IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-29325-1_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Management by Customers and Customer Control: (Im-)Balances of Power in Interactive Service Work

In: Customers at Work

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Birken
  • Wolfgang Menz
  • Nick Kratzer

Abstract

On society’s long journey from its predominantly agrarian past to its post-Fordist present, the Fordist era has now become synonymous with clearly regulated relationships between companies, employees, and customers. Henry Ford, after whom the concept was named, is asso- ciated with a very specific way of conceptualizing social production and consumption. His conception was based on three distinctive, mutu- ally compatible pillars: equating value creation with the production of goods, a concept of labor based on the subjugation of human needs to the requirements of production machinery, and an image of the customer’s economic contribution as limited to the consumption of standardized mass products as famously illustrated by Ford’s statement that ‘any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black’ (Ford, 1922: 73).

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Birken & Wolfgang Menz & Nick Kratzer, 2013. "Management by Customers and Customer Control: (Im-)Balances of Power in Interactive Service Work," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Wolfgang Dunkel & Frank Kleemann (ed.), Customers at Work, chapter 5, pages 76-99, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-29325-1_5
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137293251_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-29325-1_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.