The Dynamics of Service: Reflections on the Changing Nature of Customer/Provider Interactions

"This book presents the perfect combination. It is easy to read and impossible to forget. If you are like me, you will find yourself assigning it to your management students and giving it to your clients, especially those with whom you are establishing a relationship." --Faye J. Crosby, professor of psychology, Smith College, and author of Juggling

"A wonderful example of why, in an age when the customer is king or queen and customer service is supposedly the name of the game, we often feel so badly mistreated. This book helps faculty and administrators in higher education understand the problems created by treating college and university students like customers." --Sheila Slaughter, professor of higher education, University of Arizona

"From the supermarket checkout to the doctor's office, service transactions are increasingly important in our lives. Barbara Gutek's insightful distinction between encounters and relationships explains the meaning of that fact, the choices it confronts us with, and their consequences for the quality of our lives." --Robert L. Kahn, professor emeritus of psychology and public health, University of Michigan

"Barbara Gutek's The Dynamics of Service digs into the much-discussed current concept of service to see what's really inside: when and why do customers feel served? Are we truly becoming a service-oriented society? Or are we so deperonalizing and robotizing customer service that no shred of human connection may be left in what we used to call 'the provider/customer relationship'? This is a thorough, thoughtful, in-depth analysis of where that provider/customer relationship has been and where it may be going." --Harold Leavitt, professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University