Co-constructing the service experience: Exploring the role of customer emotion management

This article introduces customer emotion management as an integral part of the service experience. By building primarily on Hochschild (1983), this study provides a deeper understanding of customers’ active emotional involvement and emotion display in extended service encounters. Using ethnography, this research demonstrates that customer emotion management is essential in understanding customer performance in co-construction of service experiences. The ethnographic findings challenge the assumption of a universally asymmetric emotional relationship between customers and service providers by providing evidence that customers also actively engage in emotion control.