| This study uses a dramaturgical perspective and primarily builds on services marketing and consumer behavior literatures. It investigates the complexity of high-risk service encounters and the patterns of interactions among service providers, customers, and service settings characterized by risk and stress. In doing so, it takes the interactional, experiential, and emotional components of service encounters as a whole. By taking the service setting or servicescape as a stage for customers, it shows how performance on the side of customers essentially shapes and affects the service experience and their relationships with service providers and other customers. It investigates how the conflicts and boundaries among service providers and customers unfold and operate. In addition, it presents how mutual interdependence and conflict among service providers and customers play out in a commercial environment with significant risks. It investigates a unique service encounter which is neither commonly experienced nor relatively routine. Also, it provides a more complete picture of consumption experiences through incorporating negative sides of participation in addition to those of more positive and well-reported hedonic aspects. Furthermore, with this research, it demonstrates that reality is a process that is continuously shaped through interactions between various social and individual forces and thus the usefulness of ethnographic methods for studying service encounters as social phenomena. |
