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RESEARCH PRODUCT

L'acceptation des dispositifs technologiquesd'auto-production par le consommateur : une approche par l'empowerment psychologique

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, the deployment of self-service technologies (self-checking, interactive terminals, smart devices…), allowing to substitute existing service employees and give more autonomy to consumers, have accelerated. In the french academic literature, Cova et al. (2013) conceptualized these devices as « directed self-production » technologies, underlining a more or less imposed transfer of tasks operated by firms. Among consumers, these technological devices have been subjected to ambivalent representations from consumers : some positive representations mainly related to greater autonomy for individuals exist alongside concerns about human contact degradation, macrostructures precedence and the loss of control over private data, specifically when these technologies rely on the collection of consumtion data. These ambivalent representations invite to investigate their impact on consumer adoption. This doctoral work, positioned as an extension of literature on self-service technologies, leverages for the first time the concept of psychological empowerment borrowed from organizational literature to deal with the issue of the use of these technological devices. Two fields are investigated to cover the scope of directed self-production: self-service technologies in retail (self-scanning and self-checking) delegating tasks similar to what could be undertaken by a service employee, smart feedback-based self-service technologies (e.g. smart meters) allowing to enrich the service offer with the provision of feedback to clients on their consumption. Mixed methods allow in a first exploratory phase to collect qualitative and quantitative data around semi-structured interviews, social representations analysis and online questionnaires, with the objective to enrich the conceptualization of psychological empowerment. Then, after a second phase aiming to better characterize smart tracking-based self-service technologies, a third explanatory phase introduces a “generating chain » of psychological empowerment « chaîne de formation » and captures its effets on the acceptance of these technologies. The results reveal an enriched conceptualization of psychological empowerment that incorporates self-construals and underline the role of social representations in the construction of consumer psychological empowerment. We show the relevance of considering social aspects of psychological empowerment for examining paradoxical consumers’ representations of self-service technologies. Finally, after introducing a new category of self-service technologies relying on smart tracking, we show that the intent to use these devices is largely explained by the generative chain of psychological empowerment.In mobilizing the concept of psychological empowerment, this thesis contributes to enrich its conceptualization in the marketing literature and brings a new and complementary enlightment to existing research on self-service technologies adoption, and more broadly smart objects. This doctoral thesis is also adressed to marketing managers aiming to implement directed self-production technological devices, and suggests them to consider psychological empowerment when designing self-service technologies, and when implementing communication campaigns. We also hope to move beyond current research methods by mobilizing and combining original methodologies, such as lexicometry, social representations analysis and interpretive literature review.