Mortality, morality and the marketplace: empathetic improvisation and the double duty of care in service encounters with bereaved consumers

ABSTRACT

In the field of death studies, there is growing recognition that other people, culture and the dead themselves shape individual experiences of bereavement. Service encounters are a key but under-researched site for examining these interactions, broader relationships between mortality, the marketplace and consumer culture, and their implications for consumer well-being. This interpretive study explores service encounters from the perspective of bereaved American consumers. Our data suggest that bereavement rendered service encounters doubly heterogeneous, and that continuing bonds between the living and the dead often placed a double duty of care on service providers, since the interests of the dead as well as the well-being of survivors were at stake. From the bereaved consumer’s perspective, this double duty of care seems more likely to be discharged through empathetic improvisation rather than standardised performances of saccharine sensitivity by service providers.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• bereavement
• service encounter
• consumer vulnerability
• liminality
• empathy

Acknowledgements

The interviews on which this article is based were conducted while the first author was a Fulbright Scholar in the US. The support of the Fulbright Commission is gratefully acknowledged. Both authors are grateful to the editors and reviewers for constructive feedback in developing the paper

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the terms “survivors” and “bereaved people” interchangeably in this paper. “Survivor” is a lexical commonplace in the death studies literature and obituaries often refer to the dead as “survived by” particular family members.