Abstract
Identifying the abundance of servicescapes whose meaning and identity can be contested by customers, and recognizing the necessity for managing these environments, this study investigates and provides theoretical understanding of the way in which service providers stage contested servicescapes. To this end, ethnographic research was conducted at the Gettysburg National Military Park as an exemplary empirical context of a servicescape that, more than a century and a half after the battle transpired, remains at the center of intense controversies. Analytical attention was focused on the performative practices of tour guides who—as frontline employees (FLEs)—are essential in practices of staging. The contribution of this research lies in (1) highlighting the politicized nature of certain servicescapes and theorizing their staging through three groups of interrelated practices, (2) viewing authenticity as a discourse employed by service providers to legitimize their claims of an undisputed “official” servicescape, and (3) shedding light on current debates on the tension between domination (structure) and resistance (agency) by introducing the strategic notion of metaperformance. Implications for practice are provided in the form of suggestive techniques that can guide FLEs in staging potentially controversial servicescapes and avoiding contestation.
Whether it is the 9/11 memorial, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, or even the ESPN Zone, consumers do not always agree on the meaning of commercially built spaces intended to impart value-enhancing consumer experiences. Some of these spaces can be highly politicized due to varying perspectives and divergent ideologies. Such a situation may result in the contestation of the servicescape, something that prior services literature has not addressed adequately and what the current work proposes in the context of the Gettysburg Military Park. Although the idea that customers are active participants in the creation of the meaning of servicescapes is not new (Esbjerg and Bech-Larsen 2009; Kozinets et al. 2002; Maclaran and Brown 2005; Peñaloza 2001; Sherry et al. 2001), little attention has been paid to instances of contestation of servicescapes where different groups of customers assign competing meanings to commercial environments. The current research aims to address this gap by focusing on marketers’ efforts to stage contested servicescapes.
Marketing scholars have previously noticed that within the marketplace, competing experiences and views are played out. Peñaloza (2000), for example, identified contested discourses in marketers’ processes of reproducing Western values and beliefs in a Western stock show and rodeo. Kozinets et al.’s (2004) work on ESPN Zone, Chicago, found consumers resisting corporate rules and defying social conventions. Resistance practices are seen by the authors as the means for consumers asserting control as well as for subverting and creatively appropriating the servicescape. Work by Luedicke and Giesler (2008) and Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler (2009) on “contested consumption” looked into practices consumers use to challenge and critique each other’s consumption choices, behaviors, and ideologies. What the above studies collectively demonstrate is the presence of contested views, beliefs, and ideological positions with the potential to upset marketers’ effort to stage the servicescape.
Contestation has been also identified in a plethora of consumption contexts, whether at a local, regional, or national level (Table 1). Yet, none of these works have explicitly focused on a theoretical treatment of contestation, the way in which it affects marketplace participants, and how each participant copes with it. Marketplace contestation has important implications for service providers. Grove, Fisk, and Bitner (1992) maintained that unruly or unanticipated customer behavior or their unwillingness to cooperate can destroy a service performance. As value is cocreated during service performances, we see that there is always the possibility that value can be “co-destroyed” (Plé and Cáceres 2010). Gaining a more fine-grained understanding of marketplace contestation will equip service providers with the knowledge and skills to avoid or correct particular service delivery failures.
Contested Places.
Accordingly, the research question driving this study is, in what way do service providers stage contested servicescapes? Grounded on the dramaturgical framework and the theatrical metaphor in services (Baron, Harris, and Harris 2001; Grove and Fisk 1983, 1992; Grove, Fisk, and Bitner 1992), we look into service provider–customer contestation and aim to unpack the practices service providers use to stage contested servicescapes. Using the empirical context of Gettysburg Military Park, analytical attention was focused on the performative practices of tour guides who—as frontline employees (FLEs)—are essential in the staging of contested servicescapes. The contribution of this research lies in (1) highlighting the politicized nature of certain servicescapes and theorizing their staging through three groups of interrelated practices, (2) extending our knowledge on the concept of authenticity as employed by service providers to legitimize their claims of an undisputed “official” interpretation, and (3) shedding light on the tension between domination (structure) and resistance (agency) by introducing the strategic notion of metaperformance.
Theoretical Background
The Staging of Servicescapes
The notion of servicescapes as theatrical stages of sorts where both service providers and customers perform has a long history in services and marketing literature (Arnould, Price, and Tierney 1998; Kozinets et al. 2002; Kozinets et al 2004; Peñaloza 1999; Sherry et al. 2001). One way in which servicescapes can be staged is through communicative staging—that is, through the deliberate presentation and interpretation of the surrounding environment (Cohen 1989). In theorizing the communicative staging of the wilderness servicescape, Arnould, Price, and Tierney (1998) argued that the successful service delivery depends on the communicative and performative skills of highly involved service providers.
Offering further insight on communicative staging, scholarship on tour guiding has emphasized guides’ verbal performances and storytelling skills in directing customers’ gaze, coaching them on what to observe and what to ignore, and—most importantly—instructing them on how to interpret a place (Gelbman and Maoz 2012). Tour guides are seen as key actors in “performative guiding” (Brin and Noy 2010) wherein they use words and narratives to signify a symbolic site—an attraction, a neighborhood, a city, a nation—and to provide interpretive frameworks that are used by customers in constructing generalized images of the character of the place (Bowman 1992; Fine and Speer 1985; Lugosi and Bray 2008; Salazar 2005). The role of the service provider is thus instrumental in socially constructing a servicescape and framing customers’ experiences.
Servicescapes are also staged materially. Bitner (1992) has originally defined a servicescape as the “manmade, physical environment” (p. 58, emphasis added) that includes layout, equipment, furnishings, signs, and various artifacts. A number of researchers investigated the role of architecture and design in the staging of retail stores (Wallendorf, Lindsey-Mullikin, and Pimentel 1998), theme stores (Sherry 1998a), shopping malls (Creighton 1998; Sandikci and Holt 1998), and flagship brand stores (Kozinets et al. 2002; Peñaloza 1999). They argue that physical elements, design, and architecture structure and guide the customer experience, define their activities, channel their movement, and encourage their active engagement (Creighton 1998; Peñaloza 1999; Sandikci and Holt 1998; Sherry 1998a; Sherry et al. 2001). Importantly, material staging communicates servicescape meanings and contributes to its distinctiveness (Bitner 1992; Peñaloza 1999; Sherry 1998a; Wallendorf, Lindsey-Mullikin, and Pimentel 1998). Not unlike communicative staging, then, material staging is seen as a form of nonverbal communication, an “object language” (Bitner 1992) that constructs the image (Esbjerg and Bech-Larsen 2009; Fischer, Gainer, and Bristor 1998) or the “essence” of the servicescape (Sherry 1998a).
What both communicative and material staging seem to have in common is that they are intentional and strategic. As Bitner (1992) claimed, servicescapes are “purposeful environments.” They are methodically designed, rigorously controlled, and carefully managed (Edensor 2001; Kozinets et al. 2002; Sandikci and Holt 1998). Whether through the patterned communication of guides (Arnould, Price, and Tierney 1998) or the “rhetorical qualities” of their design (Peñaloza 1999), they are staged to create a convincing reality, communicate particular meanings, and achieve specific customer reactions (Esbjerg and Bech-Larsen 2009; Williams and Anderson 2005). That is, the staging of servicescapes aims to convince that there is—or there must be—a particular common understanding of their nature and the proper consumption activities that should take place there.
Yet, customers’ readings and understandings of the servicescape do not necessarily align with managerial intentions. They infuse the stage with their own meanings and bring their own interpretations (Esbjerg and Bech-Larsen 2009; Rosenbaum and Messiah 2011). As an abundance of evidence supports (Table 1), some servicescapes can be contested. Servicescape contestation has been fleetingly acknowledged in extant servicescape literature. Peñaloza (2000), for example, has identified “contested discourses” in marketers’ processes of producing cultural meanings at a trade show. As she explains, some customers visit the show on their own terms, provide their own narratives, and counterargue or reject marketers’ information. Nevertheless, she takes contestation instances as part of the mechanism for a negotiated cultural production. For Peñaloza (2000), servicescapes and their meanings are produced through “joint activities” of marketers and consumers. Similarly, in their analysis of ESPN Zone, Chicago, Kozinets et al. (2004) have noticed customer “resistance practices” when they defy social conventions or create new rules for performing. Like Peñaloza (2000), they see store environments as a negotiated production and, rather than problematizing customer contestation, they see producer and customer interests as “embedded in one another in a process of ‘interagency’” (p. 658). Underlying both Peñaloza’s (2000) and Kozinets et al.’s (2004) works is the idea that contestation is an unavoidable side effect of customer participation and service cocreation (Nilsson and Ballantyne 2014; Vargo, Maglio, and Akaka 2008). Thus, while existing marketing scholarship is insightful in terms of how servicescapes are commercially staged and identifies the possibility of contestation, it falls short in identifying the politicized nature of certain servicescapes and the necessity for service providers to address contestation that interferes with and disturbs their strategic staging.
Politicized Places and the Making of “Official Stages”
Contemporary humanist perspectives highlight the politicized character of place that reflects an unstable outcome of a struggle between interest groups (Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001; Cresswell and Hoskins 2008; Hughes 1998; Jeong and Santos 2004). Since early human geographers identified place as a meaningful location centered on human experience (Cresswell 2004; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977), place is considered a social construction, and its emergence is seen as a process through which the material environment is invested with a variety of meanings by different groups or individuals. As a result, place identities can be multiple, and the dominant character of place will be subject to debate and contestation (Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001; Bender 1993, 2002; Hanna and Del Casino 2003; Jeong and Santos 2004; Tilley 2006). Central to this debate is the issue of authenticity and the struggle over “real” place identity (Kong and Law 2002). If a meaningful place is variously interpreted and assigned disparate meanings, each effort to describe place identity becomes an embellishment of the beliefs and values of a specific social group that foster and promote their own “preferred reality” (Stokowski 2002). Whose conception of place “reality” should then prevail in the public realm? And, in terms of what is more relevant to the purpose of this research, how do place authorities, marketers, and service providers go about staging a place “reality” of those commercial places that are subject to contestation?
Conceptual guidance is provided by a number of scholars who theorize the production of “official stages” by dominant social forces in an effort to inculcate particular ideological positions—meanings, ideals, values—and craft their own version of social reality and place identity (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002; Gillen 2014; Goulding and Domic 2009). This phenomenon is particularly prominent in the context of museums, memorials, public buildings, historic districts, cemeteries, battlegrounds, and other places of memory (Till 2003) where state authorities stage particular representations of national cultures that legitimate dominant political ideologies and advance a unified national identity (Gillen 2014; Leitner and Kang 1999). National identities in “official stages” are produced through formally sanctioned discourses or ways of constructing meaning, wherein history is selectively used to articulate and communicate idealized narratives of the nation (Ateljevic and Doorne 2002; Goulding and Domic 2009; Park 2013; Sarmento 2009; Wight 2016) infused with moral meanings according to the needs of the present (Till 2003). Language is important in the discursive construction of “official stages” and, in the hands of the state, can be a powerful tool in crafting ideological narratives, inventing national myths, and reinforcing national identities (Stokowski 2002; Yea 2002; Zhang, Decosta, and McKercher 2015).
In addition to language, an “official stage” is produced when narratives about the place, its past, and its identity are projected onto landscape features (Till 1999). Osborne’s (1998, 2001) work on the construction of landscapes of power and the role of monuments is very instructive in this respect. Grounded on the idea that “landscapes constitute a discourse” (Cosgrove 1998, p. xiv), a “discourse materialized” (Schein 1997), Osborne (1998) views certain memorial landscapes as “theaters of ideology,” and he argues that elite groups and political authorities employ them to present allegorical statements of a dominant national narrative. In this way, story-laden landscapes partake in the formation of national identities. Monuments, in particular, anchor collective memory and perform a didactic function. They are often located in times and places where dominant ideologies are contested (Osborne 1998), and they serve as rallying points for a shared identity and for the legitimation of state authority (Osborne 2001). Interestingly, during times of social unrest, a familiar landscape feature—such as a monument—projects a more stable and comforting picture of reality than historically accurate information (Till 1999).
While the above scholarship on the politicized character of particular places identifies both communicative and material staging of servicescapes—as marketing literature does—it goes a step further by emphasizing the struggle among opposing parties and by theorizing “official stages” as one way in which dominant forces legitimize particular ideologies and advance a unified place identity. Yet, this theorizing remains sketchy about whether “official stages” adequately work out a solution to place contestation. Although dominant forces have significant power in constructing an official place ideology, they are not always able to control how their construction is interpreted by different audiences (Till 1999, 2003). Official histories of iconic servicescapes, such as the Ellis Island Immigration museum, are open to contestation from alternative popular versions of the past (Desforges and Maddern 2004). As Hirschman (1993) reminds us, while dominant ideology promulgates the worldview and the value-and-belief system of a dominant group, oppositional ideologies directly challenge the dominant ideology and advocate antagonistic worldviews. This research intends to address this gap by looking into the staging practices of FLEs during the time of the service delivery.
Method
Market-oriented ethnography (Arnould 1998; Arnould and Wallendorf 1994) was conducted at Gettysburg, a small town in South Central Pennsylvania, where the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War took place in July 1–3, 1863. The Gettysburg National Military Park attracts the highest number of visitors among civil war battlefields in the United States (Hanink and Stutts 2002). Before the presentation of the details of the research design, we provide a brief commentary on Gettysburg as a contested space in American memory.
Research Site: Gettysburg as a Contested Servicescape
The battle of Gettysburg was not just the bloodiest military engagement in the American Civil War; for some historians, it was “the most important event in American history” (Hall 1994, p. 7). Others have claimed that “it is our Waterloo, our Stalingrad, and our defining moment…. Nothing less than worldwide freedom was saved there” (Desjardin 2003, p. 7). Most importantly, Gettysburg has a strong identity value. In 2001, USA Today called it “the essential American place” and the “symbolic heart of America” (Desjardin 2003, p. xviii). For many Americans, it defines who we are and shapes the national consciousness (Hall 1994).
At the same time, Gettysburg is also the arena for conflict over the memory of the Civil War (Shackel 2001, 2003). For many southerners, Gettysburg is a “landscape of regret” (Gold and Gold 2003) that is etched in their memory as a scene of defeat and loss. Known as the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy, it is seen as the start of the South’s eventual demise. To compensate for the ensuing uncomfortable feelings of anger and disgrace, many southerners developed the “Lost Cause” ideology in order to justify their secession from the Union. Rooted in journalistic writings, church groups, and fiction writers, it was supported that the South fought for a just cause—State’s rights—and they only lost because of the North’s overwhelming numbers. It is also argued that “the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery” (Horwitz 1998, p. 69; Shackel 2003). This “Neo-Confederate” view presents a romantic outlook of the old south as “a divinely sanctioned society of aristocratic planters and content slaves” (Thompson and Tian 2008, p. 599) and “a cohesive region upholding Christian values” (Horwitz 1998, p. 384). This idealized construction of the South is presented as under a constant threat by the Northern aggressors who want to establish their own heritage and values.
In the 21st century, the Neo-Confederate ideology is still powerful in southern culture (Desjardin 2003; Shackel 2003). Fights keep erupting over the display of the Confederate flag, states’ rights, and the erection of controversial statues (Horwitz 1998; Lanktree 2017), indicating an “ineradicable divide between North and South” (Horwitz 1998, p. 68). Within this unstable ideological landscape, Gettysburg seems to be “a catchall” of ideas symbolizing almost any cause imaginable: Since 1895, it was the scene of civil rights speeches, Ku Klux Klan gatherings, and world peace commemorations. As with other representations of civil strife (Dwyer 2003), Gettysburg too is susceptible to appropriation and rewriting. Maybe it can be better understood as “a multiple choice battlefield” (Desjardin 2003, p. xxi) that, almost a century and a half after the fratricidal clash, still remains at the center of intense controversies.
Today, the Gettysburg National Military Park is managed by the National Park Service (NPS) that is responsible for its preservation and its presentation to visitors. In addition to visiting the Museum and Visitor Center, tourists have the opportunity to take guided battlefield tours led by one of the professional guides who are officially licensed by NPS. What is the role, then, of NPS in this shifting landscape? How do they stage an “official” national landscape and how do they legitimize their staging knowing in advance the possibility of being contested?
Ethnographic Fieldwork
Gettysburg exemplifies a storyscape, that is, a servicescape where narratives are at the center stage of the consumption experience (Chronis 2015). Narrative plots are enacted on a physical setting that is the theatrical stage where performances take place. Not unlike actors, professional employees in proper costumes engage customers—their audience—in role-playing. As a site of consumption, then, Gettysburg provides a fitting context to study theoretical relationships pertaining to the theatrical metaphor. All data collection, analysis, and interpretation were done by the author.
Familiarity with the Gettysburg storyscape was achieved by visiting numerous tourist attractions, including the NPS visitor center, museums, the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, as well as by strolling through the historic downtown and the National Military Park that are interspersed with a number of preserved buildings, around 400 cannons, and more than 1,100 monuments and memorials. Numerous battlefield tours on a bus with a licensed guide provided opportunities for participant observation, “a technique well-suited to dramaturgical analysis” (Grove and Fisk 1992, p. 260). We visited the locations where battle engagements transpired, and we enhanced our understanding of the natural topography as well as the associated historical narratives. During battlefield tours, we observed consumption behaviors, spots of attraction, interactions between customers and service providers, and above all, we recorded the way licensed guides—as FLEs—constructed and performed on the stage.
Data collected through participant observation were enriched through 102 depth interviews with consumers, licensed guides, and business managers. Consumer informants were asked about what Gettysburg meant to them, how they evaluated their tour experience, what their opinion of the guide’s performance was, how authentic the park was, and whether they had any disagreements with the whole performance. Licensed guides were asked about their qualifications and the official process of getting their license, what their basic strategies of guiding were, how experienced they were, how they structured their tour, what brought customers to Gettysburg, how informed their audience were, how they interacted with customers, and whether they had experienced instances of contestation. We also gained insight from business managers about customers’ place of origin, attitudes toward the conflict, level of knowledge, biases, and their evaluation of the site and their experience. Interviews with both customers and employees were semistructured with open-ended questions and a focus on a free-flowing conversation with the potential to elicit insight that might not have been foreseen in advance. Transcribed recordings and field notes provided more than 500 pages that were read and reread in order to gain familiarity with the text (Arnould 1998).
Analysis and interpretation were conducted following the basic steps of categorization, abstraction, comparison, dimensionalization, iteration, and refutation (Spiggle 1994, 1998). An initial battery of codes was utilized that was created based on the purpose of the study and the existing literature. We started by teasing out the text for relevant themes but—as we gained a deeper understanding during data analysis and interpretation and as we moved back and forth between data and the relevant literature—we modified some existing codes, added new ones, broke down some other ones into subcodes (dimensionalization), and created higher order categories (abstraction) as suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994) and Spiggle (1994). As an example, we started out looking for instances of guides’ “narratives” with the intention of capturing their efforts of “communicative staging” (Arnould, Price, and Tierney 1998). As more attention was paid to the content of collected stories, we created the subcodes of “suffering,” “death,” and “sacrifice.” By trying to make sense of what was behind these stories, we came up with the code of “values” and the subcodes of “freedom,” “cause,” and “ideals.” In a series of part-to-whole iterations, we analyzed each individual interview, tour, and observation for its own themes, and then we related and combined all individual analyses to an overall interpretation of the data. This process continued until we reached data and theoretical saturation (i.e., the point which additional data would not further improve a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon under investigation). The study’s confirmability was established through triangulation across methods (personal interviews, observation, and photo-elicitation) and through peer auditing as described by Wallendorf and Belk (1989). Data analysis and interpretation resulted in an emergent understanding of the contested—and thus politicized—nature of Gettysburg. The research findings are presented next with the help of the emergent framework in Figure 1.
The staging of contested servicescapes.
Findings
We first provide evidence of consumer contestation instances under the label domains of contestation, and then we move into the ways in which service providers stage the servicescape using practices of staging. Although we looked into and report on both parties of the servicescape transaction, for the purpose of this article, ethnographic attention was focused on licensed guides: the kind of landscape they stage and the ways in which their performances reveal efforts to avoid, cope with, or efface contestation.
Domains of Contestation
Instances of customer contestation are organized into three mutually constituted areas of text, landscape, and ideology.
Text
The term text is used to refer to the customers’ knowledge of the historical narrative: what happened, where it took place, who participated, and numerous other substantive and contextual details. Instances of contestation in this sense can be attributed to ignorance or misinformation as in the case of a customer who entered the Visitors Center asking for the location of the 38th Infantry Division monument. A guide on duty informed him that such a unit—and consequently its monument—did not exist at Gettysburg. The visitor was not convinced and became loud: “You men! You think I don’t know what I am talking about? The monument is here! I like someone who can show me where it is.” The guide brought over other very knowledgeable people and suggested involving the Head Park Ranger, but the visitor was not convinced and went away angry.
To a large extent, customers’ ignorance and misinformation can be traced back to their prior familiarity with the historical texts that they learned at school or read in books. As one of the interviewed tourists reported, I started reading the Killer Angels and I’ve always been a big reader and I started reading that and when I finished I was like, spell-bound. And it picked my interest in the Civil War and I wanted to know more about it. And that’s when I started reading a lot more about it. Most people will accept us as an authority. But we are very sensitive [when] they have inaccurate information and they are kind of invested in it. Especially if somebody has come here having read the novel Killer Angels. A lot of people do and consider that history. We consider it a novel. But they’ll come here with the conception that this is an accurate book…. And I’ll have people who will say, “I have just read the Killer Angels novel twice to get ready for this trip. So, I’m all fresh, you know.” You know, I’m rolling my eyes to myself but I’m thinking, well, this person is invested in this version of the battle…you know, and some people just won’t accept things that we say even though we’re totally sure we’re right.
Landscape
Customer contestation was also witnessed in the domain of landscape; that is, material elements of the surrounding environment that are considered inaccurate markers of authenticity (MacCannell 2013). Among a number of cannons on Little Round Top—one of the heaviest visited sites—one of them had “1864” inscribed on its muzzle. A couple of visitors examining those cannons expressed a feeling of disappointment when one of them noticed the 1864 inscription, adding that this cannon was not here during the battle but was brought from somewhere else. Obviously, he knew that the battle occurred in 1863. As already argued, when consumers discover that the standards for authenticity have been manipulated, they become circumspect in their attitude toward the servicescape (Grayson and Martinec 2004). A considerable number of customers have questioned the NPS’s representational accuracy in regard to certain landscape features. We heard multiple times, for example, the question of whether the trees were there during the battle. A similar question was raised to a guide about Devil’s Den, a boulder-strewn hill mostly occupied by Confederate sharpshooters during the battle: “Were these boulders here during the battle?” Some visitors were not convinced about the large number of bullet holes on the trees, while on rarer occasions, some questions would be characterized by guides as “silly”: “Why did all battles take place in National Parks?” or “How did they know that this would be a National Park so that they would come and fight here?” Probably these last set of questions do not express contestation or confrontation with the given narrative or the surrounding landscape, but—as all the other instances mentioned above—they can be revealing about customers’ interrogation of the relationship between history, its commercial packaging, and staged authenticity (MacCannell 2013).
Ideology
Customer contestation was probably most strongly voiced in the domain of ideology, wherein certain customers’ value-and-belief systems incited oppositional reactions to the official interpretation provided by the NPS. Some customers, for example, found that the NPS’s rendering of the past was biased against the role and significance of certain groups. The manager of the Civil War Museum told us that for a short period, the Confederate flags in front of the museum were outnumbered by the Union ones because of a supply shortage and shipment delays. As a result, some visitors from Southern States contested the “biased” presentation of the museum. Licensed guides confirmed that many visitors from the South were disappointed because “they wanted to see more Southern things here.” Acute ideological criticisms on the park’s staging were anchored on historical “accuracy” as when a visitor claimed that “the South never surrendered; that Lee asked for a little truce upon which they can collect wounded and dead and the North then run in and stole their guns.” Historical interpretations framed through ideological predispositions are not rare among Southern visitors. When brought up during guided tours, these oppositional interpretations of history and its protagonists become the basis for contestation and created conflict between customers and service providers.
More heated expressions of ideological contestations related to Southern heritage that is still revered in the South but reportedly reviled in the North. Very representative is the following account by a customer from Georgia—the “Deep South,” as he said—who expressed a fear of the Yankees’ determination to destroy the Southern heritage: You’re talking to a darn heart South. And you don’t run to that many of them up here [in the North]…. I spent $77 there at the visitors’ center in books about my grandson…. We got a comic book. And I thought that was neat…we want our kids and grandkids to know about our heritage because everybody seems to be, particularly the Yankees and blacks are determined…. They don’t type away the Southern heritage. I mean, they want their own heritage…. You know, no confederate flags, no Dixie. You can’t play Dixie…. They want our heritage taken away from us…we want them [our grandkids] to know since they don’t learn it in school, about our heritage.
Practices of Staging
Licensed guides are well aware of potential contestations. They were told about them, they have read about them in secondary accounts (e.g., Confederates in the Attic by Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Horwitz), and they have directly dealt with many such instances during their guided tours. They are also sensitive to the issue of contested Civil War discourses through contemporary reports on the contested presence of the Confederate flag and Confederate statues in public places (e.g., Lanktree 2017). How do they stage, then, such a contested servicescape?
“Heroes Have a Way of Finding Bullets”: Practices of Reading
Dramatizing
Commercial staging at Gettysburg makes a spectacle of death. In performance terms, it is a “theater of death,” since killing was sensationalized in every way. Every guide made extensive references, for example, to the staggering number of casualties: “There are 97,000 Union soldiers that fought here and 75,000 Confederate. 28,000 Confederate casualties, 23,000 Union. That’s 51,000 casualties in three days. Can you picture what this town was like with all these dead soldiers lying around?” There was so much killing, they claimed, that some locations were named accordingly, like the “Bloody Run” and the “Valley of Death.” As in all battle sites, death at Gettysburg haunts the landscape. Although military engagements occurred throughout the whole area, particular locations are known for the high number of casualties, as in the case of Wheatfield: Here’s a 26-acre field, very sad place. This 26-acre field changed hands 6 times in 2.5 hours of fighting on day two. At the end of two and a half days, 5,400 men were shot down in this 26-acre field. That’s only 700 fewer than were shot down at D-Day over 40 miles in 12 hours. This is 26 acres two and a half hours. Acre for acre, that is, probably the bloodiest piece of ground in the Civil War. The tactical story, you have to have some of that to make everything fit together, but the average visitor doesn’t say “Oh, wow! I am amazed.” What they get amazed by are the real stories with the soldiers in specific areas and what they do. I want to tell you about that fellow John Bell Hood. In this battle, he is holding on devil’s den and then shot in the left shoulder. Lost the use of his left arm. And then he lost his right leg but they would strap him in the saddle in the battles that followed to meet his troops. Can you imagine that? That’s the way those fellows were.
Materializing
Sacrificial acts are also articulated through the more than 1,400 monuments and memorials that are scattered throughout the park. Employing the practice of materializing, guides did not miss an opportunity to use this “litany of heroic deeds and fallen martyrs” (Horwitz 1998, p. 362) in telling exemplary stories: The man over here on the horse to your right is General John Sedgwick. He is essentially about the third highest-ranking general at Gettysburg in the Northern Army…. And he, like so many others, will not make it through the war…well, heroes have a way of finding bullets. Look at the Louisiana monument here, at the dead flag bearer. See him lying there at the feet of the woman? Look at the Mississippi state monument. Again, a dead flag bearer. See how they treat the flag? They cover their body so it doesn’t touch the ground. 74th Pennsylvania. This is a German regiment. But look at the flag bearer as he falls to the ground mortally wounded. Notice how he drapes the flag over his shoulder, almost like a blanket so it doesn’t touch the ground. The closest man to him will throw away his rifle and take up the flag.
Moralizing
Stories of death and suffering, typical of patriotic narratives, elevate the protagonists to the status of heroes. Not unlike the “cult of heroes” in ancient Greece where certain dead individuals were venerated for their superhuman character at designated shrines, heroes at Gettysburg are enshrined in statues and memorials and they are revered for their patriotic ethos. The Death → Sacrifice → Hero sequence works as a discursive device to stage a patriotic tale that, as all historical narratives, attempts to give moral meaning to a sequence of historical events (White 1981). As Campbell’s (1988) extensive work on myths reveals, hero is someone who gives his life for something bigger than himself. His death has a moral objective which, in war memorial landscapes, is typified in his sacrifice for the nation. The moral idealization of this kind of “good death” was not only a poetic outcome of dramatization but could also be found inscribed in some monuments: “Here’s the Georgia monument on your right. See where it says ‘we sleep here in obedience to law. When duty called, we came. When country called, we died.’ I think that about tells how they feel.”
In guides’ effort to moralize the narrative of battle, there was complete lack of evaluative distinction between different units, states, ethnic groups, or most importantly between Union and Confederate soldiers. All falling combatants, whether from the North or from the South, fought for a noble cause that was used by the guides in order to discursively construct a patriotic landscape. What was also moralized was the camaraderie among the soldiers: “Right here in front of us Maryland State Memorial dated 1996. And it shows a Union soldier and a Confederate soldier helping each other. Folks, they would do that.” Very characteristically, the spirit of unity was emphasized by a tour guide as “a piece of our history” that “built America”: What do you think of this place so far? It is a sad place. It’s an amazing place. And in this wave of patriotism, it’s a great place. This is what built America, folks. Win or lose, North or South, free or slave, it don’t matter. They were all Americans. And they all fought for what they firmly believed in. And in the end it’s something we can all be proud of whether we are from the North, the South, the East, or the West or, you know, in my family came from Czechoslovakia at the time of the Civil War which they did, but the point being, you know, even if your family wasn’t involved in this, even if your family didn’t live in America at that time, it is a piece of our history that we can all be very, very proud of. No question about that.
Keep It Simple Stupid: Practices of Editing
Narrative theorists have claimed that all stories are human inventions (Cronon 1992); therefore, we can have multiple stories that are all based on the same historical event (Smith 1981). In this sense, storytelling at Gettysburg does not repeat a fixed narrative text since guides always perform creative narrative composition (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). Although their accounts are founded on the same historical events, their dramatic compositions are colored by their personal poetic choices, and in this task, they function as editors of the narrative text. There are four ways in which they do this.
Simplifying
In order to circumvent conflicting situations, guides-as-editors avoided detailed and complex descriptions that might not universally appeal to the diverse composition of their audience in terms of prior knowledge, interests, ethnic background, and ideological dispositions. Instead, they used the practice of narrative simplification. As one guide said, “this is a huge story that I’ll have to summarize in a matter of moments.” Another one explained in the beginning of the tour that “I’ll try to keep this simple for you.” During personal interviews, a guide referred to his technique as “dummying down your presentation,” while another one called his approach “KISS—Keep It Simple Stupid.”
Adjusting
Another editing practice used by guides was to adjust their performance to a particular audience. One popular techniques they used was to ask a number of questions in the beginning of each tour in order to learn more about the composition of their customers. Adjusting was also practiced when guides try to accommodate requests of special interest groups. A guide told us that when his tour includes military veterans, he presents events from a military perspective, as when explaining how Wentworth rifles were used in specific engagements. He also employs military terms such as “KIA—Killed in Action” or “FO—Forward Observer” or “enfilade”: “And those guns here on top of the hill were pointed this way then as Pickett’s men go across the field. They enfiladed. Do you remember that term? ‘Enfilade,’ they shoot from the side.”
Distancing
Through this practice, guides tried to be impartial and nonpartisan by not making judgmental statements and by choosing the proper language when they referred to the opposing sides of the conflict. As a rule, they all tried to remain neutral in the delivery of the tour. In personal interviews, they claimed that their tours were always balanced. One of them told us that he avoided using the terms “Yankees” and “Rebels” “because those are offensive to some people.” He always explains at the beginning of his tours that he will be using the words “Union” and “North” for one side and “Confederate” and “South” for the other. “I’m not going to say, ‘Good Guys’ or ‘Bad Guys.’ So, this tour is going to be nonjudgmental. Both sides think they’re right.”
Connecting
Concern for individualized interpretation was very evident in guides’ efforts to construct direct links between customers and the historical narrative through the practice of connecting. Abundant opportunities to make personalized links were offered by the numerous state monuments and memorials: “Anyone here from New York?”; “Troops from Alabama. Anyone here from Alabama?”; “Anyone from Louisiana? Here’s the Louisiana Memorial to your left. Very impressive…. Any Mississippians? Here’s the Mississippi State Memorial”; “Anyone here from Massachusetts?”; “Now we come around this corner past the Minnesota monument. Anyone here from Minnesota? This regiment lost 83% of its men in 8 minutes.”
Visitors’ connection with Gettysburg could be sometimes established through ancestors who participated in the battle. It was a rather frequent occurrence to meet visitors who claimed that they had a family member who fought at Gettysburg, and it was not uncommon for some to actively search for evidence. Capitalizing on this desire to identify family heroes, guides directed visitor’ attention to relevant monuments and memorials: That’s the Pennsylvania State Memorial, folks, dedicated 1910…. The bronze plaques contained their name of 34,530 soldiers from Pennsylvania. If you have a relative that fought in the Pennsylvania regiment, his name is on one of those plaques. You could find it. People find those names quite often.
“It Really Hasn’t Changed All That Much”: Practices of Authentication
While practices of reading provided a proper, professionally sanctioned way of reading Gettysburg as a patriotic landscape that unites all Americans, and practices of editing bent and adapted the narrative text to various performance contingencies, there was further need for licensed guides to address customers’ doubts about the accuracy of their claims and the truthfulness of the National Park. Gettysburg as a servicescape, then, needs to be legitimized and authenticated. A discourse of authenticity figured highly during guides’ performances. We identify four practices used by guides in this respect.
Validating
Through the practice of validating, guides tried to establish historical truth and accuracy of what was presented at the Park. As it has been already presented, one way to validate historical accuracy was to provide precise numbers of combatants, casualties, dates, and time lines. Knowing that there is a multitude of fictional reports in novels and other publications, they tried to demythologize some of those false accounts. It is widely believed, for example, that the true reason for why the two great armies met in a small town in South Central Pennsylvania was that the Confederate soldiers were in desperate need for shoes: Did you ever hear that story, the Confederates are coming here to get shoes? Not true. Not even remotely true…there simply weren’t shoes here. It’s hard to imagine Lee would bring an army of 74,000 men to a little town in Pennsylvania to get shoes where there aren’t shoes. He brings them here because of the road net. That’s why. These are three-inch rifles…. They fired a ten-pound shell…. These shells were set to explode not by contact but by fuses. And they were set to explode in the air. And if you achieved an air burst above a group of men, the shrapnel is what killed people. All right. Now you watch movies and you see shells hitting the ground and then flying up in the air. That’s Hollywood, not Civil War.
Freezing
While guides-as-storytellers maintained some creative flexibility in editing the narrative text, the same was not true when it came to the authenticity of the landscape they staged. Supporting further the underlying claim that this is not a commercial—thus, inauthentic—construction, Gettysburg was presented as permanent and unchanged: As we get on up here into the downtown area, I’m sure you’ll notice right away, like most small towns, it’s just characterized by a series of quaint little stores and shops. It really hasn’t changed all that much since 1863…that is the old courthouse that actually stood here at the time of the battle. In fact, this is one of over 200 historical buildings still standing in the town today…. There’s a small bronze plaque…. These plaques, to the best of my knowledge, are on every historical building in town. They say simply, “Civil War Building, July of 1863. Look up at the top window. To the left of the window there’s a shell sticking in the wall, lodged in the wall there. It’s a round black thing. Everyone see that?…I guarantee you this, folks, if that shell comes loose, that fellow will be out there in about five minutes with a ladder. They’re not going to let that fall out of the house.
Grounding
At the same time that materiality provided evidentiary proof for the park’s unchanged character and, as it was discussed earlier, assisted guides in explicating the proper way of reading history, it also helped in grounding events of the past to the specific locations where they happened: And I want you all to appreciate right now. They did not stick them out here anywhere for decoration. But rather they went to great lengths to locate these monuments pretty much exactly where that particular group of soldiers stood and fought at one time or another during the battle.
References to specific locations where significant events unfolded are always part of a battlefield tour: Wheatfield, Bloody Run, and Peach Orchard. While these locations were familiar to many customers through their previous reading and remained abstract labels in a narrative-as-text, they became reified and authenticated during the experience of being-in-place (Sherry 1998b): Many of you may recall at Gettysburg there is a place called “The Peach Orchard.” This is it. I know at least one of you asked me this earlier. Now there were numerous peach orchards at Gettysburg, but this one has been singled out to history as the famous Peach Orchard. Now again, another famous landmark. This clearing to your right, folks, quite famous, known today simply as the famous Wheatfield at Gettysburg…. Folks, there’s absolutely nothing strategic about that field. It is simply where the two sides locked horns and slugged it out. And in the end, the bloodiest fighting of this whole three-day battle unfolded in the field that we just drove by.
Reversing transgressions
If any change infringes Gettysburg’s authenticity, it will be a result of the inherent dynamism of the natural environment, as in the case of growing trees and cultivated crops in the surrounding area. But if the original “authentic” look is being altered through nature’s intrusion, the NPS acts as a responsible guardian, it keeps this hallowed place under its aegis, and it takes all the necessary measures to keep it as it was in the past. Many tour guides told their audiences that the park is constantly engaged in cutting down trees that were not there during the battle; they lease many fields to farmers, allowing them to grow crops or graze cattle there in order to recreate the general sense of an agricultural setting; and they restore the old wooden fences “so the place really does look quite like it did in 1863,” corroborating further the practice of freezing.
Restoration efforts were also observed in some historical buildings that could not otherwise stand the passage of time: Here’s Meade’s headquarters. Look at the old wood. Can you see it there? Right there where that scaffolding is. Now the park is going to put brand-new wood planks on top of that. But there’s the original house. Pretty neat, isn’t it? I just paid my quarterly taxes last week. The ones I paid last year went to buy this Ford dealership here [customers laugh]. No, seriously. Men from Georgia, Illinois, and New York fought and died over there. The park has now bought that place and this man moves his inventory out, they’ll tear up the parking lot, tear down the building, and restore that to what it was in 1863: the battlefield [customers applaud].
Discussion
Commercial staging of servicescapes has received some attention in existing literature (Arnould, Price, and Tierney 1998; Sherry et al. 2001). The staging of contested servicescapes has been overlooked. This study was designed to investigate and provide theoretical understanding of the way in which service providers stage contested servicescapes. To this end, ethnographic research was conducted at the Gettysburg National Military Park as an exemplary empirical context of a servicescape that, almost a century and a half after the battle transpired, remains at the center of intense controversies. While the idea of contested and politicized character of certain servicescapes has not gone unnoticed in servicescape research (Kozinets et al. 2004; Peñaloza 2000) and other scholarly writings (Bender 1993, 2002; Jeong and Santos 2004; Tilley 2006), this study provides a more focused and nuanced theorization of this phenomenon through the three mutually constituted domains of contestation. In the domain of text, contestation emerges due to provider–customer misalignment of “facts” and “truths” about the “real” place identity. Ignorance, misinformation, and prior familiarity are identified here as potential sources of contestation. The domain of landscape refers to contestation associated with the materiality of the surrounding environment, including the terrain, design, architecture, and artifacts. In the domain of ideology, we can locate systems of ideas, values, and beliefs that function as the interpretive lens and the generative engine for the “real” place identity (Chronis 2016; Hirschman 1993). Servicescape contestation arises due to a perceived ideological misalignment between provider and customer.
Facing the constant possibility of contestation, service providers used practices of staging to address this. Using practices of reading, guides fashioned an official “proper” interpretation of the site and were able to address all domains of contestation. Through dramatizing, contestation was avoided by providing a specific way in which customers should read and understand the narrative text. Accordingly, Gettysburg is neither a place of a lost cause (Horwitz 1998) nor of regret (Gold and Gold 2003) but a site of courageous fighting, suffering, and death. Through materializing, they employed the surrounding landscape and its physical features to complement, elaborate, and substantiate the servicescape narrative (Chronis 2015). Contestation was avoided by bringing in sync narrative and landscape. If customers read a plot of death and suffering in the narrative, they were also guided to “read” the same plot on the landscape. Through moralizing, guides avoided contestation by furnishing an underlying ideology that was all-inclusive. It is due to the undisputed sacrificial death of all combatants that Gettysburg was promoted as an undisputed patriotic landscape that unifies all Americans.
Using practices of editing, guides bent and adapted their narrative interpretation on the basis of the composition of their audience. These practices avoided contestation in several ways. By simplifying, they avoided complex, lengthy, and convoluted interpretations that were more prone to and risk contestation. Through adjusting, they adapted their accounts to their specific audience, customizing in this way both the content and style of their storytelling. Through distancing, they remained impartial and maintain neutrality from partisan ideological positions. No side was privileged. Through connecting, they made links between customers and the storyscape narrative. Contestation was avoided by including all customers in the servicescape narrative, irrespective of their state affiliation, ethnic background, ancestry, or ideological position.
Using practices of authentication, guides demonstrated and reinforced the truthfulness of the narrative and the landscape. Through validating, they avoided contestation by establishing factual accuracy of the narrated events. The practice of freezing promoted an uncontestable site by presenting it as fixed in time and unchanged. Further corroboration of the official narrative was achieved through grounding, wherein the story line and related factual claims were anchored on the materiality of the landscape. Through the practice of reversing transgressions, guides deflected managerial interventions to the site that could be seen as infringements to its authentic character. What this study shows is that, facing the potential that customers might have doubts about the narrative and physical reality of the servicescape, the guides’ efforts to stage the servicescape were proactive. By validating, freezing, grounding, and reversing transgressions, they brought to the surface what had the potential to be contested, and at the same time, they legitimized their claims through the discourse of authenticity before contestation occurs. Such a strategic use of authenticity provides a novel contribution to this conceptual domain by showing that perceptions of authenticity are not only an outcome of consumer assessments and their strategies to authenticate consumption contexts (Beverland and Farrelly 2009; Grayson and Martinec 2004), but they also depend on marketers (Muñoz, Wood, and Solomon 2006). Authenticity is viewed in this study as a political resource that serves the discursive construction of contested servicescapes.
As the findings show, the discourse of authenticity figures highly at Gettysburg. In one sense, authenticity was anchored on a factual reality that is sanctioned by the uncontested objectivity of what actually happened. This is a factual authenticity that supports a “real” place identity based on a verifiable “truth” of events. Authenticity was also anchored on the materiality of the servicescape. Material authenticity was accomplished through materiality’s claim to “truth.” Informed by their study of “primitive” cultures, anthropologists have shown that specific aspects of the landscape can “become details of knowledge, the accuracy of which validates the narrator’s and group’s ownership of the story.” (Kahn 1990, p. 59). Similarly, Malinowski (1922) has noted that features of the landscape prove “in the native’s mind the truth of the myth” (p. 330). Not unlike “primitive” cultures, authenticity at Gettysburg was founded on historical buildings, “quaint little stores,” cannons, a shell sticking in the wall, and the boulders at Devils Den that “they still pretty much look exactly like they did” during the battle. Materiality of the servicescape, then, bore testimony and supported the truthfulness of narrative, and, by extension, it legitimized the ideological framing of the servicescape by service providers. Another way in which authenticity was anchored on the landscape was through the uniqueness of the geographical location. The importance of location in servicescapes has been emphasized in terms of store location in retailing, the location of products within the store, and the location of artifacts in such a way as to facilitate customer experiences (Kozinets et al. 2002; Peñaloza 1999). This research contributes the idea of locational authenticity that refers to the actual, physical geographical spot where focal events unfolded, authenticating the servicescape in this way on the ground (DeLyser 1999). In our case, references to the Bloody Run, the Wheatfield, and the Peach Orchard establish an indisputable genuineness, and their immovable geographical coordinates legitimized service providers’ construction of an uncontested servicescape.
The present analysis of the potentiality of conflict between service providers and customers has theoretical implications related to the politicized character of certain servicescapes where place identities can be multiple and, as a result, subject to debate and contestation (Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001; Cresswell and Hoskins 2008; Hughes 1998; Jeong and Santos 2004). The term politiciazation is used here as the unstable and ideologically conflicting state brought about by opposing groups and the concomitant need that something should be done to resolve this tension. Although not openly addressed as such, politicization is directly implicated in a significant corpus of works theorizing the tension between marketers’ domination (structure) and consumer resistance (agency). Critical scholarship in this area identifies marketing discourses as a structure of domination that consumers can resist (Cherrier 2009; Kozinets and Handelman 2004; Peñaloza and Price 1993). Overwhelmingly, the position advanced by these works is that discourses of domination and resistance are locked in a recurring process of “tactical moves and countermoves” (Kozinets et al. 2004, p. 659). Thompson (2004) refers to this process as “a dynamic system of shifting and perpetually morphing relationships between power and resistance” (p. 174), while Murray (2002) in his inquiry on the politics of consumption argues that this is a continuous struggle that involves “a tug-of-war between life worlds [of customers] and social systems [of marketing agents]” (p. 439; Figure 2A). Under this thinking, the only (counter)move that marketing agents can make is to take over, exploit, and incorporate resistance into their own practices in order to increase domination (Cherrier 2009), continuing in this way the cyclical path of domination–resistance–domination.
Two theoretical frameworks of servicescape contestation. (A) Domination versus resistance. (B) Metaperformance.
While its value is recognized, this theorization does not provide any guidance to service providers in their constant struggle to avoid a continuous cycle of contestation. The present study’s empirical data help us to provide an alternative theorization. As it was shown, ideological contestation of Gettysburg is anchored on a Southern reading of Gettysburg and the ideology of States’ Rights that is formulated in opposition to the competing reading of the Civil War as a war against the institution of slavery. In order to handle this ideological confrontation, service providers’ discursive practices do not directly cope with oppositional readings at the level of North-versus-South ideological plane—as the domination-versus-resistance thinking prescribes—but they work instead at a higher level of metaperformance, where oppositional readings are effaced by using the discourse of patriotic-landscape-through-sacrifice and its ideology of unification where both North and South are included (Figure 2B). Conceptually akin to Gramsci’s (1994) idea of “hegemony” according to which dominant ideologies are not recognized as coercive and constraining but give the impression of a fundamental consensus—and as a result the majority of people are persuaded to adopt as their own—the notion of metaperformance views the commercial staging of contested servicescapes expressed through an ideology of unity that avoids contestation not by being coercive and confrontational but by giving the impression of a consensus and inclusion which all parties can be persuaded to adopt.
Implications for Practice
The present inquiry into the staging of contested servicescapes is relevant to a large number of contexts where oppositional views might be expressed and instances of conflict may arise (Table 1). The suggestions provided here are especially applicable to those cases where FLEs come in direct contact with customers and play a major role in the staging of the servicescape through performative guiding. The first step for any managerial intervention should be a careful study of the domains of contestation, which, to varying degrees, are manifest in all contested servicescapes. Some of the questions that can help in this respect are as follows: What are the potential contestation scenarios and in what way are those verbalized (Domain of Text) or expressed on the physical environment (Domain of Landscape)? Most importantly, what are the underlying beliefs and values of each alternative reading and what is the potential conflicts they may engender (Domain of Ideology)? Potential sources for such an analysis are existing historical and other secondary texts, FLEs’ feedback, and primary research to uncover customer views.
Being equipped by such knowledge, service providers should next exercise dramaturgical circumspection; that is, they should have a proactive attitude and use foresight in how to stage their “show” (Goffman 1959) and avert conflict. Table 2 summarizes the practices that can be used in this respect. Practices of reading should be used to craft and communicate a preferred interpretation of the site. Through dramatizing, the servicescape should be staged based on captivating and convincing stories of people whose actions had an important bearing on the current meaning and identity of the servicescape. Through materializing, FLEs should employ and unpack the surrounding materialities for the stories they tell (Kozinets et al. 2002). They can use signs, artifacts, and the surrounding space to depict dramatic story plots, communicate particular meanings, elicit emotional responses, infuse community symbolism, and instill a desired identity of the servicescape. Since most narratives involve a moral component (Cronon 1992; Kashima 1997; Linde 2001), FLEs should use practices of moralizing in crafting their stories around a specific value point that summarizes the moral meaning of the servicescape’s master narrative in a coherent and nonconflicting way.
Suggested Practices to FLEs for the Staging of Contested Servicescapes.
Note. FLEs = frontline employees.
To successfully apply practices of editing, FLEs should be able to identify the composition of their audience. A popular technique used by most of the guide informants and can be applied to other contests was to assess the education and knowledge level of their party by asking particular context-specific questions at the beginning of the tour. Equally critical is to assess customers’ involvement, ideological predispositions, demographics, and other relevant characteristics. Based on this pretour customer assessment, they should apply the practices of simplifying, adjusting, distancing, and connecting accordingly. Management must provide a certain level of empowerment that is necessary for FLEs to be flexible and innovative in using their personal judgment in editing the servicescape narrative and make decisions based on customer variability and emerging contestation possibilities.
Building on the idea that a sense of verisimilitude constitutes a basic characteristic of successful service environments (Kozinets et al. 2002), this study provides guidance through the employment of practices of authentication by FLEs in order to legitimize their claims about the proper way to read contested servicescapes. FLEs should be attentive in anchoring their dramatic performance on “factual” text (history in our context) but also on the materiality of the encompassing stage. Physical surroundings should be paid particular attention not only because their material rhetoric supports and works hand in hand with verbal storytelling, but because they also provide “proof” for the truthfulness of the providers’ point of view.
Table 2 presents the staging practices explained in the form of suggestive techniques that can guide the guides as they guide; that is, as they interact with customers, lead them through the site, construct a servicescape identity, and avoid contestation.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, Executive_Summary - The Staging of Contested Servicescapes
Supplemental Material, Executive_Summary for The Staging of Contested Servicescapes by Athinodoros Chronis in Journal of Service Research
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
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