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Towards a deeper understanding of service exclusion based on power

Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Service exclusion stems from inequitable service experiences that affect service actors’ well-being. A growing number of studies are investigating how to alleviate exclusion experiences, but they do so without adequately understanding how service exclusion occurs. Service scholars describe service exclusion as those actions of service providers or service systems that deliberately or unintentionally fail to include or serve service actors adequately and fairly. In the marketing literature, the discussion of inequitable experiences is fragmented across various categories due to the absence of a robust conceptual understanding, further hindering efforts to explore these experiences in detail. This fragmentation curtails knowledge of how service exclusion occurs – knowledge necessary to inform efforts to alleviate these experiences and build inclusive services. Further, the service literature’s understanding of dynamics that continue service exclusion and the circumstances and factors affecting such experiences, which are critical to tackling them, remains limited. Recent studies of service exclusion have called for a deeper understanding of such dynamics, circumstances, and factors responsible – a call that is also echoed across marketing studies exploring consumers’ vulnerable experiences. Reforms with inclusive motives typically seek to extend access and rights to services while maintaining the current service inequalities and the taken-for-granted assumptions and structures driving such inequalities; hence, service exclusion. It further highlights the need for a robust understanding of these experiences and how they continue and can be disrupted. This thesis poses three research questions: (RQ1) How can we advance a power-focused theorisation of service exclusion? (RQ2) How do power dynamics continue service exclusion? (RQ3) What are the circumstances and factors responsible for service exclusion? This thesis addresses these research questions with three studies employing a qualitative, constructivist research design and a systematic transcript-based analysis process involving inductive thematic analysis. The empirical setting for this thesis was the exclusion experiences of students experiencing atypical development (SEADs) across education service settings. It adopts a multistakeholder perspective and explores these experiences from the perspective of parents of SEADs, educators and other stakeholders working to alleviate the exclusion experiences of SEADs. This research collected data via 53 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021 with purposefully selected informants across the informant groups. Education services is a research context that features inherent imbalances, particularly for SEADs, which allows us to tease out (i) the mechanisms causing service exclusion, (ii) the power dynamics that continue exclusion experiences, and (iii) the circumstances and factors responsible for these experiences. Education services are transformative, offering pathways for more meaningful and lifelong opportunities. However, ecosystem-wide developments such as universalising service delivery, managerialism and commoditisation have profoundly impacted education services to the detriment of that very nature. Often, schools are considered contested sites involving limited resources and ample needs. On the other hand, prolonged engagement in education services suggests the vast extent of value outcomes possible considering participation that can span ten to thirteen years. Educational attainments are critical for full participation in other aspects of life. Therefore, exclusion from education service settings can be devastating and threaten the well-being of SEADs. Thus, the exclusion experiences of SEADs across education service settings offer an extreme yet appropriate research context from which to gain rich insights. Study 1 (Chapter 3) of the three studies theorises how service exclusion unfolds from the disadvantageous impediments and, hence, inequalities resulting from the power exerted by mechanisms at different levels of the service ecosystem. It identifies relational, discursive and sociocultural mechanisms and the associated power that drive the exclusion of SEADs from education services. It makes an original contribution to service literature by presenting a nuanced and holistic theorisation of how power and associated mechanisms drive service exclusion. It does so by (i) emphasising power as a central aspect of service exclusion, (ii) surfacing the power exerted by complex mechanisms, and (iii) theorising the way these mechanisms shape service exclusion. Study 2 (Chapter 4) describes how power dynamics – power tensions, pluralities, and complexities generated at the intersections of power at various service ecosystem levels – continue service exclusion. It sheds light on how interdependencies between multilevel mechanisms add to continuing service actors’ exclusion experiences. It reveals the persistent nature of service exclusion experiences across the service ecosystem. It uses this understanding to articulate possible pathways to disrupting power structures that continue service exclusion. Accordingly, it emphasises reflexivity, reframing, and integration as potential pathways to disrupt power structures, thereby advancing how power dynamics extend as a useful basis for transforming power structures for improved and equitable outcomes. Finally, Study 3 (Chapter 5) identifies maladaptive service flows and gatekeeping controls as the circumstances that set the stage for service exclusion. It also identifies the choice-, framing-, adaptation-, and worth-based factors that directly impact service exclusion in services. It adds to the knowledge of inequitable service experiences, advancing the theoretical understanding necessary to navigate such experiences effectively. It also adds to the emerging discussions of service exchanges’ dark side in the service ecosystem (i.e., the challenges and obstacles to service exchange and the associated inequitable experiences). Overall, this thesis answers several calls for further research. Service scholars have called on the service literature to rethink and reframe “its logic to include concepts and tools for correcting exploitive interactions” (Fisk and Alkire, 2021, p.196). The current thesis does this by providing a robust and coherent understanding of service exclusion, which is essential to supporting efforts to tackle exclusion experiences. This thesis also responds to the calls to consider the harder-to-measure mechanisms driving service exclusion (Burgess et al., 2017; Ng et al., 2022; Saren et al., 2019), using a power lens to uncover the multilevel mechanisms. Further, this thesis answers the calls for a better understanding of how to build more inclusive services for service users experiencing disadvantages, such as SEADs (Field et al., 2021), by elucidating potential pathways to tackle exclusion experiences and promote inclusion. This thesis also answers the call for a better understanding of using the knowledge of service exclusion to build inclusive service ecosystems (Fisk et al., 2018). To achieve this, it conceptually and empirically develops a sense of service exclusion beyond its seminal definitions (Fisk et al., 2018) and different manifestations (Ng et al., 2022) – transforming it from an abstract idea to a palpable construct malleable by targeting the circumstances and factors responsible.
DOI: 10.25959/29555513
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7207861604
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