The service sector of work is the largest single sector in the modern western economies such as the Danish. Yet its effects on the workforce in the sector has only been sparse-ly looked at by researchers. This masters thesis of psychology seeks to further the un-derstanding of the dynamics of customer misbehavior in the specific service setting of bars and restaurants. The research question of this thesis is:

What challenges and potential consequences are service workers faced by relating to customer behavior in the bar and restaurant business, and how are these challenges sought to be prevented and handled?

Firstly, the thematics of the thesis is presented in the introductory chapter, that also includes a motivation for the relevance of the study along with a presentation of the rest of the thesis.

Secondly, a field of relevant research is presented, with roots in three broad categories of organizational perspectives with their respective areas of focus as a structural under-pinning of the chapter. The perspectives represented are respectively the unitarian, radi-cal and pluralistic perspectives of work and organizational theory.

Thirdly, the methodology of the thesis is presented. This chapter includes presentations of qualitative methods of data acquisition through interviews, ethics, method of analy-sis along with descriptions how the participants were recruited.

In the fourth chapter, the analysis is presented with relevant citations from the qualita-tive data. The findings include different perspectives on types of problematic customer behavior including types of customers doing this behavior, reasons for bad customer behavior, the consequences of the bad customer behavior and lastly ways of prevent-ing, handling and processing bad customer behavior.
The fifth chapter is a discussion of the findings including a discussion of the method-ology and quality of the research. It is discussed how the findings of this master’s the-sis compares to the already established literature on the subject, including highlights of both findings that are in line with the existing and findings that are in opposition or contribute significantly to the literature with new insights. This chapter also includes a discussion of the implications of this thesis’ findings, as well as a discussion of possi-ble future research in this area.

The sixth and final chapter of the thesis is the conclusion. This chapter is a direct an-swer to the research question and thus includes this thesis’ findings relevant to this.