I'm sorry you feel that way : the new cultures of customer service / Diane Negra

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Negra, Diane, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Customer services--Social aspects.

Customer services.

Customer relations.

Service industries.

Mass media--Social aspects.

Mass media.

Corporate state--21st century.

Corporate state.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (278 pages)

Place of Publication:

Redwood City : Stanford University Press, 2026.

Summary:

"This book is about how twenty-first century capitalism is re-making the roles of customer and customer service provider, shedding light on why consumer capitalism has come to feel so punishing for so many. In call centers, banks, airports, universities, public transport systems, hospitals, and other key sites, the intensification of profit imperatives alongside hyper-technologization has generated an "antagonistic interface" between customers and workers. Consumers widely report feeling trapped in the vise-like grip of frustrating and confounding systems that waste significant amounts of time. Positioning the poorly served customer as the definitional figure of 21st century commercial relations, Diane Negra articulates a new corporate authoritarianism that allocates a broad range of digital tasks to customers. Essential to this apportionment are technology platforms with high failure rates, corporate devotion to byzantine bureaucratic procedures, and the conspicuous, constant valuing of high-status customers over low-status ones. Compliance with new stripped-down service protocols is enforced not only directly but through powerful norms and customs, and affective culture is notable for converting service encounters into transactions routinely characterized by frustration, impotence, and fury. In analyzing the service ecology and its media representations, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way reveals how the shift to customer work is now both totalized and thoroughly naturalized. As the book maps out, the changing nature of the service encounter in day-to-day life and in the cultural imagination reveal the emergence of corporate emotions seldom recognized as the assault on dignity they constitute." -- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Immiserated Customer

One Corporate Emotions and Weak Social Ties

Two Service Reduction and Customer Micro-Rebellions

Three Gotcha Customer Service and Securitization

Four Anti-Customer Tactics and the Decline of In-Person Shopping

Five Status Stratification and Techlash: From Self-Service to Premium Service

Six: The Misery of Compulsory IT

Seven Automation, Estrangement, and the Shift to Low/No Service

Eight Customer Labor and the Third Shift

Nine Negotiating Customer Conflict: From Staff Revenge to Celebrity Rudeness

Ten Representational Habits of Customer Service Media

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

Other Format:

Print version: Negra, Diane I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

ISBN:

9781503646513

OCLC:

1579812139