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Disciplining Customers at the Grand Seaside Hotel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

Dirk Bunzel ,
Stewart Clegg  and
Greg Teal
Dirk Bunzel
Affiliation:
University of Keele, Department of Management, Keele University, ST5 5BG, England, UK, Email: d.bunzel@keele.ac.uk
Stewart Clegg
Affiliation:
School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia, Email: s.clegg@uts.edu.au
Greg Teal
Affiliation:
Department of Management, University of Western Sydney, Campbelltown NSW, 2045, Australia. Email: g.teal@uws.edu.au
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Abstract

The Grand Seaside Hotel is a large five-star hotel in an Australian Coastal town. It is a place that not only aspires to provide excellent service but that also seeks to reconcile two apparently divergent demands: the need for customized service and the efficient management of business operations. To commit staff to the provision of service excellence, management has introduced a customer service programme that relies on various forms of training and rewards, as well as a guest response system. The customer service programme, particularly the use of guest questionnaires, appear as disciplinary strategies that aim to produce service encounters in which both staff and guests are ‘normalized’. The main loci of ethnographic data collection for this paper are regular Management Briefings. Through data collected from these, the paper investigates the use of the ‘imaginary’ in constituting service encounters and guest expectations. It interprets these in terms of Foucault's Panoptic analysis to identify the immanent mechanisms of discipline in these customer service programmes.

Keywords

powersurveillancepanopticismcustomer service
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Management & Organization , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , 2002 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2002

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