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The Service Triad: Modelling Dialectic Tensions in Service Encounters

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Author

Summary, in English

SUMMARY: Models of service encounters are often fraught by reductionism, describing business relationships as mathematical combinations of dyadic constellations. Metaphors of ideal social relationships (marriages or friendships) are highlighted to stress normative aspects of equal, balanced and long-term business partnerships. However, these approaches are limited in their analytical sensitivity, as they cannot address the complexity of multipart relationships, where meanings, roles and relationships are continuously constructed and reconstructed. In order to understand the ambivalent quality of business interactions, this article analyses the corporate travel market by applying Georg Simmel’s depiction of the triad as a specific social form. Triadic constellations and more complex service networks involve dialectic tensions, simultaneously exhibiting loyalty and disloyalty, trust and distrust, empowerment and disempowerment. It is argued that a qualitative methodology is more adequate approach to grasp such dynamic and contextual social realities, because (opposed to a quantitative approach) it is not confined to operate with mutually exclusive analytical categories.

Publishing year

2010

Language

English

Pages

265-280

Publication/Series

Service Industries Journal

Volume

30

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Keywords

  • corporate travel
  • service relationships
  • service triad
  • hybrid market

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0264-2069