Contemporary challenges of consumption: a Kafkaesque and critical marketing perspective

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague to Jewish parents who spoke German and gave him a European cultural space as he grew up (Warner, 2007). His life is a story of turmoil, one vital dimension and the determinant of which was his painful relationship with his father, who many accounts have noted was a persistent bully (Preece & Julian, 2002; Warner, 2007). Despite his tumultuous inner state, Kafka graduated with a doctorate in law and worked for an insurance compensation agency (Kaplan, 2014). He juggled professional responsibilities with the drive for writing. Ironically, while he received acclaim for the former during his lifetime, the latter domain was broadly recognized only posthumously (Preece & Julian, 2002).

At a philosophical level, Kafka found Kierkegaard’s work emblematic (Powell, 2012). Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, wrote principally on faith and existentialism in the 19^th century. The suffering depicted in these philosophical accounts manifests distinctly in Kafka’s characters (Eilittä, 2000). Kafka’s literary work has illuminated various scholarly domains, including literature (Emrich et al., 1977), philosophy (Cooke, 2014), organization theory (Warner, 2007), law (Minkkinen, 1994), culture (Zeng & Hu, 2017), psychology (Stroup, 1961), politics (Danoff, 2000), and post-industrial critiques (Khare & Varman, 2016), among several others. While the volume of his work is in no way imposing, its impact on contemporary human thought and understanding has been immense (Steinhauer, 1983). The parables he wrote depict life at an aggregate level, for Kafka envisioned the state of humanity rather than the fate of individual protagonists. His writing is intense, illuminating, and enlivening in its portrayal of despair, injustice, and the nightmarishness of the human condition. The analogy between Kafka’s writing and contemporary consumption experience is not too hard to decipher. Just as Kafka’s characters find their efforts toward guidance, fairness, and acceptance thwarted by the very authorities that exist to facilitate them, so do consumers often face a similar fate at the hands of the same market actors who purport to fulfill their needs and desires.

Literature offers a novel means to explore and understand lived experiences. It thus enables a foray into the realities of subjects, thereby serving as a source of research insight (Beyes et al., 2019). Accordingly, this attempt to portray consumption experiences continues an established tradition of adapting fiction to comprehend life (Rhodes & Westwood, 2016), for the latter is itself “an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 162). More specifically, Kafka’s literary work is adopted as a lens through which consumers’ everyday experience and consumption challenges are illuminated.

The paradigm of critical marketing is a natural foundation for exploring the challenges of contemporary consumption, as its basic premise is to go beyond the often-depicted but partial and distorted image of positivity presented by marketing (Panayiotopoulos & Lichrou, 2023; Tadajewski, 2010). Further, the impacts of marketing policies, strategies, and forces are central to any work within this critical school (Tadajewski, 2022).

Indeed, critical marketing has several strands and is only a loose confluence of multiple paradigms. This work primarily restricts itself to the relationship between contemporary marketing realities and the life or plight of consumers. More specifically, drawing from Tadajewski’s (2018) idea of denaturalization, this work questions the taken-for-granted nature of consumer supremacy in the marketing system. In this respect, one salient dimension of critical marketing theory is the problematization of consumer sovereignty. Insofar as consumer agency and choice is concerned, Tadajewski argues that much of what forms the ‘customer is the king’ narrative is a circumscribed, political, and self-motivated view of the market. Marketing institutions and practices, instead, absorb people into consuming a primarily standardized set of goods and services (Heath et al., 2017). As a result, the individuality of the consumer is superficialized. What we believe to be unique often represents a homogenization shaped by the massification of production, distribution, and advertising (Fromm & Anderson, 2017).

Further, market research is enacted lopsidedly to glamorize the ‘consumer power’ narrative, wherein prospective buyers share the same perceptions and opinions resulting from the structural market forces themselves (Tadajewski, 2018). In many ways, consumers strive toward the goalposts that the marketing system both creates and provides with the tools to achieve. Put differently, market-driven aspirations are the ends as well as the means.

The first aspect to explore regarding the consumption landscape is the extent of consumer choice and resultant market power. As demonstrated above, this dimension appeared most frequently in the reviewed studies. The dialectic tension under this category is the macro-level question of whether consumers are the powerful drivers of the marketing system or the superficial face of an underlying sellers’ market. In the assessed literature, while the former narrative is unequivocally more pervasive, there are significant voices that raise doubts.

One of the most substantially acknowledged advantages for contemporary market structures is undeniably the argument for enhanced choices (Rezabakhsh et al., 2006). Liberal economic policies have transformed a supply-constrained world into a landscape of plentitude. A concomitant rise in competition and the advent of the internet engender a similar abundance of information (Pires et al., 2006). However, divergent arguments view the narrative of consumer sovereignty and empowerment as more mythical than real. Philosophers such as Bourdieu (1984) view consumer choice as an illusion crafted by the capitalist economic culture. Similarly, Schwarzkopf (2011) argues that while consumer sovereignty theory attempts to legitimize capitalist society, it ignores the hardships millions of consumers and citizens face under such an economic arrangement. Indeed, at a less abstract level, some voices argue that the internet and other structural forces initially empowered consumers in several ways, e.g., by reducing information asymmetry, but this has now metamorphosed into an era of surveillance capitalism (Dholakia et al., 2021a). Where once they only had the intent of understanding consumer behavior, marketers have been moving into modifying and driving it, thereby trying to turn buyers and markets into “organisms that behave” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 377). Figure 1 illustrates the dominant narratives or sub-themes associated with this contestation between empowerment and entrapment. Other dimensions discussed in the text below are also similarly delineated in this visual depiction.

Figure 1:

Many legitimate marketing practices, such as brand imagery and symbolic communication, coupled with a competitively-shaped reduction in differences across offerings, make an objective assessment of the consumer’s consideration and choice set extremely difficult, if not impossible (Tadajewski, 2018). The above notion problematizes consumer rationality from an operational perspective. However, scholars go a step further conceptually, raising the issue of whether more choice implies enhanced welfare. For example, in their review on consumer choice freedom, Botti et al. (2023) state that increasing options entails both benefits and costs, and cognitive limitations and emotional conflict contribute to the latter. Similarly, Dholakia et al. (2021a) argue that while consumer choice is reified morally and instrumentally, the real world presents enough instantiations of restrictions on and of choice-making. In a macro-critique of the internet and big-data-driven contexts, they provide multifaceted arguments for the thesis that such hyperdigital marketspaces blur the boundaries between consumer empowerment and entrapment.

Studies from consumers’ perspective on the role of marketing are few and far between, but are also lopsidedly critical. For example, Marino et al. (2020) reveal that consumers have a manipulative view of the marketing function and feel entrapped in their consumption decisions. Recent studies confirm the persistence of such negative attitudes. Heath et al. (2017) provide an eclectic account of consumers trying to resist but unable to escape from dominant, infringing, and pervasive market forces. Similarly and more importantly, in a third-world context, Kashif et al. (2018) highlight that consumers view themselves as pervaded and pushed amid the hegemony of markets and marketing.

From a theoretical standpoint, the consumer sovereignty model is seen as the consumer collective’s process of counterbalancing firms’ power through rational choice (Bachouche & Sabri, 2019). Somewhat relatedly but via different pathways, the cultural power model sees consumers as more tactical, adopting several micro-social practices to counter firms’ marketplace advances. However, alternative theoretical explanations challenge the empowerment narrative, supporting the notion that consumers are often more entrapped than dominant. For example, Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and disciplinary power argue that consumers are indoctrinated into the structures of the market and the practices that firms and other actors desire them to enact (Bachouche & Sabri, 2019).

Kafka’s characters evocatively reveal the paradoxical state of today’s consumer. In The Castle, K., the protagonist, views the first village official Klamm as the link to the enigmatic castle. Yet, he fails to reach this first power sphere, let alone the foci of authority (cited in Nasir, 2012). Relatedly, today’s consumers are enmeshed in a narrative of market-shaping, while in reality they are often held at the first semblance of any market logic (Ertimur & Coskuner-Balli, 2015). Similarly, Joseph K, the protagonist in Kafka’s book The Trial, pronounces, “Behind my arrest and today’s interrogation there is great organization at work” (Kafka, 1984, p. 54). Similarly, contemporary businesses often employ a structured and dedicated enterprise to manipulate the consumer through misleading advertisements, predatory prices, or similar unfair practices. When individual consumers submit to these exchanges, it threatens their sense of autonomy (West, 1985). Kafka’s writings do not deny sovereignty (McLoughlin, 2016). However, through his lens, the human protagonist is never empowered. Instead, it is the impenetrable structure of authority that holds infinite power. Extending this thought to the consumption paradigm, consumers lie enmeshed within the maneuvers of market hegemony. Such is the extent of Kafkaesque passivity that scholars equate it with physiological states like impotence (Clegg et al., 2016).

Critical marketing scholars, too, suggest that marketing forces often disempower consumers. For example, Tadajewski (2018) argues that “the marketing concept” and “consumer sovereignty” are perspectives that are individually realistic but contradictory in conjunction. Most of what marketing managers do aims to influence and shape consumer choice in particularistic ways, yet they sing paeans to the merit of sovereignty. Francis and Robertson (2021) show that market intermediaries like retailers and agents reinforce racial discrimination against black consumers, resulting in a constriction of those consumers’ choice sets. More broadly, modern-day marketing is also considered an instrument of cultural imperialism (Rodrigues & Hemais, 2022). Contemporary consumption is a forced exercise rather than a manifestation of free will and is undertaken to fulfill the marketer-created myth of prestige and symbolism (Bourdieu, 1984).

Another challenge that emerges from the reviewed literature is the pervasive and frequent occurrence of service failures or negative consumption experiences. Service failure refers to any dissatisfactory value provision perceived by a consumer (Fouroudi et al., 2020).

Correspondingly, service recovery denotes a firm’s attempts to remedy a perceived service failure (Arora & Chakraborty, 2021a). Since the basic premise of SFR is that some service instances going wrong is inevitable, i.e., the “fallibility” thesis, such negative experiences have always existed. However, several factors allude to an aggregate-level rise in SFR relevance. For example, complaints to the Indian National Consumer Helpline have grown by 54% in a year to reach around one million annually (CNBC, 2022). Further, the relatively new-age industries are more problematic, e.g., the e-commerce sector contributes about half of these cases, reflecting a much steeper rise of above 80% annually and 300% over the past five years (CNBC, 2022; TOI, 2022).

The developed world does not provide a different picture. The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) received about 80% more complaints in 2021 than the previous year (CFPB, 2022). Clearly, these significant rises cannot be attributed to a general increase in consumption volume alone. A representative survey of consumer (dis)satisfaction, complaint levels, and the responses received illustrates the problem more profoundly (Grainer et al., 2014). The study showed that several relevant metrics, e.g., the proportion of respondents who faced consumption problems in the past year, the percentage of complainers who got some resolution, and the number of times a consumer had to complain to get some resolution, actually was worse in 2013 as compared to a similar survey in 1976.

In this review’s six-dimensional framework of consumer challenges (Figure 1), SFR emerged as the second-most frequently assessed category in the identified literature. In practice, service failures can be seen as isolated instances or systemic occurrences. The tip-of-the-iceberg theory postulates that several instances remain hidden for each such event coming into a firm’s knowledge (Taylor et al., 2020). Accordingly, it is understandable that there is a higher likelihood of a reduction in such events for firms following the latter philosophy, wherein each failure is seen as a learning opportunity. However, evidence and scholarly research suggest that dissatisfactory consumer experiences may be rising (Arora & Chakraborty, 2021b). Scholars go on to comment that marketing has a “Janus face,” in that its stated philosophy differs from exhibited conduct (Taylor et al., 2020).

The stated essence of liberal markets and marketing philosophy is a systemic improvement in value provision aided by competition (Marshall & Parra, 2019). However, consumer reality is depictive of oxymoronic rather than actual betterment. When marketers consider each customer as a data point rather than their innate relational partner, it becomes unsurprising that organizational practices and culture could transform into controlling consumers rather than serving them. The pervasiveness of service failures and unsuccessful recoveries is such that we see ourselves in every complaint or negative review.

In a similar vein, Kafka’s characters encounter situations that are weird but still commonplace (West, 1985). At a broader level, consumption dissatisfaction can be viewed as a manifestation of human detachment from reality and the self (Hooti & Borna, 2014). The artist in Kafka’s A Hunger Artist portrays the divergence between mental ideals and mundane realities of existence (Baykent, 2018). The correspondence between the artist’s hunger to be admired and the market’s tilt toward hedonic consumption cannot be ignored. Scholars have convincingly argued that such cultural recasting and predatory practices of capitalist markets reinforce each other (Kennedy, 2020).

It is thus reasonable to argue that rising instances of consumer grievances and, more importantly, the rate and level to which they are escalating, indeed demand some explanation. While SFR captures a reasonable essence of the widening gap between expected and provisioned service, one also needs to look at associated aspects: for example, are structural forces pushing down the expected service levels over time? If so, consumers are ceteris-paribus worse off even without perceiving a dissatisfactory marketing exchange. Similarly, many contemporary service interactions engage frontline employees (FLEs) in some form, whether physically, telephonically, or on the web. Consumption experiences that are perceived as below par, i.e., falling within the SFR domain, may still fail to be recognized as such if FLEs are disengaged and neither themselves respond nor log/escalate the issue. Such factors necessitate the exploration of the FLE aspect separately, as done in the last dimension.

Consumers constantly interact with technological facets of the marketing system and are often conditioned to provide more and more information about themselves. In other words, marketing exchanges involve more generation and real-time transfer of data trails than ever before (Fuller, 2019). Accordingly, extracting, using, and disseminating consumer information, including demographics, search, and usage, requires judicious consideration (Martin & Murphy, 2017). However, there have been rising instances of unethical intrusions via imprudently-targeted communications and surreptitious tracking. What began as a relatively well-intentioned component of customer relationship management has been transforming over the years into an exercise of direct instrumental aims (Chatterjee et al., 2021). Further, the boundaries of where the collected data lie are blurred. Firms are transforming into value networks of independent business entities, with commercial exchanges of such consumer information prevalent (Lusch et al., 2010).

More often than not, consumers are not mindful of how extreme these involuntary disclosures are. Further, while regulation may have marginally helped, the attributes of these exchanges, viz. information asymmetry, are to the natural advantage of digital firms, consumers’ behavioral biases such as bounded rationality and immediate gratification, and commercial standing to gain from potential selling of collected consumer information, aggravating privacy concerns (Fuller, 2019). Firms are crossing all boundaries by engaging in practices such as biopolitical management of consumers’ lifecycle events by associating buying patterns with lifecycle changes. For example, US retailer ‘Target’ designed an algorithm to predict pregnancy, wherein it relied on consumers’ prior purchases to infer such status for other consumers exhibiting similar buying patterns and offer them its baby-shower services (Callanan et al., 2021).

Privacy concerns emerge as the third most frequently studied dimension in the six-category framework (Figure 1). They also showed the highest evolutionary rise, indicating a potential climbing of this theme in the coming years. Regarding the theoretical lens, this study’s arguments about the problematic nature of data protection concerns in contemporary consumption can be seen from various perspectives. First, as part of the social contract, firms and marketplace actors are obliged to meet privacy norms and standards (Martin & Murphy, 2017). However, since these norms are always fluid, such perceptions of social contract fail to actuate requisite conduct. For similar reasons, social exchange theory, which postulates that consumers willingly reveal personal information when benefits are seen as outweighing costs, also often fails as an explanation. Many times, the data exchange is implicit and disguised. Even when consent is relatively informed, marketing tactics could play up the perceived benefits, and downplay the costs, of this exchange (Boerman et al., 2021).

Kafka’s The Trial documents the protagonist’s nightmare when he is arrested without giving any information about the charges against him (cited in Smith, 2008). An information dossier is maintained about him without consent or disclosure, and he tries to seek reasons and justice in vain throughout the narrative. Solove (2004) adopts the Kafka metaphor to characterize the dehumanizing and intrusive effects of databases that exacerbate the power imbalances between agencies that collect and hold information and the individuals to whom the data pertains. Analogously, the mighty market structure has vast details about consumer lives, which it handles carelessly and yet enjoys impunity (Yeh, 2018). It is an indifferent market where the consumers are pawns (Heath & Heath, 2016). Decisions are made about consumers without their knowledge, let alone any semblance of control.

Critical marketing theorists argue that direct marketing practices like database marketing instantiate stalking rather than the normative principles of relationship building (Skiba et al., 2019). Consumers are objectified in these exchanges, and modernday critiques testify to the glaring idea that underlying these technologies, consumers are often themselves the product being sold (Mazzucato, 2018). Shultz et al. (2022) recognize the consumer risk that arises from increasing personalization of marketing efforts. They specifically link such customization to the potential undermining of actual and perceived consumer agency insofar as making preferences and choices are concerned. Critical scholars go on to envisage a new term, Terminal Marketing, to capture the realistic voices questioning contemporary marketing practices and raising concerns, such as those pertaining to privacy (Ahlberg et al., 2022).

The need for oversight and regulation in capitalist market structures is generally well-accepted, even by proponents who see most markets as self-correcting (Kutan, 2010). However, while consumer protection is a salient element of the global economic order, challenges persist and are aggravated by weak regulation mechanisms in many contexts. Such issues are systemic and owe their existence to the nature of capitalism as a force that thrives on the ‘money begets money’ phenomenon (Pettini & Musikanski, 2023). Within this realm, while proponents of free markets sing the praises of the competitive forces unleashed by economic liberalism, critics point out the semblance of competition as a thin veneer that hides a high degree of industry concentration beneath it (Plotkin, 2014; Tadajewski, 2018). Beyond the economics of this disproportionate market power are its political aspects, like lobbying, which is a proven force for reducing the effectiveness of regulation (Klein et al., 2022). In such a scenario, consumer outcomes suffer at a micro level, in how firms and adjudicators deal with individual grievances, and at the macro level, in how the market stakeholders accommodate their interests (Tarrant & Cowen, 2022). Interestingly, scholarly interest in this dimension appears to be decreasing, reflecting a broader lack of critique of contemporary economic models. In the reviewed literature, the only two dimensions of focus that trailed this aspect were evolving service provisioning modes and lowered stakes of frontline employees (Figure 1).

Further, most new-age services and industries thrive on network effects and have potentially problematic implications for regulation via concentration attributable to such dynamics (Tucker, 2019). Even in relatively traditional sectors, the prevalence and rising reliance on online reviews in particular, and the internet as an information source in general, lead to such a network dynamic (Fernandes et al., 2022). Consumer interest and welfare are often not helped by the market power thus vested in firms (Ferrari, 2022). These arguments align with broader critiques of contemporary economic systems, e.g., crony capitalism theory (Klein et al., 2022). Similarly, the Marxist theory of alienation views contemporary existence as a duality of power and isolation, wherein heightened perceptions of the latter could accompany even reasoned improvements in the former (Øversveen, 2022). Kafka’s work illuminates the pretense of law and justice (Dargo, 2006). His jurisprudence at the philosophical level is caught between the elusive enigma of existential fairness and the perpetual effort of an ordinary mortal to move toward it (Minkkinen, 1994). In his parable Before the Law, the protagonist spends a lifetime seeking admittance to the law, only to be continuously slighted by a metaphorical door and its keeper (cited in Kaplan, 2014). On the verge of death, this man asks why he could not see anyone else seeking an entry when everyone strives for justice. The doorkeeper replies that this gate was meant only for him and will be permanently shut now, which is rendered redundant after his death. The system society thus sets for ensuring justice for its members implies different barriers and burdens for each. Similarly, regulatory mechanisms in the consumption context often fail to ensure consumers’ best interests. Ferrari (2022) points out that market failures often go unanticipated, and when these occur, legislation is either non-existent, late, inadequate, or enforced ineffectively.

The critical marketing paradigm also presents several arguments for the negative impact that market concentration has on aggregate consumer outcomes. In this respect, McAllister (2020) enunciates the means of market intermediaries’ control of markets as blurring the boundaries between ethically questionable and illegal conduct. Francis and Robertson (2021) make a telling comment on the American consumer regulation setting when they challenge the notion of the market’s invisible hand. They argue that regulation has failed miserably in preventing discrimination against black consumers, implying that the market’s hand is visible and white instead. In a more direct indictment, Giannetti and Srinivasan (2022) show that corporate lobbying reduces firms’ attention to product safety, thereby endangering consumers and increasing product recalls. Similarly, Vadakkepatt et al. (2022) argue that lobbying often furthers a firm’s interest among regulators to the detriment of its market effectiveness. They demonstrate that it reduces firms’ customer focus and decreases customer satisfaction.

As Figure 1 illustrates, the fifth aspect that manifests as a consumption challenge is the transformation in service provisioning or delivery modes. While marketing philosophy regards the focal firm or seller as indistinguishable from any of its partners (e.g., dealers, franchises), few would disagree that consumer experience is often shaped differentially at distinct stages of the value chain (De Keyser et al., 2020). By and large, the delegation of control over critical customer interfaces and exchanges is detrimental to service performance (Whitaker et al., 2019). A parallel can be seen in hierarchical work relationships, wherein it is generally agreed that while authority can be delegated, responsibility cannot be. Accordingly, the focal firm is the principal actor responsible for satisfactory provision.

Over the past few decades, a gradual letting out of several business functions, including customer services, in many cases, has been in vogue (Grimshaw et al., 2019). Few would disagree that the biggest challenges in such an exercise emerge from the consumer perspective (Du Preez & Bendixen, 2019). Espino-Rodríguez & Rodríguez-Díaz (2021) conceptualize and validate the adverse causal effects of outsourcing on customers’ perceived service quality and online review ratings in the hospitality context. Grimshaw et al. (2019) demonstrate how such detrimental customer outcomes are explained by reduced employee commitment. More broadly, Grossberg (2015) notes a distinct erosion of service standards in the 21^st century and argues that excessive focus on costs, efficiency, and productivity in outsourcing and other firm-level decisions is a significant cause. Further, he decries a generic tendency of service downgrading based on the flawed justification of reduced prices.

Another salient development has been reducing the human element at the service interface, using robots, artificial intelligence, chatbots, self-service, or other related manifestations. While the advantages of such automation unarguably exist, its deployment is often dictated by presumably prudent financial considerations rather than customer service standards. Indeed, several studies show that operational concerns drive businesses, and systemic disregard of customer perceptions is internalized and naturalized (Kukreti et al., 2023). In the process, thus, the vital relational aspect of FLEs offering courteous and responsive service is almost wiped away without due thought (Gazley & Simmonds, 2018).

From a theoretical perspective, service operations have always been a dynamic arena and aims toward efficiency do not necessarily impede customer interest (Xiao & Kumar, 2021). However, as stated above, the locus of causality of a decision makes all the difference in whether a change is seen as customer-friendly or merely profit-driven. In this respect, marketers often view customer reluctance to adopt newer provisioning routes as a generic resistance to change rather than an unpreferred mode. It is also essential to recognize that such provisioning changes are positioned as innovations and technological progress rather than operational decisions. Accordingly, users either fail to see a decline in their experience or transactional well-being or accept it as a normative transition applicable to everyone. Thus, chatbots that repeatedly fail to understand one’s contention and toll-free lines that keep giving automated options and announcements are often ignored rather than incorporated into service evaluations (Grossberg, 2015).

Kafka’s writings instantiate several metaphoric connections to the double-edged impacts of technological evolution and human progress. For example, while industrial workers’ safety was one of Kafka’s focus areas in his professional career, his technological changes had to satisfy efficiency concerns so that the state and private management could be convinced to be on board (Wasserman, 2001). More broadly, market and state institutions that exist to help the disadvantaged often display inaccessibility, complex legality, asymmetrical power relations, and alienation (Khare & Varman, 2016). Critical marketing theory has also been conscious of these paradoxical implications of technology-enabled transformation. For example, Dholakia et al. (2021a) argue that operational changes that inhibit consumer choice are portrayed instead as facilitating it. They view contemporary markets as a manifestation of a simultaneity of choice and choicelessness.

The final dimension this review identifies is the negative effect of FLEs’ ownership of service experiences on consumer outcomes (Figure 1). From a broader perspective, work has been seen in diverse ways, including as a daily humiliation and a form of violence to the human body and soul (Studs Terkel, quoted in Delbridge & Sallaz, 2015). While such a view may be unduly extreme, some occupations, particularly some service contexts, show a concerning picture regarding challenges like low wages, casualization, limited growth opportunities, and high turnover (Partington, 2016). Maintaining worker engagement and excitement toward service is challenging in such work conditions, and eventually, this shows in reduced customer outcomes. One mechanism that explains the fall in employees’ efforts to provide desired service levels is their lowered stakes. Eventually, motivation is, for most, a blend of intrinsic and extrinsic forms, with the latter category often predominant, especially until a minimal threshold of hygiene factors such as pay, security, and reasonable working conditions is reached (Good et al., 2022). Societal changes are seen to imply stagnation in many of these hygiene aspects (Delbridge & Sallaz, 2015), a dimension that problematizes worker motivation and, through it, consumption experiences.

Further, by their very nature, service interactions require emotional adaptation and empathy. However, adherence to display rules and customer-focused behaviors require a deep-rooted commitment that can hardly be expected from the precarious state of frontline employment. The internal marketing paradigm rests on the premise that customer service outcomes are unequivocally contingent on employee perceptions, attitudes, and outcomes (Huang, 2020). Further, equity theory supports the idea that FLEs who stay on in adverse work environments would reduce effort as a means of balancing their dissonance, harming service quality (Swain et al., 2020). Pertinently, the advent of the gig economy has further complicated matters in taking casualization to a new degree. The grey area of whether platform businesses are employers or neutral intermediaries presents sites for worker commoditization and exploitation (Purcell & Brook, 2022). It is thus no surprise that assessments of such digitalized marketspaces have shown that they undermine the quality of customer outcomes (Lata et al., 2022).

Kafka’s work reveals the disregard that organizational structures often have for employees, especially in the lower rung of the hierarchy (McCabe, 2015). To him, organizations are arenas of disempowerment and helplessness, where metaphors like cage and factory of pain are applicable (Warner, 2007). Similarly, critical marketing is rooted in disdain for the overly concentrated nature of markets and the inequitable power balance between service provider firms and their employees (Tadajewski, 2010). A vast literature recognizes the emotional labor that frontline employees have to engage in and its detrimental impacts on employees, service firms, and even the consumers for whom it is intended (Teoh et al., 2019).