Immersive Service: Characteristics, Challenges, and Pathways to Consumer Agency

This research introduces a novel conceptualization of immersive service, defined as service that consumers are embedded in and surrounded by, such that their life experience is within the service and, in great part, constructed by it for some period of time (e.g., hospital stays, residential care, air travel). The authors examine two key questions: (1) How can characteristics of immersive service challenge consumer agency? (2) How do consumers bolster their agency in immersive service? They study these questions through a novel theoretical lens (figured worlds theory) and based on an ethnography in a residential care facility. The analyses unearth, define, and describe four conceptually novel characteristics of immersive service: encapsulation, positionality, multivocality and protocolization. These characteristics are crucial for marketers because, as the authors find, these structural aspects of immersive service can threaten consumer agency. The research also shows how consumers overcome challenges to agency. Specifically, consumers pursue five pathways toward their individual and collective agency: expanding the figured world, voicing, seeking task responsibility, challenging figured world protocols, and playing and imagining within the figured world. These findings break new conceptual ground for scholars while also being relevant for managers, consistent with ideals of Better Marketing for a Better World and transformative service research.