Abstract
This article proposes a focus for research by drawing on two emerging and largely distinct streams of literature-on service/emotion work and organizations in consumer society. In particular, experiences of `customer care' and related `corporate culture' initiatives are examined. Here, employee ambivalence is highlighted and is typically portrayed in terms of: protecting a privileged or `real' sense of self; (re-)asserting control; and/or as being constituted through gender, class and other cultural relations and interactions with customers. Little attention has been given to parallel postmodern literatures documenting both the pervasiveness of a constituting discourse of the sovereign consumer and the emergence of multiple selves in a `de-traditionalized' consumer society. Here, the theoretical primacy given to discourse typically precludes an empirical consideration of subjectivity which is viewed as ephemeral. It is argued that such an epistemology has given rise to an exaggeration of the dominance and coherence of discourse, neglecting internal contradictions, alternative representations