My life as a service-worker

Lew Perren () and Geoff Stevens

Service Business, 2008, vol. 2, issue 2, 147-152

Abstract: This paper presents Val’s idiographic account of her life as a service-worker. Val’s oral history is important as it reminds service business academics not to dehumanise service-workers as part of their reified interpretations of human activities. Rarely is a service-worker’s personal interpretation of their world heard directly within management academia. Val’s personal account goes someway towards addressing this issue. She juggles the competing pressures of multiple life-worlds and demonstrates how their nature, boundary and importance are fluid depending upon her current construction of the situation. Her story as a service-worker provides insight into the complexity and sophistication of her interpretations and reminds us of the risks of reification and simplification. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2008

Keywords: Service-worker; Idiographic; Interpretivist; Oral history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11628-007-0029-8

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