Servicescapes: Cruises And The Production Of Experience

“Servicescapes: Cruises and the Production of Experience” details the history of an experiential product in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. It introduces and uses the analytical framework of the servicescape to trace the complex entanglement of infrastructural, environmental, technical, atmospheric, and social elements that together produce a cruise product. These elements include geography and climate; harbor and port development; passenger terminal architecture and construction; ship design and operations; and hospitality management, research, and training. I use this product to argue for greater scholarship on services as an economic category with the history of technology, environmental history, and the history of science. I offer this framework both as a model for capturing the material, discursive, and cultural dimensions of seemingly intangible consumer products, and as a means of understanding the production of serviced individuals in the later decades of the last century.