Culture and religion in service provision

Customers from different cultures and with different religious beliefs have different views of service excellence and what constitutes inappropriate service. Service Operations workers from different cultures/religions have different backgrounds and social mores that cause them to react to instructions differently, engage with quality management differently, and react differently to reward structures. Rather than advancing a theory, the focus here is on a number of examples that show service provision and consumption differ according to the cultures/religions of customers and employees. The small amount of literature on the subject is also reviewed. None of the examples herein will be surprising to the specific "in-group." However, they are frequently surprising to Western managers - the audience for this work - who attempt to transfer operating procedures across cultures and religious systems. In that sense, it is argued that a new type of "generalization" is needed: generalization of cultural and religious context, rather than subject.