Constructing the Customer

Leanne Cutcher makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the consumption and production nexus. Through extensive analysis of data from a range of financial institutions she shows how wider structural change and shifting organisational discourse has influenced customer and worker relations in the retail banking industry in Australia. The research focuses in particular on credit unions and community banks, two areas of retail banking that have been largely ignored to date. Her research shows that, in addition to customers having a physical presence in and influence on organisational life, management and workers also construct discursive customers as a means of influencing the meanings attached to service work. The front-line workers are not passive recipients of managerial discourse but active agents, accommodating or resisting the impact of these customers. Cutcher shows how these competing concepts of the customer influence both the customer-service provider relationship...