was translated into managerial practices, e.g. service quality surveys, service and market orientation change models, and relationship marketing databases. The power/knowledge of
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these practices targeted subjectivity by focusing on human characteristics such as empathy, trust, responsiveness, and appearance. Based on the body of knowledge emerging over the years, Vargo and Lusch (2004, see also, for instance, Lusch et al. 2007) recently argued that service marketing provides the central input for a new dominant logic of marketing - "the service dominant logic" - provoking a shift in perspective for marketing scholars and practitioners from focusing on operand resources - "land, animal life, plant life, minerals and other natural resources" - to focusing on operant resources - "skills and knowledge" (Vargo and Lusch 2004: 2). The service dominant logic, and indeed the service marketing discourse as a whole, can thus be seen as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense of the word: it is a regime of power/knowledge which targets the subjectivity of employees by producing practices that foster customer-oriented "skills and knowledge". Despite the general lack of systematic empirical studies concerning how and to what extent marketing and service marketing practices order organizations within marketing (Marion 1993; Svensson 2007; Webster 2002), the dominant position seems to be that marketing practices have not ordered organizations and their members significantly (see, for instance, Hollander et al. 2005; Hunt 1983; 1994; Wind 1983). However, some empirical studies of marketing and service marketing within the field of management studies suggest otherwise. Peccei and Rosenthal (2000; 2001) have shown that customer-orientation practices, including service marketing practices, have affected organizations and FLEs deeply. A weakness in Peccei and Rosenthal's studies, in relation to the present paper, is that service marketing practices are grouped together with other customer-orientation practices. Harris and Ogbonna (2003: 503) show that the organization they were studying was "driven by parttime-marketers who either use a traditional mix-management approach or a relational approach" (see also Morgan and Sturdy 2000). The latter approach "focus[es] on long-term
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relationship formation" (Harris and Ogbonna 2003: 503) and fosters a customer-oriented subjectivity among the FLEs. In spite of these studies, how and to what extent academic service marketing practices order employee subjectivity, as well as what critical implications this has, remains obscure. When this is studied from a Foucauldian perspective, it is essential to understand that the subject is located in regimes of power/knowledge: the subject is not a function of stable constellations of attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experience residing in the individual but a position embedded in service marketing discourse. Therefore, the focus of the present paper is whether or not the employees behave, talk about, and define themselves, as well as whether or not they are talked about and defined by others, in the language of, or one aligned with, service marketing discourse; not whether they have internalised the values and norms promoted by service marketing discourse.
Disciplinary and pastoral power Foucault (1977; 1981; 2007) postulated a critical difference between two forms of power/knowledge during processes of subjectification: disciplinary power and pastoral power, both of which are pivotal as regards analyzing how service marketing practices contribute toward customer-orientating the subjectivity of employees in the present paper. Differentiating between the two forms is based upon what kind of notion of "truth" or epistemology they presuppose in order to subjectify. Disciplinary power presupposes a positivistic epistemology. True and correct statements about subjectivity - i.e. objective statements - are those corresponding with empirical reality as perceived by our sensory organs. Regimes of disciplinary power, such as the modern social and behavioral sciences, including marketing, make claims about subjectivity based on objective truths about normality: they subjectify people by objectifying them. In order to accomplish this form of
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subjectification, argued Foucault (1977; 1981), the practices associated with disciplinary power function as examinations. Through examinations - such as the service quality surveys studied in the present paper - people are turned into objects of knowledge. Examinations embody the norms associated with the regimes of power/knowledge they are embedded in and reveal gaps between the person's present state and these norms. This enables a management that fosters a movement toward the norm: By closing gaps between the actual self and the ideal self, the person becomes, through disciplinary power, both a subject of knowledge and subjected to knowledge. Pastoral power is founded on what could be referred to as a transcendental understanding of "truth" or epistemology. Here, "truth" is represented by a belief system such as the Bible or a formalized ethic such as the Ten Commandments. Indeed, the very word pastoral is usually associated with Christian practices. Foucault's point, however, is that the key function of the pastoral - confession and avowal - illuminates how subjectivity is constructed in many societal domains (Foucault 1977; 2007). Foucault argued that people not only confess their sins to pastors representing the Christian belief system, but also to "pastors" representing other ethics, e.g. employees avowing their "sins" to their managers who interpret this information in relation to a common ethic such as that of customer-orientation promoted by marketing discourse. By means of the avowals that confessional practices generate, it is possible for managers to guide and lead confessors toward the ethic governing the situation. However, confessing and avowing subjects can also subjectify themselves without the support of an outside force. In speaking about themselves, they become aware of what type of people they are (Covaleski et al. 1998) and, if they find themselves deviating from the ethic that promises them "salvation", they may try to change themselves. Accordingly, pastoral power facilitates reflexive self-subjectification.
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METHOD
Because there has not been any previous systematic empirical analysis of how and to what extent academic service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees into customer-oriented subjects, I adopted an exploratory single-case study design (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 1984). I deliberately chose to study an organization - the FI - whose management has a track record of drawing on service marketing practices. The FI has collaborated, for instance, with researchers and consultants specializing in the field of service and relationship marketing in order to develop the organization along these lines.
Data collection My main data collection technique was interviewing (see Glazer and Strauss 1967; Spradley 1979). In total, I conducted 41 interviews between March 2006 and December 2007. Each interview lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. In total, I interviewed 13 managers, 6 back office staff, and 22 FLEs. Seven of the respondents - 3 managers, 2 back office staff, and 2 FLEs were interviewed twice. These are my main informants and some of them have fictitious names in the case description. In total, 34 respondents were interviewed, 24 of whom were women and 10 men. At first, the interviews were rather unstructured. However, as themes started to emerge (see next section), these were probed during subsequent interviews. An initial round of interviews was conducted between March and June 2006. After having transcribed all the interviews verbatim and made a thorough categorization, I returned to the organization in August and December 2007 for a second and third round of interviews devoted to probing the themes that had emerged. In addition to interviews, I also collected internal documents such as strategic plans and customer quality survey forms.
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Data analysis Complying with the suggestions given in grounded theory regarding data analysis (Glazer and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1998), I transcribed and coded the interviews as soon as possible after conducting them; Nvivo 7 was used as the data analysis software. This first order coding focused on in vivo codes (Glazer and Strauss 1967) or simple descriptive phrases (Van Maanen 1979) which seemed relevant to understanding the role of service marketing in the ordering of employee subjectivity. I soon discovered that the first order codes associated with change, or with management's ambition to bring about change, were clearly related to service and relationship marketing practices. Therefore, it seemed plausible to draw on the case in order to explain how and to what extent service marketing practices trigger processes of subjectification.
THE CASE STUDY
The FI specialises in home loans, having approximately 10% of Sweden's home loans market. It has a net annual profit of SEK462m (approx. €50m). In 2006, it had 410 employees, of whom approximately 65% were women (Annual Report 2006). The FI has three divisions: borrowing, business-to-business loans, and consumer loans. The present paper focuses solely on the consumer loans division, which is the FI's largest with approximately 210 employees. Basically, this division consists of back office functions such as IT and HRM and a front office customer service function arranged as six groups of approximately 15 FLEs and headed by a team leader. Communication with the customer is mostly conducted by phone, but also by e-mail and fax. No face-to-face interaction occurs with the customers.
Measuring service quality: generating a customer-oriented subject position
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Due to increasing market competition during the early years of the new millennium, the management of the FI decided to improve customer service by relying on a service quality approach. Service quality is one of the major research fields of service marketing (Schneider and White 2004). Several models have been developed for measuring customer-perceived service quality. These models focus on measuring how the service is rendered - the "functional quality" - rather than what the customer gets - the "technical quality" (Grönroos 1982; 1984) - suggesting that the subjectivity of the staff, and of the FLEs in particular, is a key object of measurement (Skålén and Fougère 2007). This argument is supported by an inquiry into the "service quality determinants", which models for measuring service quality are based on. The determinants are deemed to be the dimensions having the most influence on the customers' overall perceptions of service quality and are thus thought to account for variances in customer-perceived service quality. Many of these determinants address the behaviors and feelings of the FLEs, e.g. their reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurance, attitudes, appearance, behavior, and expertise. Using standardised measurement scales such as "Servqual" (Parasuraman et al. 1988) and "Servperf" (Cronin and Taylor 1994), based on these service quality determinants, the expressed feelings and behaviors of the FLEs can be measured, enabling systematic comparison between FLE subjectivity and the dimensions of customer-perceived service quality. The quality measurement surveys utilized by the FI are largely based on quality determinants similar to the general scales, as suggested by the following comparison between the Servqual constructs and the constructs of the FI's major quality survey, the customer barometer.
Insert table 1 about here
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Mary, a project leader and manager who had systematically analyzed the results of all the customer surveys, said: "The only general criticism we've had in the quality surveys is that we're not proactive enough." Every single manager I interviewed shared Mary's interpretation of the survey results. The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English defines proactive as "creating or controlling a situation by taking the initiative." This is in line with the meaning attached to the word by the FI employees. FLE Anne, for example, argues that proactive means "Anticipating the customer. You realise the customers have a need before they realise it themselves and then you act on that knowledge". It is the FLEs who are supposed to "anticipate" and "act" on "knowledge". Being proactive is one way of being an FLE; this is a possible and, according to FI managers, preferable subject position for the FLEs. However, when the service quality program was initiated, the bulk of the FLEs perceived themselves as administrators; something which most of the managers argued was the antithesis of a proactive FLE, as exemplified by Mary, who argued that the FLEs "needed to shift from being reactive order clerks to being proactive customer representatives". The results of the surveys were accepted as fact by the managers and back office staff, and this acceptance had a huge effect on the strategic orientation of the FI. As sales manager David puts it: "Since they [the customers] say in the surveys that we are too passive, we have to become more proactive." This "truth", or power/knowledge effect of service quality surveys, is consistent with previous Foucauldian conceptual research, which has perceived service quality measurement practices to be a form of examination shaping subjectivity through disciplinary power (Skålén and Fougère 2007). As explained above, Foucault argued that examinations make people visible, detectable, and known objectively - they establish "truths" about people, e.g. that the FI's FLEs are reactive. Examinations are, furthermore, based on norms of appropriate behavior, referred to as "service quality determinants" in the service quality case. Informed by these norms, the service quality surveys produce knowledge
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which guides perception and action, e.g. that the FLEs need to be more proactive. Consistent with Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power, the FI service quality surveys thus revealed a gap between the FLEs' present reactive subjectivity and their ideal proactive subjectivity. However, the quality surveys did not contribute toward closing this gap. This became evident to FI managers who then, framed by the power/knowledge of the results of the service quality measurement, adopted coaching and customer relationship marketing in order to produce something which, from their perspective, has to be described as the truly customer-oriented FLE; i.e. the proactive FLE.
Coaching and relationship marketing: the shaping of customer-oriented proactive subjects Coaching and the proactive FLE At the FI, coaching is a leadership style which emphasizes strategic social interaction and communication between the coach / manager and the FLEs whereby the former tries to support the latter so that these behave in a customer-oriented and proactive way. As FLE Anne puts it: "The bulk of the feedback we get from the boss deals with the extent to which we have been proactive during our conversations with customers". The approach to coaching used by the FI is consistent with the recommendations given in Delivering Quality Service, which is an entire book, written by influential service marketing scholars Leonard Berry, A. Parasuraman, and Valerie Zeithaml, about how to close the "service quality gaps" which service quality surveys have detected. These authors argue in favor of what they call an "inthe-field leadership style." This type of leadership entails that "excellent? service leaders lead in the field? They are visible to their people, endlessly coaching, praising, correcting, cajoling, sermonizing, observing, questioning, and listening. They emphasise two-way, personal communications." (Zeithaml et al. 1990: 7, emphasis added).
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At the FI, coaching manifests itself most prominently in the form of tele coaching. This involves the team leaders sitting and listening to the FLEs while these talk to the customer by phone, giving them instant feedback afterwards. In this way, the team leaders help the FLEs to become more proactive. As an example, the team leaders, via tele coaching, get the FLEs to ask requirement-oriented questions, which is one way of expressing oneself proactively. Anne explains: "Most of us work by putting requirement-oriented questions to the customer. Right from the beginning of the call, you take charge and ensure that it's not only the customer who talks." Anne makes a direct link between the tele coaching that her team leader Alice has provided here and the practice of using requirement-oriented questions. "Alice does a lot of tele coaching with us and she has pushed hard to get us to work with requirement-oriented questions." Several of the FLEs on Alice's team emphasized this. One of them said: "the tele coaching I got from my boss [Alice] made me use requirement-oriented questions." In the two interviews I conducted with Alice, she confirmed that this was indeed the case. She explained that "requirement-oriented questions are questions concerning what we can help the customer with. They support my staff in finding out what the customer wants? and whether or not we want that customer." By taking charge of the customer interaction by asking requirementoriented questions, rather than letting the customer drive the conversation, the FLEs present themselves proactively to the customer. The proactive subjectivity thus emerges by means of subtle changes in the dialog with the customer. I suggest that coaching drives the formation of a proactive subjectivity through pastoral power. As explained above, managing in a pastoral way is dependent on confessional practices - e.g. tele coaching where the FLEs avow their behaviors and thoughts to their team leaders. These avowals make it possible for the team leader to detect if the FLEs have taken on a proactive subjectivity or not. If this is not the case, the team leader will coach the FLEs towards a proactive subjectivity by, for instance, making them ask requirement-oriented
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questions. Seen from the perspective of pastoral power, the team leaders are "pastors", i.e. people who, through their inner qualities, are appointed to lead and direct a "flock of sheep" the FLEs - in accordance with the ideal of proactivity. Pastors manage by helping "their sheep" reach "salvation", which means, at the FI, being a customer-oriented proactive FLE; only then will the FLEs be richly rewarded, socially (recognition), psychologically (selfesteem), and monetarily (higher salaries). But the FLEs also steer themselves toward proactivity without the direct support of a pastor. When speaking about themselves during coaching sessions, they reveal to themselves what types of FLEs they are and, if they are dissatisfied with who they are (a satisfaction contingent upon the customer-oriented proactive ethic), they will try to change themselves. Accordingly, the coaching stimulates and enables self-management, which is another key feature of pastoral power. Anne exemplifies this: "During tele coaching, you reflect a lot on what you say to the customer. You go through your communication skills yourself." Another FLE said: "tele coaching makes you think for yourself, it's an eye-opener; how you should be conducting the conversation" and thus how you should be conducting yourself. As Alice puts it coaching is "help-to-self-help."
Customer relationship management and the proactive FLE In addition to coaching, customer relationship management (CRM) discourse was drawn on in order to make the FLEs' subjectivity more proactive. Mary, who led the CRM project, saw a clear link, as did her assistant project leader Barbara, between CRM and making the FLEs' subjectivity more proactive. This is consistent with how I interpret the central tenets of research into relationship marketing (RM), departing as it does from the belief that longlasting customer relationships, under many circumstances, are more profitable and better able to realize customer orientation than transaction marketing focused on finding new customers
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(Grönroos 1994). Accordingly, research into relationship marketing has focused on issues such as how to make customers loyal (Reichheld and Teal 1996) and prevent them from switching (Roos 1999) to competitors. A prerequisite for accomplishing this, in line with Mary's argument, is FLEs acting proactively toward their customers - only by (pro)acting before the customers become disloyal, or switch, will the FLEs be able to prevent them from going their separate ways. The fact that the CRM project at the FI, according to Mary, was aimed at "shaping ways of working which ensured that customers applying for loans did not drop out during the handling process and that existing customers stayed longer" is thus very much in line with the central tenets of the RM literature. This would ensure, according to Barbara, that the FLEs went from "being order clerks, without the ability to take the initiative, to being proactive customer representatives." Mary and Barbara, as the appointed project leaders, together with a team consisting of 12 FLEs and one team leader who had all been transferred from their normal duties for a period of six months, began working on developing RM-informed "ways of working". One of the FLEs made the following representative statement about the content of the work carried out by the group: "Through our discussions within the group, it became evident that many of us had experienced that the customers whom we hadn't contacted directly after their loan application had often chosen another bank by the time we'd eventually contacted them?then we realised that this wasn't beneficial to us." Drawing on the notion of pastoral power, I argue that the FLEs confessed and avowed that they had lost many customers during the application process. They also acknowledged that this was bad for business. The FLEs thus confessed that they needed to work differently. Implicitly, they acknowledged that a "way of working" which fostered long-lasting relationships with the customers was something to strive for. Informed by these insights, the FLEs, supported by "pastors" Mary and Barbara, developed new ways of working. One of the FLEs said: "We realised that? we needed to ask questions
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that establish what needs the customers have? is this a customer for us? If so? how can we help that customer in a beneficial way?? We made checklists of how to work this way? it then became obvious that we needed to be more active when dealing with the customers." Hence, the CRM project at the FI encouraged the FLEs to lead themselves toward more proactive ways of working, exemplified thus by one FLE; "Now I assume responsibility and ring customers who have made a loan application and ask if they have any questions ? previously I never did that". One of his colleagues made a similar remark: "The [CRM] project created a new way of thinking? a new mindset." Their team leader agrees: "We keep our customers closer to us now". However, this is not the complete story. Some FLEs only took part in developing the proactive ways of working, but resisted working in accordance with them. Mary explains: "When some of the group members realised that this [the new ways of working] was being demanded of them, things became very, very tough for some of them." These FLEs only adapted their subjectivity to a very limited extent to the proactivity prescribed to them by the RM discourse, as exemplified by one FLE who said: "I chose to drop out of the project after a while. I couldn't see how it would improve the handling process." According to Foucauldian management scholars, resistance to a particular managerial discourse is mobilised via other available countervailing discourses and is especially likely to arise when discourses make contesting claims regarding subjectivity (Covaleski et al. 1998; Quist et al. 2007). It is possible to interpret the resistance of some of the FLEs toward RM at the FI using this reasoning. CRM offers the FLEs subject positions as proactive FLEs, while the institutionalized bureaucratic discourse at the FI fosters reactive subjects. In order to relax these competing, contradictory, and confusing claims, the resisting FLEs draw on their present subjectivity which is colored by the bureaucratic discourse. They refused to align themselves with the proactive subject position inherent in the RM discourse.
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CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
The focus of this paper has been empirically studying how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees, especially FLEs, into customeroriented subjects. While this is an understudied issue in marketing (Marion 1993; Svensson 2007; Webster 2002), the dominant position is that marketing practices have ordered organizations and their members to an insignificant degree (see, for instance, Hollander et al. 2005; Hunt 1983; 1994; Wind 1983). Even though a few empirical studies of marketing and service marketing in the field of management studies suggest otherwise (see Harris and Ogbonna 2003; Morgan and Sturdy 2000; Peccei and Rosenthal 2000; 2001), how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward turning employees into customeroriented employees remains obscure. The present paper suggests that service marketing practices contribute toward making the subjectivity of FLEs more customer-oriented. This is consistent with previous research (see Harris and Ogbonna 2003; Morgan and Sturdy 2000; Peccei and Rosenthal 2000; 2001). This paper suggests, furthermore, that service marketing practices make employee subjectivity more proactive. In addition, the present paper also explains how service marketing practices contribute toward making employee subjectivity more customer-oriented and proactive. Based on the Foucauldian power/knowledge framework, the study suggests that service marketing discourse promotes disciplinary and pastoral practices premised upon the rationality of customer orientation. These practices foster certain examinations and confessions which jointly shape the subjectivity of FLEs by generating knowledge about them, e.g. that the FLEs are reactive but need to be customer-oriented and proactive, and by contributing toward working that knowledge into the FLEs - e.g. making them more
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customer-oriented and proactive. However, the paper suggests that it is the disciplinary power which generates the subject position of proactivity and that it is the pastoral power which makes the FLEs more proactive. The paper thus contributes toward shedding light on the relationship between disciplinary and pastoral power in more general terms; a relationship which is unclear both in Foucauldian management studies and in Foucault's own work. Pastoral and disciplinary power seems to be intertwined with each other and do not appear to be two different forms of power. More research is needed on this issue. Moreover, the paper also suggests that service marketing practices order the subjectivity of managers by showing that the managers' strategic intentions are disciplined by the power/knowledge of service quality measurement practices and that coaching and relationship marketing discourse turn managers into "pastors" who guide and lead the FLEs toward salvation. These results, at least at first glance, must seem like a positive surprise for the mainstream marketing scholars who have claimed that marketing practices have had very little impact on organizational practice and who have seen this as unfortunate. However, in addition to the section on CRM above showing that marketing practices are being resisted, the findings suggest that academic marketing practices do not order organizations in the way prescribed by marketing research. This differentiates the present study from previous empirical studies of the effects of marketing practices on organizations; studies which have argued that the customer-oriented rationality inherent in marketing practices has determined organizational practice (cf. Harris and Ogbonna 2003; Morgan and Sturdy 2000). On the contrary, the present study suggests that something takes place, which can be described by drawing on Latour (1987; 2005) as a re-interpretation or "translation" process, when service marketing practices encounter organizational practice (cf. Skålén et al. 2005). More specifically, the present study suggests that the translation process takes place at the point when the "objective" knowledge generated by the disciplinary practices - in the present case
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the results of the service quality measurement - meets the "subjective" knowledge associated with pastoral power; the latter being represented in the present case by the managers / the "pastors" and their images of the FLEs. The latter interpret the results of service quality measurement and reach the conclusion that the FLEs need to be more proactive. This interpretation is not determined by service quality discourse. Rather, proactivity emerges as a subject position to strive toward when the managers' perceptions of the FLEs as reactive order clerks and the results of the quality surveys are combined in order to interpret the situation. Thus, if the results are analyzed a bit deeper, they may not be such a positive surprise to mainstream marketing academicians after all because the conclusion put forward here suggests that the marketing discipline needs to distance itself from the positivism and managerialism it is founded on. More specifically, it questions, in line with previous conceptual critical marketing research (cf. Cochoy 1998; Brownlie and Saren 1997), the idea that academic marketing research is able, and meant, to formulate managerially colored general and objective truths which marketing practice and practitioners should strive to mirror. Because the logical implication of the translation thesis put forward here is that it is unrealistic to expect marketing practices to be able to determine marketing practice and practitioners. Accordingly, the paper problematizes the truth claims inherent in academic marketing discourse and contributes toward desubjugating the subject; something that Foucault (1997) argued was central to critical analysis. Furthermore, the translation thesis suggests that the marketing discipline needs to be re-orientated away from prescribing marketing to practice and toward studying - empirically as well as critically - marketing as practice. A key topic of such a critical research program would be investigating the link between academic marketing and organizational practice in order to find out if the translation thesis put forward here has any support or not.
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TABLES
Table I: A comparison between Servqual and the FI customer barometer Servqual determinants Reliability XYZ provides its services at the When I send an e-mail, do I get a time it promises to do so.* response within the timeframe I expect? Servqual statements FI customer barometer
Responsiveness You do not receive prompt Have we given you prompt service service from XYZ's employees.* regarding your home loan? Assurance Empathy Employees of XYZ are polite.* Have we dealt with you satisfactorily?
Employees of XYZ do not give Have you been treated well by your you personal attention.* contact person?
Tangibles
XYZ's physical facilities are The design of the webpage makes it visually appealing.* easy for me to find the information I need?
*Source: Parasuraman et al. 1988.
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See the following edited books (Brownlie et al., 1999; Saren et al., 2007b; Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008), monographs (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Skålén et al., 2008), and journal articles (see, for instance, Alvesson, 1994; Arndt, 1985; Brownlie, 2006; Burton, 2001; Skålén et al., 2006) regarding the introduction of critical perspectives into marketing.
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