How the ideology of customer sovereignty shapes customer-oriented practices in the call centre

Consumer sovereignty is a well-established ideology within marketing scholarship. In a neoliberal market economy, such an ideology seemingly endows customers with autonomy through their buying power. This thesis seeks to understand how consumer sovereignty - as an ideology – shapes customer-orientated practices among frontline call centre employees during service interactions. Specifically, this thesis contributes to current debates in the marketing study of ideology by problematising the notion of the sovereign consumer and argue that it is rhetorically constructed to ultimately serve the benefits of the organisation. While previous studies concentrate on understanding consumer agency and the extent consumers are able to exercise ‘absolute’ power, this thesis shifts the unit of analysis to frontline service employees to explore how their agency as a serving subject is implicated by the ideology of consumer sovereignty. Drawing on Althusser’s theory of ideology, this research conceptualises how organisations reproduce consumer orientation through training, coaching, and policies which elicit and shape frontline service employees’ ideas, beliefs, and consciousness. This study seeks to understand the process in which frontline service employees are interpellated by consumercentric ideologies that beckon them to take up a serving role. While organisational discourses on marketing orientation can engender a power imbalance between the customers and the employees, this study reveals previously unexplored dimension that witness the ability of frontline service employees to exercise subtle power circumstantially. Interestingly, this tacit use of power is at times engendered by managerial discourses ‘posing’ as custodians of customer sovereignty while at the same time setting boundaries that curb customer misbehaviour.

To understand the ideological implications of customer-orientation, this study is grounded in a social constructionist perspective. Twenty-seven call centre agents were recruited using purposive snowball sampling with whom in-depth interviews were conducted. Critical discourse analysis was applied to analyse the use of language, which is crucial in elucidating power dynamics that characterise service interactions.

The research contributes to marketing theory by advancing an operational understanding of consumer sovereignty and portraying that the power balance between frontline service employees and customers is not always tipped to favour the former.