Consumer Complaining Behavior: a Paradigmatic Review
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Consumer Complaining Behavior: a Paradigmatic Review Swapan Deep Arora 1
& Anirban Chakraborty
1
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
Consumer complaining behavior (CCB) is an important stream of research and practice, as it links the domains of service failure and service recovery. CCB research, although extensive and temporally wide, exhibits a lack of concern for the underlying assumptions of scholarly inquiry. Researchers neither explicitly mention, nor consciously indicate their ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. We systematically identify the extant CCB literature and map it to two well-accepted paradigmatic classifications (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz Organization Science 7(2): 191–207, 1996). Normative or functionalist paradigm with the assumptions of an objective external reality, a positivist epistemology, a determinist view of human nature, and nomothetic methodology emerges as the dominant CCB research paradigm. The implications of this dominance are discussed as a barometer of the future of CCB research and practice. Keywords Paradigm . Ontology . Epistemology . CCB . Consumer complaint . Consumer complaining
Introduction A defining tenet of the marketing concept is the central role and importance of the customer (Homburg et al. 2017). Business organizations attempt to ensure that customer experience is satisfactory, even delightful (Oliver et al. 1997). However, humans are fallible (Lutz 1994), and so are organizations that are at a structural level, nothing but human collectivities. That a consumption
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-02000148-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Swapan Deep Arora [email protected] Anirban Chakraborty [email protected]
1
Marketing Area, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow, Lucknow, India
Philosophy of Management
experience can often lead to customer dissatisfaction, is a truth, that businesses realize, and do their best to remedy. Michel (2001) articulates this well when he comments that “service failures are inevitable, but dissatisfied customers are not.” The actions (or inaction) that customers take in response to service failures, collectively fall under the realm of consumer complaining behavior (CCB). The post-failure reaction of an organization comes under the domain of service recovery. Accordingly, CCB functions as the link between service failure and service recovery. Business firms get a chance to remedy the situation, only when the complaint response is visible to them, directly or indirectly. Hence, the significance of complaining behavior needs no emphasis. Further, it is imperative to understand that although the research domains of service failure, and service recovery, originated in the context of services literature, whereas CCB research mostly originated in the product domain, these distinctions have disappeared over time. Service-dominant logic provides us a lens to understand
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