The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of interactive service work and clarify the methods of controlling interactive service workers. Because of the distinctiveness of interactive service work in that the object of labor is customers, the labor process consists of triangle relations of managers, workers and customers, and not of binary relations of managers and workers in the manufacturing work. In the triangle relations, each party concerned seeks their own gains. Conflicts of interests, which are not observed in the manufacturing sector, then emerge. Because customers are supposed to have customer sovereignty in the interactive service work, managers and workers face dilemmas in dealing with the customers to provide services effectively and at the same time maintain the myth of customer sovereignty. To control interactive service workers, managers then face such difficulties as variability of customers, openness of the labor process, impossibility of monitoring the labor process, insufficiency in measuring of workers' performances, and making workers exercise their own initiative and discretion. These difficulties are based on the necessity to realize both providing services effectively and maintaining the myth of customer sovereignty. Methods to overcome these difficulties of labor control are monitoring via new technologies, labor control via customers, developing customer-orientated attitudes of workers, empowerment of workers, and ideological control in workers' self-management. Methods to control interactive labor process mentioned above can be characterized as a conjunction of, what Andrew Freedman noted, direct control strategy and responsible autonomy strategy. Managers then face a contradiction to implement two opposite strategies, one to allow workers discretion and autonomy and the other not to allow them. A possibility for workers to resist managers' labor control strategies emerges from this contradiction. Namely, by making use of the rhetoric of customer sovereignty which is stressed by the management in responsible autonomy strategy, workers can force the management to mitigate direct control strategy as appropriate customer services would not be provided under direct control.
