Empathic Service Systems: 'Designing' Emotion in a Cancer Care Service System

This paper focuses on the 'design' of emotional wellbeing in a cancer care service system. There is little or no scholarly understanding of the concept of emotion in service systems discourse. Yet, emotion is often referred to in service systems research; scholars have pointed out the need to create long-term emotional bonds with customers, for example. However, little or no attempt has been made to define or understand in detail the complex concept of emotion. To address this deficiency, we draw on psychology and social theory to construct a theoretical framework of emotion and put it to work in an empirical case study of a Maggie's Centre in London.