京都大学 大学院経済学研究科・経済学部

タイトル： 

“The cultural logics of service interactions”

Abstract: 
The globalization of service brands often encounters cultural friction. For example, the use of first names by Starbucks in France clashed with local norms of privacy. While previous research has focused on how consumers interpret global brands, how service employees themselves interpret and implement service is often overlooked.
This is problematic because service workers are not neutral actors — they bring with them culturally ingrained views of what it means to serve, which can conflict with organizational expectations. Treating them as easily adaptable overlooks the complexity of service work in global contexts.
To address this limitation, we introduce the idea of cultural logics that structure service interactions. Cultural logics are patterns of understanding and behavior that influence service interactions. While in institutional theory logics are the organizing principles that animate institutional fields (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012), we view the cultural logics of services as guiding principles that emerge from various sources such as institutional dynamics, organizational cultures, and everyday cultural worlds.
Our work is based on a comparative ethnographic study conducted in a multinational hotel company, where we observed service staff interacting with customers in three different countries: France, India and China. This allowed us to observe how this global service brand, originating in France, was transferred to other service contexts and how service staff in each context brought their own way of understanding service interactions. Based on these observations as well as interviews with service employees, we uncovered the prevailing cultural logics of each environment that shape the way service employees interact with customers. Furthermore, we highlight the potential for logic conflict in service environments, in particular the friction between the dominant cultural logic that employees assume and the dominant cultural logic that customers use to formulate their expectations.
Our research makes two important contributions to the study of services in a global context. First, we show that even as global service firms strive to provide standardized services to their customers, they inevitably encounter contexts in which pre-existing service practices and perceptions exist. We show how cultural logics operate at the intersection of institutional fields and everyday cultural worlds, and suggest ways in which managers can better understand these cultural logics.
Second, we offer new insights into understanding cultural friction in service settings. In particular, we show how service spaces become battlegrounds for friction between different cultural logics generated by different stakeholders. Recognizing that service landscapes are a field of competing and potentially conflicting cultural logics offers global managers a novel way to conceptualize global adaptation. We provide managers with tools to better monitor cultural logics and techniques to manage conflicting logics.

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