In management research, concepts such as customer and market orientation, customer culture and service climate have been put forward as desirable end-states to strive for. In managerial discourse as well as in critical studies of management, the possibility of fully implementing such concept is often taken for granted. However, empirical studies show that achieving this is not very easy in practice, despite ambitious programs of internal marketing, training and empowerment. Some researchers have even questioned whether it is possible to manage organizational cultures at all. The critique takes various forms, but one common standpoint is that the managerial notions of culture is more concerned with how people should think and what they should do than with how they are actually thinking and doing. This might lead to discrepancies between managerial ideals and organizational realities. The present paper reports some initial findings from an ongoing research project that highlights the underlying causes of such difficulties. Data for our study is collected before, during and after a service culture program, mainly through qualitative methods (interviews, observations during staff meetings, document studies), but also through company surveys of employee attitudes and opinions. Drawing on theories of service management, organizational culture and management control, but also on critical studies of workplace resistance, the paper seeks to analyze the dynamics of cultural programmes. In particular, we focus on how the changes are rhetorically framed and interpreted by front-line staff. In the processes of framing and sense making, we note that administrative and technical aspects of the company's operations are frequently referred to as objective conditions determining what is possible, desirable and necessary to do and not to do when it comes to customer service. The cultural control inherent in the service culture concept is thus negotiated and modified with respect to local contingencies. These contingencies can be used as a critical resource in the argumentation and negotiation for what is proper organizational development. The cultural change becomes a matter of having access to such critical resources, to the agenda setting procedure and rhetorically convincing ways of defining what good service really is.
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