IBSS Seminar Explores Customer-Centric View of Rule Enforcement in Service Encounters

On 30 July 2026, Dr Kemefasu Ifie presented a research seminar titled Beyond the dichotomy: Exploring how customers interpret and respond to service rule enforcement. His study adopts a customer-centric approach to explore service rule enforcement and its outcomes for customer recipients. Drawing on legitimacy theory and attribution theory and using a critical incident technique (CIT) study and two experimental studies, the study uncovers the nuanced ways in which customers interpret frontline employees’ (FLEs) enforcement actions and how these interpretations, together with motive attributions, trigger and shape their responses. Rather than assuming customers automatically accept enforcement as legitimate, Dr Kemefasu Ifie proposes a customer-centric model in which patrons interpret enforcement of service rules. The study contributes by offering a novel view of rule enforcement and its role in the service system. Managerial implications include educating customers about real rules and training employees to justify actions in more positive ways.

The seminar brought together researchers and early-career scholars to discuss mixed-method methodology and paper development tips. The talk closed with a Q&A session where Dr Ifie took questions from IOM colleagues and PhD students, touching on the future of AI roles in enforcement, multi-stakeholder perspectives, and the challenge of related research methods in daily service settings.

This seminar offered a conceptually rich, empirically grounded rethinking of a mundane service moment, when a rule is enforced, and why the same act can be read differently depending on who is watching and why they think it happened.