Darach Turley

Compassion at the counter: Service providers and bereaved consumers

Although the emotional labour required of service providers has received considerable research attention, few studies have examined service workers’ experiences of emotionally charged service encounters. In this article we review literature on emotion management and compassion in the workplace. We then describe a qualitative study which examined the service encounter occurring when bereaved Irish consumers contacted their local newspaper to place In Memoriam notices on the anniversary of a close family member’s death. We suggest that these newspaper employees engaged in philanthropic emotion management when dealing with bereaved customers, and we locate this within the broader context of compassion as interpersonal work and as organizational accomplishment. We also suggest that compassion in organizations is not amenable to managerial systematization and control.

Grounded theory in sales research: an investigation of salespeople’s client relationships

In this paper, grounded theory as an inductive method of theory generation in business research is presented and critically evaluated. The historical and epistemological backgrounds of the method are discussed, its research procedures are briefly outlined, and its suitability for sales research assessed. To illustrate the principles of the method, a study of the nature of business‐to‐business sales relationships is introduced. The results of this study show clearly that grounded theory can yield highly significant findings in areas that deal with phenomena as complex as human relationships, where the construction of theoretical frameworks cannot be achieved at the cost of conceptual density.

Exploring salesperson learning in the client relationship nexus

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the characteristics and parameters of salesperson learning within client relationships, thereby filling a noticeable gap in the knowledge of individual learning in a sales context. It also aims at advancing the discussion on the nature of learning and knowledge in sales and marketing.Design/methodology/approach – A grounded theory approach is used to investigate salesperson learning in a relational context. Data collection methods include interviews with 36 business‐to‐business sales personnel, reflexive exercises and field observations.Findings – The investigation shows that salesperson relational learning is personal, that it occurs in action, that it is contextual, natural, open‐ended, and often unconscious. Antecedents of learning are personal dispositions such as openness to changing contexts and situated learning mechanisms; consequences of relational learning are personal methods of knowledge transfer as well as the transformation of the learner and the clie...

The sadness of lives and the comfort of things: Goods as evocative objects in bereavement

Abstract This paper seeks to understand the texture and emotional tenor of the relations that bereaved people can have with a range of objects, including those that seem mundane or simply part of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. Taking Joan Didions best-selling book, The Year of Magical Thinking, as its focus, the paper examines the varied and significant roles that certain objects played as she negotiated the vagaries of her first year as a widow. While previous literature has mined the memorialising function of goods for survivors, our analysis suggests that goods and consumption experiences can also play a powerful role as tools to think with for those struggling to create a meaningful narrative of death and loss. It concludes by considering the contribution of the analysis to the understanding of goods as ‘active life presences’ (Turkle, 2007), the relationship between consumption and bereavement, and ‘the sadness of lives and the comfort of things’ (Miller, 2008).

The Perceived Impact of Information Technology on Salespeople's Relational Competencies

Over the last decade, a steady stream of academic research and practitioner articles has examined the adoption and use of information technology (IT) applications in sales and customer services. In much of this literature, sales-related IT tools have been heralded as enhancing salespeoples customer service delivery, professionalism and general sales effectiveness. However, the literature has yet to investigate the precise nature of salespeoples experience with IT tools in their daily sales tasks. Specifically, a core area of salespeoples skills – namely their ability to practice relationship selling – has been ignored by the sales management literature examining the impact of such tools. This research investigates how the incorporation of IT tools in salespeoples customer interactions affects salespeoples perceived relational competencies. Results indicate that while IT tools can enhance some relational competencies, they are likely to inhibit other competencies that may be crucial in industries where close personal customer relationships are core to a firms success.

Fatal errors: unbridling emotions in service failure experiences

There is little chance of researchers steeped in the Saxon tradition being led astray by the ‘...often private, disguised, inchoate, non-conscious, non-rational and multidimensional characteristics ascribed to, and experienced in, emotion’ (Sturdy, 2003, p. 99). Although emotions may be uncomfortable territory for the Saxon researcher, they constitute a natural habitat for Celts, who are ‘undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature’ (Arnold, 1891, p. 91). This paper explores emotional dimensions of service failure experiences. In keeping with the Celtic spirit, its origins have more to do with coincidence than calculation; unsolicited comments from interviews with service providers dealing with bereaved consumers led us to explore service failure in a context that was already highly charged. Reviewing studies on these issues, we were shocked by how methodologically circumscribed, emotionally sterile, and essentially trivial much research in this area appeared to be. According to this literature, for example, the most serious service breakdowns involve consumers finding no record of their reservation at a hotel (Levesque and McDougall, 2000), receiving incorrect items by mail order or getting the wrong room key in a hotel (Palmer, Beggs and Keown-McMullan, 2000). Undoubtedly such incidents are annoying, but the marketing literature appears silent on a whole range of service encounters that are difficult and distressing even before a service breakdown occurs. It also appears to have neglected what might be termed ‘fatal errors’—critical, irreversible mistakes that affect us as ‘people first and consumers second’ (Schneider and Bowen, 1999), such as a cancelled flight preventing us from attending a funeral. In the following sections, we review literature on emotions in services and on service failure and recovery. We then present a study examining the experiences of frontline staff who deal with

Mortality, morality and the marketplace: Empathetic improvisation and the double duty of care in bereaved consumers’ service encounters

ABSTRACT In the field of death studies, there is growing recognition that other people, culture and the dead themselves shape individual experiences of bereavement. Service encounters are a key but under-researched site for examining these interactions, broader relationships between mortality, the marketplace and consumer culture, and their implications for consumer well-being. This interpretive study explores service encounters from the perspective of bereaved American consumers. Our data suggest that bereavement rendered service encounters doubly heterogeneous, and that continuing bonds between the living and the dead often placed a double duty of care on service providers, since the interests of the dead as well as the well-being of survivors were at stake. From the bereaved consumer’s perspective, this double duty of care seems more likely to be discharged through empathetic improvisation rather than standardised performances of saccharine sensitivity by service providers.

Mortality, morality and the marketplace

ABSTRACT In the field of death studies, there is growing recognition that other people, culture and the dead themselves shape individual experiences of bereavement. Service encounters are a key but under-researched site for examining these interactions, broader relationships between mortality, the marketplace and consumer culture, and their implications for consumer well-being. This interpretive study explores service encounters from the perspective of bereaved American consumers. Our data suggest that bereavement rendered service encounters doubly heterogeneous, and that continuing bonds between the living and the dead often placed a double duty of care on service providers, since the interests of the dead as well as the well-being of survivors were at stake. From the bereaved consumer’s perspective, this double duty of care seems more likely to be discharged through empathetic improvisation rather than standardised performances of saccharine sensitivity by service providers.

Mortality, morality and the marketplace: empathetic improvisation and the double duty of care in service encounters with bereaved consumers

ABSTRACT In the field of death studies, there is growing recognition that other people, culture and the dead themselves shape individual experiences of bereavement. Service encounters are a key but under-researched site for examining these interactions, broader relationships between mortality, the marketplace and consumer culture, and their implications for consumer well-being. This interpretive study explores service encounters from the perspective of bereaved American consumers. Our data suggest that bereavement rendered service encounters doubly heterogeneous, and that continuing bonds between the living and the dead often placed a double duty of care on service providers, since the interests of the dead as well as the well-being of survivors were at stake. From the bereaved consumer’s perspective, this double duty of care seems more likely to be discharged through empathetic improvisation rather than standardised performances of saccharine sensitivity by service providers.

Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research

This masterful and captivating book has been written by two anthropologists working in the area of applied consumer research for over a quarter of a century. Their careers have paralleled the growing acceptance of ethnography as a standard item in the repertoires of most qualitative research houses. However, Sunderland and Denny contend that this development has its downside: divorced from its natural home and theoretical wellspring in cultural analysis, ethnography remains just one among a range of data-gathering methods, at best half-baked, at worst bogus. If cultural analysis is a mode of looking at the world, of analysing the organising matrices of human activity and meaning-making, ethnography is its methodology of choice and is inextricably bound up with this endeavour. One of the main contentions of the book is that, within the field of consumer research in particular, so-called ethnographies regularly fail to appreciate the complex, dynamic and mutually constitutive role of the socio-cultural substrate in framing the behaviour of individual consumers. The default ‘zoom’ of the anthropologist and perforce of ethnography itself, has to be the social. This lack of appreciation typically stems from an overly essentialised understanding of ‘culture’ as a reified variable, and a concomitant ignorance of the nature and promise of cultural analysis itself. The first objective the authors set themselves is to garner greater acceptance and use of anthropological analysis by commercial consumer researchers. The second, and arguably the more formidable, is to foster greater understanding and communication between academic anthropology and both academic and applied consumer research. If anthropological academe has harboured a modicum of disdain for applied anthropological research in general, it has viewed applied consumer research by anthropologists as singularly tainted and compromised. Corporate agendas and academic rigour are seen as incommensurate. On a related note, they recognise that anthropological researchers among marketing academics represent little more than a ‘niche’. Despite these obstacles, this book delivers handsomely on both objectives. Undoubtedly, a key