Below is a cartoon drawn by two students in one of my service management classes. These students kindly gave permission for their work to be published (I used it in a journal article which can be found here) and so please if you want to use of it, make sure you attribute it correctly to Katy and Sammi and make sure you say where you got it from (this blog) or cite the reference below as it is published in a journal.
The cartoon is a response to an assignment to create a multi-media artifact that explores the tensions service employees feel between managers and customers, both agents of control over their behaviour at work.
Katy and Sammi have very cleverly depicted a very keen 'BS' employee (denoted by the cap she is wearing) working in your typical fast food restaurant. A series of demanding and tiresome customers are depicted, and although managers are absent (as they often are in front-line service work) there are a number of ways that managers are controlling the interaction (especially through the limited menu-board). The cartoon, by using a comic format, exaggerates some of the idiosyncrasies of customers, and management, and so makes it more obvious where points of tension are.
Ralph Bathurst, Janet Sayers, Nanette Monin (2008). Finding beauty in the banal: An exploration of service work in the artful classroom. Journal of Management & Organization: Vol. 14, Re-conceiving the Artful in Management Development and Education, pp. 521-534.
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