Service encounters and the manufacture of harm: violence in the service economy under late-modernity

This article examines the proliferation of violence within Britain’s service economy, focusing on delivery drivers. The discussion and analysis will examine three recent acts of violence against delivery drivers and framed as part of a wider continuum of violence against service economy workers. Although the presented cases occurred as direct acts of violence, it is the responses of the delivery drivers who faced these attacks that is centre ground to our inquiry. We argue the responses of the delivery drivers, to safeguard their courier goods is symptomatic of a risk society, discussed by Ulrich Beck fuelled by Anthony Gidden’s idea of perpetual ontological insecurity. The conceptual marriage here between Beck and Giddens enables us to present the conditions of the service economy. As labour market security becomes uncertain, workers experience hyper-competition and precarity that ostensibly produces an insecurity, thus provoking these workers to engage in risk-taking behaviours to maintain economic and social security. This article concludes that violence in the service economy may be enabled by structural processes and has become culturally legitimated, rather than exceptional.