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Face‐to‐face role sending between client and service provider, described here as client‐interaction need (CIN), is more extensive and crucial in some service situations than in others. Reports a study of the relation of CIN to the task uncertainty and certain aspects of formalization which surround the activities of core service providers in three types of service organizations. As task uncertainty increased, service providers reported a greater emphasis on rules and procedural specification surrounding their interactions with clients. These relations became stronger as CIN increased.

Research has shown that managing client participation can add value to the delivery of quality services. While several control mechanisms have been proposed in the literature for the management of complex service relationships, they generally fail to account for two realities of service provider/client relationships ‐‐ information asymmetry and uncertainty. This paper proposes a new mechanism, “professional concern,” and suggests that its various dimensions ‐‐ provider authority, social affiliation, client role accountability and objective attitude ‐‐ provide a framework for managing knowledge‐based service relationships and optimizing decision‐making processes for delivering quality services.

While labour arbitration is established as the final stage of dispute resolution in virtually every collective bargaining agreement, there has been no attention focusing on its role in the service sector. Relying on five years of arbitration data, examines the categories in which arbitration cases arise as well as their outcomes. Finds that disciplinary issues pertaining to absenteeism, dishonesty, drug/alcohol abuse, and insubordination comprised the majority of cases arbitrated for the service sector firms examined.

Explains that efficient service delivery can often present a problem for marketers due to the nature of the services. Summarizes the two general methods already suggested for improving the efficiency of service delivery – technological and humanistic. Discusses managerial guidelines for the implementation of these approaches to service delivery in several service industries, based on two service classification schemes.

Scene I: A major hotel. 1. Guest A called the desk right after check‐in to report a burned‐out light bulb and an absence of hot water; both were fixed in an hour. Guest A also slept better, as the hotel assigned him a quiet room when he identified himself as a light sleeper. Guest B did not communicate to management until check‐out time, when he complained that there was no hot water and he had to read in the dark; he was overheard by new guests checking in, who asked if the hotel was undergoing a disaster.

Offers a fresh outlook for managing the delicate interaction between the customer and the contact employee in the service environment. Emphasizes that the quality of the customer‐employee interfacehas a great effect on customers′ perceptions of the quality and value of the service, as well as on their satisfaction. Suggests a model of how companies can improve this interface by treating employees ascustomers and customers as employees, thus developing lower cost and higher quality services and also higher levels of satisfaction on the part of both customers and employees. Recommends various steps for management to take.

Sociologists of crime and deviance have devoted considerable time and effort, in recent years, to the study of deviants' accounts of their activities. There are good reasons why students of deviance in particular should be interested in what can be learned from their subjects' explanations of their social practices. Actors are normally called to account for or to explain their activities precisely when these actions are seen by significant others to be in some sense “unreasonable”. Moreover, accounts are central to the processes of law. The purpose of legal judgements is to attribute or withold responsibility. In order to assess an individual's guilt, where criminal activities are concerned, lawyers, judges, and juries pose such questions as: “Did the defendant perform an illegal act?”; “if so, can he or she explain his or her actions in reasonable terms?”; “Was the act in question pre‐meditated?” (that is, “motivated”); and, perhaps most important of all “What is the relationship between the accused's account of his or her involvement in an act, and their real involvement?”