Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology as Interpretive Research Perspectives for Complex Service Features: An Abstract

Abstract

The marketing area is traditionally built in the positivist perspective, as the methodological background makes evident. Although appropriate for the general market perspectives, the quantitative techniques fail in the identification of very sensitive and specific details in the context that sometimes matter. The field details are poorly perceived in service settings. This academic research, positioned in the interpretive perspective by Burrell and Morgan (1979), proposes phenomenological and ethnomethodological procedures as a way to explore in a qualitative perspective the understanding of service details related to consumer behaviours, specially in the notions of relationship marketing, service co-creation, and service failure recovery. As mentioned by Edvardson et al. (2011), the social service systems deal strongly with the notion of value-in-social context, indicating that exploring phenomenological and ethnomethodological research consists in a way to contribute to service marketing context. Phenomenology can be seen as a qualitative research, which intends to explore human experience (Ehrich 2005). The most important authors of the phenomenological movement were Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. Other important contributors are Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Maurice Merleua-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel (Sanders 1982). As a philosophy in the late nineteenth century, phenomenology emerged as a reaction to the dominant scientific paradigm, the positivist (Ehrich 2005). Burrell and Morgan (1979) position this perspective of science in their interpretive quadrant paradigm. The notion of ethnomethodology deals with the everyday life situations, as the case of service context. Many strategies were adopted to build the ethnomethodological research, for example, the meaning of communications and conversation analysis (Sacks 1992; Flick 2009). Garfinkel (2006) mentions that the purpose of this orientation is the explanation of daily actions that are executed in ordinary everyday life. People that are part of the context can give better descriptions and explanations about the environmental practices, procedures, and behaviors. Burrell and Morgan (1979) emphasize that real life is part of a singular social life context. The general way to act sometimes provides important details for study than the results itself, for example: behavior of service providers to identify the real service quality. The ethnomethodological research chooses the immersion in social interactions for the construction of meaning. In this way, Carolillo et al. (2008) understand this research approach as a way to better understand the reality, which emerges from the individual and collective experience. Daft and Weick (2005) mention the possible procedures as a system of meaning, which only makes sense in the real-life context. Ehrich (2005, p. 8) states that “the contribution of phenomenology is its ability to uncover and unravel the essence of lived experience” that has the potential to understand the management phenomena as a practice and a process that the human dimension is central. The same observation of the author is valid for ethnomethodology. These methods can contribute to the evolution of the marketing field, especially in the service arena. The development of new perspectives for collection and analysis of qualitative data is a challenge to researchers. Even challenging, choosing of these alternatives is a methodological way to obtain information that can contribute to marketing.