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Consumer Complaining Behavior: a Paradigmatic Review

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Abstract

Consumer complaining behavior (CCB) is an important stream of research and practice, as it links the domains of service failure and service recovery. CCB research, although extensive and temporally wide, exhibits a lack of concern for the underlying assumptions of scholarly inquiry. Researchers neither explicitly mention, nor consciously indicate their ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. We systematically identify the extant CCB literature and map it to two well-accepted paradigmatic classifications (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz Organization Science 7(2): 191–207, 1996). Normative or functionalist paradigm with the assumptions of an objective external reality, a positivist epistemology, a determinist view of human nature, and nomothetic methodology emerges as the dominant CCB research paradigm. The implications of this dominance are discussed as a barometer of the future of CCB research and practice.

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  1. Marketing Area, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow, Lucknow, India

    Swapan Deep Arora & Anirban Chakraborty

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Arora, S.D., Chakraborty, A. Consumer Complaining Behavior: a Paradigmatic Review. Philosophy of Management 20, 113–134 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-020-00148-8

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