			Home About us Contact

Face-to-face Encounters (face-to-face + encounter)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

Service Personnel, Technology, and Their Interaction in Influencing Customer Satisfaction,

DECISION SCIENCES, Issue 1 2006
Craig M. Froehle
ABSTRACT Managing both the technologies and the personnel needed for providing high-quality, multichannel customer support creates a complex and persistent operational challenge. Adding to this difficulty, it is still unclear how service personnel and these new communication technologies interact to influence the customer's perceptions of the service being provided. Motivated by both practical importance and inconsistent findings in the academic literature, this exploratory research examines the interaction of media richness, represented by three different technology contexts (telephone, e-mail, and online chat), with six customer service representative (CSR) characteristics and their influences on customer satisfaction. Using a large-sample customer survey data set, the article develops a multigroup structural equation model to analyze these interactions. Results suggest that CSR characteristics influence customer service satisfaction similarly across all three technology-mediated contexts. Of the characteristics studied, service representatives contribute to customer satisfaction more when they exhibit the characteristics of thoroughness, knowledgeableness, and preparedness, regardless of the richness of the medium used. Surprisingly, while three other CSR characteristics studied (courtesy, professionalism, and attentiveness) are traditionally believed to be important in face-to-face encounters, they had no significant impact on customer satisfaction in the technology-mediated contexts studied. Implications for both practitioners and researchers are drawn from the results and future research opportunities are discussed. [source]

Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics

ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Issue 2 2007
Peter Benson
This article examines methodological and ethical issues of ethnographic research through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. Levinas is relevant to a critical analysis of ethnographic methods because his philosophy turns on the problematic relationship between self and other, among other important problems that define and guide contemporary anthropological research, including questions of responsibility, justice, and solidarity. This article utilizes Levinas's philosophy to outline a phenomenology of the "doing" of fieldwork, emphasizing the contingency of face-to-face encounters over controlled research design. This account provides a basis for going beyond the polarized opposition between objective and subjective ethnographic approaches. Levinas allows for an ethically informed ethnography premised upon an acknowledgement of risk and uncertainity over researcher control or reflexivity. Providing a handful of concrete examples, the article argues that critical self-reflection about the fundamental face-to-face dimension of fieldwork is central to ethnography's ethical possibilities. [source]

Culturing identities, the state, and national consciousness in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala1,

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2000
John M. Watanabe
Abstract This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala. Rooted in face-to-face encounters between departmental jefes políticos (departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local efforts to title community lands that led Maya and state officials to develop contrasting understandings of each other and their relations. Far from precipitating a national identity of mutual belonging, state formation here intensified the racism and political violence that would rend Guatemala during the century to come. [source]

Technology, Monitoring, and Imitation in Contemporary News Work

COMMUNICATION, CULTURE & CRITIQUE, Issue 1 2009
Pablo J Boczkowski
This paper addresses two related changes in contemporary journalistic practice. First, there has been an increase in journalists' use of technology to learn about the stories competitors and other players are working on and a parallel decrease in the reliance on face-to-face encounters with colleagues to gather this information. Second, this greater technology use has been tied to an intensification of monitoring and an expansion of imitation in the newsroom. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of editorial work in the leading online and print newspapers of Argentina, these changes are analyzed to make scholarly contributions about the role of technology in monitoring and imitation. This analysis also provides a window into the intersection of communication, culture, and critique in contemporary journalism by showing how recent forms of technological appropriation in the newsroom have shaped how journalists gather information and make meaning out if it in a way that affects their ability to be critical. [source]