A Systemic Perspective on Captive Services

Service captivity—a customer’s perception of lack of choice, voice, and power during service provision–has been addressed in service literature both as an experience and from a dyadic perspective. However, every service interaction today is embedded within a service ecosystem. Hence, the goal of this paper is to develop a systemic conceptualization of captive services (i.e., those services that typically generate the experiences of service captivity). Through a theory adaptation approach, we develop six propositions that start delineating the conceptual domain of captive services.