Service nepotism in cosmopolitan transient social spaces

David Sarpong,Mairi Maclean

doi:10.1177/0950017016636997

David Sarpong, Mairi Maclean

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017016636997

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Abstract

This article examines service nepotism, the practice of bestowing gifts or benefits on customers by frontline service staff based on a perceived shared socio-collective identity. Adopting a micro-sociological approach, it explores the practice as played out in multi-cultural transient service encounters. Given the dearth of existing research and low visibility of service nepotism operating ‘under the radar’, the article assumes an exploratory qualitative research approach to capture it through ‘microstoria’: the sharing of stories by marginal actors, as recounted by West African migrants working in the UK. These stories reveal similarity-to-self cueing, non-verbal communication and the availability of discretionary authority as three salient logics in play. In a highly differentiated multi-ethnic society, service nepotism challenges a very specific customer-oriented bureaucratic ethos that demands impartiality. It also provides contexts for relatively powerless employees to rebalance their relationship with their organizations, thereby addressing a more pressing dysfunction within the market and society more generally.

Highlights

The emotional and aesthetic labour associated with service work requires frontline service employees to formally grant customers ‘sovereignty’ according to organizational service norms (Bolton, 2001; 2005; Warhurst et al, 2000; Warhurst and Nickson, 2007)
This paper examines service nepotism, the practice of bestowing gifts or benefits on customers by frontline service staff based on a perceived shared socio-collective identity
Research methods The research participants were West African migrants domiciled in the UK, the service encounters of West African migrant employees representing an interesting empirical research site through which to examine the incidence of service nepotism

Summary

Introduction

The emotional and aesthetic labour associated with service work requires frontline service employees to formally grant customers ‘sovereignty’ according to organizational service norms (Bolton, 2001; 2005; Warhurst et al, 2000; Warhurst and Nickson, 2007). Despite scholarly and practitioner interest in the antecedents and consequences of such behaviours, in service encounters (Harris and Ogbonna, 2002; Murphy, 1993; Reynolds and Harris, 2006), extant research has tended to ignore a range of frontline service staff behaviours that potentially contravene organizational policies, or alternatively seek to rebalance the relationship between customers, employees and organizations in ways that generally serve to address broader inequality and dysfunction within the market and society-at-large This suggest the challenge lies with the phenomenon itself which frequently has low visibility, operating ‘under the radar’, and is difficult to pin down and apprehend. One such behaviour beginning to attract scholarly attention is service nepotism, which Rosenbaum and Walsh (2012) describe as: Favouritism an employee grants to a customer during a service encounter by virtue of his or her relationship with the customer based on shared socio-collective commonalities and without qualified substantiation related to either the customer’s economic value or organizational practices (Rosenbaum and Walsh, 2012: 242)

Methods

Conclusion