Zsuzsanna Vargha, a sociology PhD student at Columbia (–currently guest-blogging over at Socializing Finance), has made available a draft chapter from her forthcoming dissertation on client-customer interaction at a Hungarian bank. Her choice of field site couldn’t be more timely. For all the scholarship on consumption and the commodity, much less seems to have been said of the bank (though this is of course rapidly changing). And yet, is not the bank itself, Vargha seems to suggest, just one more business, one more place of structured customer relations?
Avoiding the more obvious, conspiratorial answers to this question (where ‘personalization’ would be just another devious market ploy), Vargha unravels a more fundamental problem, one that cannot be so easily attributed to ‘late capitalism’ per se. Rather, the conflicts or tensions between the face-to-face encounter and the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system informing that interaction are shown to reflect a more philosophical tension — between structures and nodes, processes and moments, sets and elements. Customer-client interaction, in other words, cannot be so easily whisked away as a ‘symptom’ of systemic exploitation. For, and this is perhaps the central methodological point of her paper, interaction itself raises the question of how structures interact with individuals, of how a given system manages to appropriate (in the cynical view), or engage with (in the more positive view), a ‘subject’.
Speaking to this point, Vargha spends some time early in the paper pointing out the relevant literature’s over-attention to macro structures. If given too much weight in the model, they assume precisely what’s in question: namely, the relation between the individual and the system. Vargha, by contrast, focuses on the individual, face-to-face encounter with the system. She notes that the very concept of embeddedness — that one is ‘embedded’, socially, in a market — diminishes in advance the importance of interaction between the one embedded and the system in which one is embedded. After all, if outcomes are programmatically determined, interaction cannot matter very much.
In contrast to this model, she turns to Webber’s view of market exchange as a struggle between opposing interests, of which exchange is the negotiated outcome rather than the pre-given result of a macro, top-down operation. She compares this perspective to some recent work on doctor-patient interaction, and how certain structures or patterns to the conversation tend to result in more prescriptions. All told, the general effect here is a restoration of particularity, the site, and negotiation — interaction not just between the client and the bank but between the micro and the macro. Which is why “mass personalization” — a wonderful phrase that demonstrates, in microcosm, her central point — results in hybrid forms, a word that recurs throughout. The CRM profile and the client meld, or mix — one can sense in her paper a small struggle to find the proper language — rather than one completely ‘subjecting’ or ‘determining’ the other. (Vargha is trying, with much success I think, to move us beyond the terminology of ‘appropriation’ and ‘subjectification’, and on to something more subtle and nuanced.)
We’ve read much of a former age’s penchant for standardization — of homes, products, dreams, — but will new intellectual equipment be required to make sense of the the standardization of interaction? Is such a feat even possible — or does the advent of CRM, in particular, and customer service, in general, represent a failed attempt to extend to people an apparatus meant for objects? “Ironically,” Vargha quips, “the most personal mode of exchange—the face-to-face interaction—becomes the least personal in the attempt to further personalize it.” (3) This is a profound thesis with far-reaching consequences. For one, it destabilizes the purity of presence, of live, ‘unmediated’ interaction, even as it focuses on the structural importance of information systems. There is, you could say, a ‘normalizing function’ at work in the CRM, and it hangs over every turn of Vargha’s logic. There is a refreshing ‘total’ aspect to Vargha’s approach, as well. Interaction, as a concept, is shown to cut across a number of areas otherwise studied in artificial isolation: interior design, capital, consumption, and of course information. We can only hope the final work will delve deeper into their strange collaboration. Its completion, unfortunately, couldn’t be more timely.
