The Customer is Always Right?

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth qualitative data from the British Public Employment Service (ES), this article sets out to examine the concept of customer bullying, an aspect largely overlooked within the literature. Highlighting the subjective, socially constructed nature of bullying, this article found that certain customer behaviours that were consistent with definitions of workplace bullying were not labelled as such by the ES frontline staff, but instead were seen as `part of the job'.