The service triad

Models of service encounters are often fraught with reductionism, describing business
relationships as mathematical combinations of dyadic constellations. Metaphors of
ideal social relationships (marriages or friendships) are highlighted to stress
normative aspects of equal, balanced and long-term business partnerships. However,
these approaches are limited in their analytical sensitivity, as they cannot address the
complexity of multipart relationships, where meanings, roles and relationships are
continuously constructed and reconstructed. In order to understand the ambivalent
quality of business interactions, this article analyses the corporate travel market by
applying Simmel’s depiction of the triad as a specific social form. Triadic constellations
and more complex service networks involve dialectic tensions, simultaneously
exhibiting loyalty and disloyalty, trust and distrust, empowerment and disempowerment.
It is argued that a qualitative methodology is a more adequate approach to grasp such
dynamic and contextual social realities, because (opposed to a quantitative approach) it
is not confined to operate with mutually exclusive analytical categories.