The second type of complaining is about complaining that occurs in social relationships, which are not customer service or product orientated. Scholarship that examines complaining within relationships is sometimes defined as a voiced display of suffering or negative experience where responsibility is sought or attributed to someone.

Complaining in Social Relationships

Definitions of complaining vary substantially across the literature. The most common type of complaint described is expressions of dissatisfaction by customers aimed at organisations – such as complaining to express dissatisfaction with a product or service using words and formal processes.

University of North Texas

For the purpose of the study, the difference between complaining and complaint can be articulated as: all complaints are complaining, but not all complaining are complaints.


Complaining vs. Complaints

Tomaszewski, P., Fisher, K. R., Robinson, S., & Ikäheimo, H. (2026). Rethinking how people with cognitive disability complain. Disability & Society, 41(2), 521–541. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2025.2536586 



Rethinking how people with cognitive disability complain

This negative association of complaining extends to the time of Aristotle and Kant who described the act of complaining as both effeminate and something that should never be done (as cited in Norlock Citation2018).


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