Services as Social Structures: Consumer Collectives and Transformative
Services Research
This session is based on the premise proposed by Anderson, Ostrom and Bitner (2010)
that services are so pervasive that they to a great degree structure and create the social world
within which consumers live. Witness the financial crisis, the Haitian disaster recovery, the
health care debate and the differences that educational services make on consumers’ lives.
Given this macro focus, our unit of analysis is focused on the collective, not individual
consumers. These consumer collectives might be communities, populations, nations, etc. This
framework also asserts a transformative (Mick 2006) perspective, called Transformative Services
Research (TSR), because it advocates concern for the well-being of consumers – both collective
and individual – that is affected by services. As such, instead of profits, market share and
consumer satisfaction, with TSR, outcomes such as access, mitigating vulnerability, wellness,
happiness, quality of life, equity, and decreasing disparity are of significant interest.
This theoretical conceptualization gives rise to certain tensions. For example, if services
do lead to the development of a social structures, then agency, which is at the other end of the
continuum, becomes a key consideration. This is especially true given the tension that exists
between structures and agency. In parallel, a focus on the collective raises questions about
possible tensions between collective well-being and individual well-being.
The presentations in this session will illustrate this framework. The first presentation by
Anderson and Ostrom presents this conceptualization and sets the stage for the Transformative
Services Research conducted by the subsequent presenters. Baker’s work is especially timely as
she presents her work on disaster services. She looks at how the service structure affects
communities’ efforts to reconstruct “home” and how services can facilitate and hinder
reconstruction and place attachment. Bone, Christensen and Williams’ research illustrates a
service structure that results in disparate treatment of minority consumers. The crucial financial
service that provides capital and loans for entrepreneurs demonstrates this inequity. Finally,
Dunnett, Brownlie and Hewer illustrate the tension between structure and agency in their
research of a community of consumers as they strike out on a path outside of the current
predominant healthcare service structure that is in place.
This session, consistent with the theme of the conference, involves building a theory that
applies to a wide range of phenomena by conceptualizing services in a new and far reaching
way. Rather than the traditional emphasis on individuals’ accountability for their own wellbeing, it looks beyond and holds services and their structure also accountable for consumer wellbeing - "big" phenomena that are of real importance to consumers' lives. The likely audience will
include those consumer researchers interested in transformative consumer research, in social
structures and a socio-cultural perspective, in services and service consumers, in the study of
collective consumer groups, and in social justice and well-being.
Overall, this conceptualization of services as social structures and, more broadly, the area
of TSR lead to a number of ‘Big Picture Questions’ including:
 What are some of the intended and unintended consequences of services creating
social structures?
 What are the implications for consumers who might exist in different worlds that
conflict with service-created social structures in which they are forced to participate
(e.g., the traditional health care service system)?
 What newer methodologies (in the consumer research field) can we use to study these
macro level phenomena?
Conceptualizing Transformative Service Research
Laurie Anderson, Arizona State University
Amy Ostrom, Arizona State University
In our presentation we seek to offer an alternate paradigm within which to consider the
role of services and the service consumer within society. We pull especially from theories of
social structure and ecosocial environments to frame our most dominant premises:
1. Services are so ubiquitous that they, to a large degree, structure the world within which
consumers live, the ecosocial environment.
2. Reciprocally, other components of the ecosocial environment influence services and the
success of services.
3. At times, there is a tension between these service social structures and the agency of
individuals or groups of consumers.
4. In some sense, given services contribution to the social structure and ecosocial
environment within which consumers live and their impact on consumer well-being,
many services approach the level of a public good.
5. Services can be intentional, unconscious, or unintentional of their transformational
impacts.
We utilize this paradigm to frame the area of transformative services research (TSR). In
this conceptualization and theory building we both build on and add to the transformative
consumer research stream. We define TSR as service research that strives to create uplifting
changes and improvements in the well-being of both individuals and communities (Anderson,
Ostrom, and Bitner 2010).
This transformative view is especially apt for looking at services because service
consumers are often vulnerable (Baker, Gentry and Rittenburg 2005) in that they often lack a degree
of control and agency, service consumers are often disadvantaged, most especially with regard to
expertise and decreased knowledge in comparison to the service provider, and services are
consumer-centric, experiential and co-created, thus more intimate than physical goods.
From this macro level view of services, it is apparent that services have the ability to
uplift and transform individual consumers and communities. Conversely, “they also, often
unwittingly, have the ability to marginalize, judge, and stigmatize citizens and communities and
to compromise sustainability” (Anderson et al. 2010). If services create socio-cultural
structures, they can be considered envirogenic (Jamner and Stokol 2000) and can act as stressors,
as enablers of well-being or ill-being, as providers of resources and/or as sources of safety or
danger. Furthermore, even though we are focused on the collective consumer, well-being is
influenced not only by the environment, but also by personal attributes. There is a dynamic
interplay between structure and person. The level of congruence between the individual and the
environment (structure) is connected to well-being. We will use research examples focused on
consumer collectives to illustrate our above premises.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Laurel, Amy Ostrom and Mary Jo Bitner (2010), “Services as Social Structures: Consumer
Collectives and Transformative Services Research,” Working paper.
Baker, Stacey Menzel, James W. Gentry, and Terri L. Rittenburg. 2005. “Building Understanding of the
Domain of Consumer Vulnerability.” Journal of Macromarketing, 25 (2): 128-139.
Mick, David Glen (2006), “Meaning and Mattering through Transformative Consumer Research,”
Presidential Address to the Association for Consumer Research, in Advances in Consumer
Research, Vol. 33, ed. Cornelia Pechmann and Linda L. Price, Provo, UT: Association for
Consumer Research, 1–4.
Jamner, Margaret Schneider, and Daniel Stokols, editors. 2000. Promoting Human Wellness: New
Frontiers for Research, Practice, and Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
“There’s No Place Like Home…Or Is There?”
Stacey Menzel Baker and José Anotonio Rosa, University of Wyoming
When Dorothy’s home is destroyed by a tornado in The Wizard of Oz, she sweetly
declares, “There’s no place like home.” Her words resonate with viewers who have formed their
own place attachments, which occur when individuals bond with particular physical spaces
(Milligan 1998). Attachment to home or place develops over time and is formed through
decommodification and singularization processes (e.g., acquisition, decoration, ritual
performance) that facilitate home becoming “me” or “mine” (Kleine and Baker 2004).
Disruption of strong place attachments, such as those wrought by natural hazard events, leads to
a profound sense of loss and necessitates renegotiation of self (Brown and Perkins 1992). In
addition, when multiple displacements occur simultaneously, as they do in disaster, there is a
loss of sense of community, and a desire to sustain community by keeping people in community.
Such severe injuries create dependence and require the infusion of outside resources and services
(shelter, food, clothing, financial assistance) into individuals’ lives and community for them to
recover. Business, government, and non-profit services provide the resources which assist
consumers in reconstituting the world in which they live.
The present research explores the tensions between community and individual identity
reconstitution processes as housing (collective) versus home-creation (individual) needs are
negotiated in disaster recovery. Qualitative, longitudinal data collected in a rural community in
the Western United States impacted by a tornado inform our purpose. The tornado caused two
deaths, rendered 100 homes uninhabitable, and left one-quarter of the community’s residents
homeless. To understand how housing/home needs were negotiated, members of multiple
constituent groups were questioned about how recovery resources were garnered and distributed,
as well as how resources were received and used.
Tensions between collective and individual identity reconstitution processes arose
immediately after the tornado touched down, and continued throughout the entire data collection
process (multiple site visits over the course of a year). Narratives reveal that the social and
economic structure imposed by service providers supplying resources were at odds with
survivors’ familiar processes of home creation and the development of place attachment. We
know that place attachments facilitate adaptation (Milligan 1998); yet our data show numerous
impediments to reconstructing home: (1) recipients of burdens of costs versus the gift of benefits,
(2) shared versus personal responsibility, (3) equality versus individuation motivations, and (4)
personal privacy versus public transparency. Each constraint will be explored in the presentation.
Consider federal funds made possible the allocation of 60 identical trailers for displaced
survivors. All were white on the exterior, all had the same floor plan, all had the same color of
paint on the walls, and so forth. In other words, the behaviors, cognitions, and affect that
typically lead to place attachment (e.g., freedom of choice over which home to inhabit and how
to decorate it once occupied) were constrained by the commoditized state of the housing. The
standardization of the trailers as well as rules against decorating trailers served to hinder positive
adaptation by survivors. Though residents were displaced, they did not also want to feel
misplaced. Survivors fought back and resisted the homogenizing forces of living in a
commoditized home. Some broke the “rules” and hung things on the walls, while others viewed
the housing as temporary and got out as quickly as possible, and still others had little choice and
were forced to make the standardized housing their homes.
The presentation concludes with a discussion on (1) how transformative service research
may play a role in community development or reconstitution and (2) the types of homerebuilding services in disaster recovery that contribute to individual and community
transformation. The data collection and analysis of this research is complete.
REFERENCES
Brown, B.B., & Perkins, D.D. (1992). Disruptions in place attachment. In I. Altman & S. Low (Eds.),
Place attachment (pp. 279-304). New York: Plenum.
Kleine, Susan Schultz and Stacey Menzel Baker (2004), "An Integrative Review of Material Possession
Attachment.” Academy of Marketing Science Review, 2004 no. 1
Milligan, M. J. (1998) “Interactional Past and Potential: The Social Construction of Place Attachment”,
Symbolic Interaction, Vol 21, pp 1-33.
When Consumer Well-Being Meets Small Business Ownership: Transforming Financial
Service Systems to Eradicate Disparate Treatment and Discrimination
Sterling A. Bone, Brigham Young University, Provo
Glenn L. Christensen, Brigham Young University, Provo
Jerome D. Williams, University of Texas at Austin, Austin
Service systems are inherently complex because of the number and intricacy of the steps
that construct them. This complexity creates a critical tension among service agents’ abilities to
follow formal procedures and structure to deliver desired service outcomes (Shostack 1987).
The discretionary nature of many service systems requires employees to diverge from the
normative to meet dueling demands of the firm and of their customers (Bone and Mowen 2010).
Bone and Mowen conclude that service agents in roles that require decision latitude may exert
personal biases that result in disparate or discriminatory actions taken toward customers.
Complexity and divergence in service systems increases the risk that disparate, and even
discriminatory actions will be taken by firms and their agents to achieve desired firm and
employee outcomes. Prior research has argued that disparate or discriminatory actions are a
threat to consumers that are in transitory states of vulnerability (Baker, Gentry, and Rittenburg
2005).
Particularly among immigrants, individuals, at an increasing rate, are starting small
businesses in pursuit of their dreams in order to avoid barriers that come with traditional jobs
(Kelleher 2008). Yet only two out of 10 small businesses succeed in the first year (Fairlie 2009).
Stimulating growth and survival of small business is a pressing concern for federal, state, and
economic stakeholders. Recent U.S. Senate hearings held on minority entrepreneurship call for
transformative efforts to help minority-owned enterprises as service consumers overcome the
“tremendous hurdles” that they “must face each day to gain fair and adequate access to venture
capital, credit, and business and technical training” (Kerry 2008).
Census and economic research has reported that minority entrepreneurs are the most
vulnerable to marketplace discrimination among consumer groups (Wainwright 2007). Where is
discrimination among small business owners most likely to manifest its ugly head? A report
from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2005) concludes that lack of access to capital and credit is
the most common obstacle for African American and Hispanic business owners. Moreover,
Wainwright (2007) reported finding quantitative evidence that minority-owned businesses are
substantially and significantly more likely to be denied credit than are white-owned businesses.
These consumers must maneuver complex service systems to garner the required resources.
In this paper we seek to disentangle the socio-cultural barriers in the small business bank
lending service system. We argue that transformative service research can stimulate dialogue
and intervention strategies to provide greater access to capital financing for racial/ethnic minority
consumers, who out of necessity, start their own businesses. We employ an in-depth interview
method to investigate the pilgrimage of consumers seeking to improve their quality of life
through small business start-ups. The method chosen was the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation
Technique (ZMET) (Zaltman 1997), an in-depth interview format that focuses on uncovering the
informants’ emotions, beliefs, and values. We purposefully sampled small business owner
informants to represent three racial/ethnic groups of small business owners: White/Caucasian,
Hispanic, and African-American. Thirty-nine informants who owned a small U.S. business were
recruited for this study. Sixteen were White, 13 were Hispanic, and 10 were African American.
Informants were asked to prepare for their 90-minute interview by writing down at least five
thoughts and feelings about seeking financing for their businesses. Informants were also asked
to find a picture that represented each of their thoughts or feelings. The combination of the
approaches elicited rich and descriptive insights into the informants’ perceived vulnerability.
Interviewers were matched to the informant based on their race and language of origin. This step
was taken to enhance conversational flow and to ensure cultural sensitivity.
We contrast interviews conducted with the “White” majority to those conducted with
minority consumers (African-American and Hispanic). Interpretive analyses use historical,
political and sociological ideology perspectives to inform this comparison of consumer
experiences. We identify compelling differences in the barriers and conditions encountered in
capital-seeking marketplace exchanges, factors that increase the likelihood of vulnerability in
this service system, and in the coping mechanisms employed to protect from disparate treatment.
Our findings suggest that minorities perceive heightened restrictions of access to
financial resources. Both minority and majority consumers describe their interactions with banks
as a “financial pipeline.” Akin to water as an essential resource for survival, majority White
informants describe their experiences seeking financial resources as embodied in the deepmetaphor of movement, where financial resources “flow” or “run” at their request. Minority
consumers, however, describe the availability of resources as a “slow drip” a “dribble,” or a
faucet or spicket that is “locked” or unavailable to them.
We also contrast the relationships that minority and majority consumers describe having
with actors in the lending service system (e.g., loan officers, loan sharks). Drawing upon
historical ideologies minority consumers describe their relationships as fettered, shackled, and
oppressed (Crockett and Wallendorf 2004). Majority consumers, however, describe their
relationships as emancipated, free and balanced.
We draw conclusions from these and other themes and suggest that consumer researchers
and public policy stakeholders consider transformative efforts to protect minority consumers
from disparate treatment. We propose an agenda for future transformative service research by
outlining specific intervention strategies to reduce discriminatory and disparate treatment in
service systems.
REFERENCES
Baker, Stacy Menzel, James W. Gentry, and Terr L. Rittenburg (2005), “Building Understanding of the
Domain of Consumer Vulnerability,” Journal of Macromarketing, 5(2), 128-139.
Bone, Sterling A. and John C. Mowen (2010), “By-The-Book Decision-Making: How Service Employee
Desire For Decision Latitude Influences Customer Selection Decisions,” Journal of Service
Research.
Crockett, David and Melanie Wallendorf (2004), “The Role of Normative Political Ideology in Consumer
Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (December), 511-528.
Fairlie, Robert W. (2009), Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: 1996-2008, Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation.
Kelleher, Elizabeth (2008), “Immigrants Fuel Small Business Growth in the United States,” America.Gov,
(http://www.america.gov/st/econenglish/2008/March/20070302160834berehellek0.7271845.html), March 7, 2008.
Kerry, John F. (2008), “Statement of Senator John F. Kerry on Business Start-up Hurdles in Underserved
Communities: Access to Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship Training, “Small Business
Committee Hearing: September 11, 2008, United States Senate.
Shostack, G. Lynn (1987), “Service Positioning Through Structural Change,” Journal of Marketing¸ 51
(January), 34-43.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2005), “Access to capital, what funding sources work for you?, U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, Washington DC, 55.
Wainwright, Jon S. (2007), “Testimony Concerning the Current State of Minority-Owned and WomenOwned Business Enterprises in the United States,” United States Senate Committee Hearings on
Small Business and Entrepreneurship, May 22, 2007.
Zaltman, Gerald (1997), “Rethinking Market Research: Putting People Back In,” Journal of Marketing
Research, 34 (November), 424-437.
From Patient to Agent: collective practices and identity work in an emotional community
Susan Dunnett, University of Edinburgh
Douglas Brownlie, University of Stirling
Paul Hewer, University of Strathclyde
This study unpacks the technology – in short, the practices – through which consumers
transform themselves in a market context. It focuses on a site where selfhood has fallen under
intense pressure - a community framed by the condition of serious illness. In a service setting,
that of healthcare, which has undergone (and is still undergoing) a significant process of
“marketisation” (Lupton 1997) it investigates an under-researched aspect of communal
consumption – the sharing of social support resources in order to realise agency in service
interactions.
Lupton has noted (1997) that where the patient as consumer is examined, the privileged
representation is that of ‘dispassionate, thinking, calculating subject’. She argues that this depiction
draws heavily on models of consumer behaviour where consumers are seen as rational economic
decision-makers who benefit from sovereignty of choice. The conceptualisation of the patient as
consumer of a healthcare system remains contentious. It has met with resistance from researchers
and medical professionals alike, largely due to its perceived role in eroding the traditional power
balance of the service encounter and thus creating the often undesired burden of consumer choice
(Henwood et al 2003; Shankar et al 2006). The archetypal counterpart to the consumerist patient is
the passive or dependent patient, a model of unquestioning compliance (Lupton 1997). The study
at hand would suggest that beyond both of these simple conceptualisations, substantial emotional
and social turmoil conditions a complex disempowerment in the diagnosed.
Taking its cue from previous consumer research into at-risk groups living with serious
illnesses (eg. Kates, 2002; Wong and King, 2007), this study explores the lived experience of
people suffering from multiple myeloma. Its context is a support group community, presented
here as a form of Maffesoli’s emotional community (1996). Through a phenomenological
approach (Thompson et al 1989), attention is drawn to an under-explored phenomenon, that of
collective enablement of self-identity. The personal movement revealed is from a position of
passivity, fear and objectification to one of perceived control, understanding and skilled
navigation of healthcare services.
Further, it seeks to assert that community can be a technology which enables the consumer
to make most effective use of the marketplace. The support groups under study are discursively
positioned as receptacles of first-hand market information, with much of the narrative exchange
within the group being concerned with navigating the healthcare, pharmaceutical and health
insurance industries. Crucially this culture of information-exchange fosters a sense of belonging.
The group provides a safe space for members to ‘forge new meanings and incorporate these
meanings into changing self-conceptions’ (Kates 2002: 636). Carrying out this arduous business of
identity work, informants make a journey from patient to agent that empowers them with a sense of
self-confidence and a newly-found ability to negotiate and manipulate health care services.
The notion of patient as agent draws attention to the necessity of mediation of the
marketplace. As the literature tells us, the consumption of goods and services is a transaction that
offers substantial opportunities for creative self-realisation (Arnould and Thompson 2005).
However, to make the most effective use of marketplace services - as this study shows - requires
much of the consumer: initiative, knowledge-gathering, energy and stamina, entrepreneurship and
wise judgment are among the qualities that enable exploitation of its opportunities, as informant
Marie’s agentic narrative highlights:
Marie: So I met my oncologist, and he’s trying to give me this drug, and I says, well how
many milligrams you gonna give me? He says, two hundred. I says well that’s too high. I
said, I’m no way gonna take two hundred milligrams. So he dropped it down to a
hundred.
The resources made available through support groups offer informants access to a new
self - and in transforming into a skilled consumer, they are transforming the nature of the market
itself. As such consumption communities can be conceptualised as a consumer-led solution to the
dark side of empowerment – the burden of personal responsibility (eg. Lupton 1997; Shankar et
al 2006). The extant literature has been slow to identify and explore helping behaviour in
consumption communities. However, we answer Kozinets’ (2002) call for consumption
communities to be characterised as an ‘ameliorative’ to the effects of the marketplace (ibid: 34)
by highlighting the emotional texture of exchange within such groups. In addition, conclusions
are drawn about the incremental, complex nature of identity work, and the collective practices
that empower it. Transformation is manifested in the newly-diagnosed patient’s journey from
dislocation and passivity to the empowered status of ‘skilled consumer’.
Perhaps, too, we may draw on Price & Arnould’s assertion (1999: 40) that ‘buyer-seller
or service provider-client relationships often pit the goals of one against those of the other’ to
conclude that the structural imperative of institutional medicine to make a profit (in the U.S.A. at
least) inherently limits its ability to deliver the type of care desired by consumers. Nevertheless,
this is still a market where the well-being of the consumer is the proclaimed mission of the
service provider. Thus we can point to potential for improvement in the development of goods
and services to fit better with the needs of the consumer. On this latter note, the study’s findings
have implications for patient information services, doctor/patient relations and the wider culture
of institutional medicine. The planning of effective healthcare services would take account of the
current deficit in acknowledgement of the consumer’s involuntary renegotiation of self. As put
by Frank (1995): ‘The scope of modernist medicine – defined in practices ranging from medical
school curricula to billing categories – does not include helping patients learn to think differently
about their post-illness worlds and construct new relationships to those worlds.’ (ibid: 6). In
practical terms, a deeper understanding of the processes of patienthood would seem to involve an
acceptance that self-empowerment through narrative is key to the journey from passive suffering
to agency. Data collection and analysis are complete.
REFERENCES
Arnould, E.J. and Thompson, C.J. (2005) Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research,
Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 31, March, pp. 1-49.
Frank, A.W. (1995), The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, Chicago, The University of
Chicago Press.
Henwood, F., Wyatt, S., Hart, A. and Smith, J. (2003) ‘Ignorance is bliss sometimes’: constraints in the
emergence of the ‘informed patient’ in the changing landscapes of health information, Sociology
of Health and Illness, Vol. 25 No. 6, pp. 589-607.
Kates, S.M. (2002), AIDS and community-based organizations: the marketing of therapeutic discourse,
European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 36, No. 5/6, pp. 621-641.
Kozinets, R.V. (2002), Can Consumer Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning
Man, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 29 June, pp. 20-38.
Lupton, D. (1997), Consumerism, Reflexivity and the Medical Encounter, Social Science and Medicine,
Vol. 45, No.3, pp. 373-381.
Maffesoli, M. (1996), The Time of the Tribes, London, Sage Publications.
Price, L.L. and Arnould, E.J. (1999), Commercial Friendships: Service Provider Client Relationships in
Context, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 63, October, pp. 38-56.
Shankar, A., Cherrier, H., and Canniford, R. (2006), Consumer Empowerment: A Foucauldian
Interpretation, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 40, No. 9/10, pp. 1013-1030.
Thompson, C.J., Locander, W.B., Pollio, H.R. (1989), Putting Consumer Experience Back into Consumer
Research: The Philosophy and Method of Existential-Phenomenology, Journal of Consumer
Research, Vol. 16, September, pp. 133-146.
Wong, N. and King, T. (2008), The Cultural Construction of Risk Understandings Through Illness
Narratives, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 34, February, pp. 579-594.