Gender Matters? Exploring How Gender is Negotiated in Service Encounters

This article argues that the service encounter is an important site for studying dimensions related to gender and power relations in front‐line service work. The shift from bureaucracy towards the market and from positional power to personal power has changed the circumstances of service work. Drawing on research from a Norwegian retail bank, this article illustrates the transformation of teller work into seller work. The written stories from the workers highlight how these women become personally responsible for solving the dilemmas related to the inherent contradictions in their organization. Given the emphasis on the pleasures of customer interaction in their accounts, it is interesting to note that most of the stories deal with what they perceived of as ‘difficult customers’. Especially at times of customer disillusionment, the women workers were not constituted as representatives of the bank, but as gendered personas. In turn, this activated gendered cultural scripts and symbols.