Research on interactive service work has paid close attention to how organizations and frontline employees deal with the inherent complexity of the customer–employee–employer triangle. This raises questions about the agency of interactive service workers with respect to the indeterminacy of service interactions. Our meta-narrative review finds that the theorization of worker agency in service interactions remains underdeveloped in the two dominant research streams of mainstream management and labour process theory studies. Implicitly or explicitly, these streams either subsume agency under managerial prescription or view it through the binary polar of control and resistance. There has been less focus on service workers’ efforts to overcome practical difficulties in everyday service interactions. To address this lacuna, we offer a conceptual framework that draws on a less prominent, third research stream, which we label pragmatist. This stream includes scholarship largely unfamiliar to the international English-speaking community, published mainly in French and German academic journals. We propose three contributions in this paper. First, we contribute to the interactive service work literature by mapping the theoretical plurality within and beyond the English-speaking community. Second, we problematize established streams of research by articulating the intellectual axes of the field; this allows us to present a new research area to account for the concrete dynamics of service interaction and to capture frontline employee agency. Third, we propose a pragmatist research framework coupled with a future research agenda more attentive to the embeddedness and materiality of frontline workers’ situated actions. This way, we address the indeterminacy of interactive situations.

中文翻译：

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将服务工作置于行动中：分析交互式服务工作的回顾和实用主义议程

交互式服务工作的研究密切关注组织和一线员工如何处理客户-员工-雇主三角的内在复杂性。这引发了关于服务交互不确定性的交互服务工作者代理的问题。我们的元叙事回顾发现，在主流管理和劳动过程理论研究这两个主要研究流派中，服务交互中工人代理的理论化仍然不发达。隐含或明确地，这些流要么将代理纳入管理规定，要么通过控制和抵抗的二元对立来看待它。很少有人关注服务人员为克服日常服务交互中的实际困难所做的努力。为了解决这个漏洞，我们提供了一个概念框架，该框架利用了一个不太突出的第三研究流，我们将其标记为实用主义者。该类别包括国际英语社区基本上不熟悉的奖学金，主要发表在法语和德语学术期刊上。我们在本文中提出了三个贡献。首先，我们通过映射英语社区内外的理论多元性，为交互式服务工作文献做出贡献。其次，我们通过阐明该领域的知识轴，将已建立的研究流问题化；这使我们能够提出一个新的研究领域来解释服务交互的具体动态并捕捉一线员工的能动性。第三，我们提出了一个实用主义的研究框架，以及一个更加关注一线工人情境行为的嵌入性和重要性的未来研究议程。通过这种方式，我们解决了交互情况的不确定性。