My life as a service-worker

Abstract

This paper presents Val’s idiographic account of her life as a service-worker. Val’s oral history is important as it reminds service business academics not to dehumanise service-workers as part of their reified interpretations of human activities. Rarely is a service-worker’s personal interpretation of their world heard directly within management academia. Val’s personal account goes someway towards addressing this issue. She juggles the competing pressures of multiple life-worlds and demonstrates how their nature, boundary and importance are fluid depending upon her current construction of the situation. Her story as a service-worker provides insight into the complexity and sophistication of her interpretations and reminds us of the risks of reification and simplification.