Customers at Work : New Perspectives on Interactive Service Work

Explores the ongoing transformation of service relationships, focusing on the incorporation of the customer's active contribution to virtually all aspects and stages of the production process. This volume illuminates social relations and interaction between customers and service providers as well as between the users of web-based services.

Customers at Work is about the ongoing transformation of service relationships, focusing on the incorporation of the customer''s active contribution to virtually all aspects and stages of the production process. This volume illuminates social relations between customers and service providers as they interact in any kind of service relationship. It presents distinctly sociological approaches that provide new insights to the debates about service proletariat and internet-based knowledge work. Recent research on service interaction, informed by the German sociology of work tradition, highlights profound changes in service relationships that will shape the quality of future service work. The authors of this volume bring together many of these recent core findings and offer them in a combination of theoretical exploration and empirical analysis to an international audience for the first time.