Playing with Space to Deal with the Contradictions of Customer Sovereignty: An Ethnography of Service Workers’ Spatial Tactics in Train Stations

Abstract

While the existing literature on service work allows us to understand how customer sovereignty policies constrain service work by transforming servicescapes, we need a more agential approach to how service workers use space as a resource to deal with the tensions resulting from the promotion of customer sovereignty. This article draws on de Certeau’s thinking to fill this gap by looking at how workers play with space constraints and opportunities and deploy spatial tactics to walk a fine line with their customers. Through an ethnographic study of service work in train stations, this article offers a fine-grained empirical account of the spatial tactics used by workers in their daily work. We show how they use space to cope with the tensions in their daily interactions with customers, and how spatial tactics constitute micro-practices of resistance to customer sovereignty policies.