Structure of lecture

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Structure of lecture

• Polarisation (example Phil Crangs study of
  restaurant work)
• Performance, gender the body (example Linda
  McDowells study of merchant banking)
• Emotional labour (example Arlie Hochschilds
  study of airline work)

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Service work performance, polarisation and
embodiment

• Capitalism is moving into a phase in which the
  cultural forms and meanings of its outputs are
  becoming critical.
• The majority of people are now employed in
  service jobs rather than production.
• These jobs tend to be characterised by
  polarisation growth in jobs at upper and lower
  end of the spectrum (banking finance versus
  shop work, cleaning, catering)

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Service work

• Britain, along with the USA and many of the
  advanced industrial economies are shifting
  towards a service based economy.
• Work is increasingly a performance undertaken by
  embodied, gendered and sexed individuals.

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Performative encounters

• What is central to new relationships is encounter
  and communication from the irritation of a
  customer at an airline ticket office to the
  harassed response of teacher to student. The fact
  that individuals now talk to other individuals
  rather than interact with machines, is the
  fundamental fact about work in the
  post-industrial society (Bell, 1973
  post-industrial work).

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Polarisation

• The demise of the industrial landscape based on
  manufacturing and a mass workforce has led to
  more diversified, fragmented employment
  structures and greater inequality.

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The two sides to service work

• The up-side high status, high pay, career jobs
  banking, finance
• The down side low status, low pay, precarious
  work. Vulnerable work, poorly paid, insecure
  contracts, temporary labour (eg call centres,
  shop work, restaurant work, cleaning, childcare,
  catering)

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Routine service work

• The majority of job growth in the future will be
  in routine interactive service work and low level
  service jobs.
• It is argued that it is not thinking or technical
  skills that are of increasing importance but
  person skills. Knowledge in these occupations
  is not technical, learned skill but resides in te
  person it is embrained.

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Phil Crang Its showtime

• Ethnographic account and diary entry of a phd
  student working in a fast food restaurant
  smokys.
• A heavily engineered environment where emotions
  and appearance are regulated and controlled too.
• The script...

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Surveillance

• Managements panoptican gaze from key vantage
  points
• Mystery diners

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Performing work

• Service as spontaneous, sincere, personally meant
  for you
• Work as role play its showtime, cast
  performances, uniform, scripted
• Judging customers in order to decide what role
  you will act (garys and sharons, stags and hens).

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Looks matter

• Acting the part means looking the part too
• Service work is embodied, gendered, sexualised
• Strike the pose hiding (from customers or
  managers), masquerading (appearing to be doing
  what youre not), posing, parody (disco dolly)

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Personalised performance

• Such workplace tactics and acting performances
  are integral to service work. Waiting work sits
  as a mutual entanglement of self and capitalist
  production

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Embodied skills gender

• It is embrained, encultured and encoded
  knowledge that is of growing significance
  (Blackler 1998).
• In interactive service work, the way we look,
  sound and act is part of the product.

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Linda McDowell Capital Culture

• The old city of London gentlemanly capitalism
• The new city sexy greedy
• Merchant banking physical appearance, persona,
  weight, bodily hygiene, dress and style are all
  important workplace attributes

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Divided workforce

• Gender a mans world
• Class
• Physical appearance
• Dress and style
• Chauvenism city Linda Davies

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Linda Davies
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Interactive service work

• In many kinds of interactive service work workers
  identities are not incidental to the work but are
  integral to it. Interactive jobs make use of
  workers looks, personalities and emotions aswell
  as their physical and intellectual capacities,
  sometimes forcing them to manipulate their
  identities more self consciously (Leidner, 1991
  p 115)

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Emotional labour

• For a long time it was believed that we could
  (should) leave our emotions at the threshold of
  the workplace.
• Increasingly we are being asked to manage our
  emotions at work, to manufacture emotions as part
  of the service or product. For example it is
  often required that we smile at work, even though
  it may not be genuine and we may not feel like it

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Emotional labour

• Arlie Hochschild wrote about the concept of
  emotional labour. Drawing on her work on the
  airline industry she explores how service workers
  need to manage their emotions in order to project
  a particular image to customers.

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Emotional labour

• the effort, planning and control needed to
  express organisationally-desired emotion during
  inter-personal transactions (Morris and Feldman
  1996)

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Emotional labour

• emotional labour requires one to induce or
  suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward
  countenance that produces the proper state of
  mind in others (Arlie Hochschild)

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Emotional labour

• Where an employee has to manipulate feelings in
  order to create a publicly observable facial or
  bodily display.
• Hochschild argues that this work is often
  unacknowledged, has gendered connotations and
  carries human costs for workers.

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Worker identity

• In many kinds of interactive service work
  workers identities are not incidental to the work
  but are integral to it. Interactive jobs make use
  of workers looks, personalities and emotions as
  well as their physical and intellectual
  capacities, sometimes forcing them to manipulate
  their identities more self-consciously

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Gendered emotions

• Emotional labour is gendered. There is a sexual
  division of emotional labour (Heller 1980).
• Men are associated with tasks that demand
  aggressiveness.
• Women are more often given jobs tat demand
  sensitivity, tenderness, nurturing and intuition

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Regulated empathy

• Emotion management is acquiring an overwhelming
  importance as service becomes a competitive
  differentiator.
• Emotional labour requires the worker to suppress
  or induce feeling

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Airline attendants (Hochschild)

• What happens when worked-up warmth becomes an
  instrument of service work?
• Even before an applicant for a flight attendants
  job is interviewed she will know the rules of the
  game.

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control

• Emotion work legitimises employers intervention
  in the very thought processes and emotional
  reactions of workers, alienating workers from
  their feelings, their faces and their
  moodsemployers manage to control the appearance,
  mood, demeanours and attitudes of their
  employees (Leidner)

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Interview pamphlet

• Appearance facial expressions should be sincere
  and unaffected. One should have a modest but
  friendly smile and be generally alert,
  attentive, not overly aggressive but not reticent
  either
• Mannerisms friendliness is important. A
  successful candidate must be outgoing but not
  effusive, enthusiastic with calm and poise.

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Contd.

• Vivacious but not effervescent. Maintaining eye
  contact with the interviewer demonstrates
  sincerity and confidence, but dont overdo it.
  Avoid cold or continuous staring.

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Appearance management

• In most companies, after the applicant passes the
  initial screening test (for weight, straight
  teeth, facial regularity, age) they are invited
  to an animation test. The interviewees are
  screened for a certain middle class sociability.
• An ability to act is explicitly or implicitly
  assumed. They are expected to feel at home on a
  stage

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Contd.

• Interviewees were made to feel dispensable
  there are 5,000 girls out there wanting your
  job. If you dont measure up youre out
• Rulebook

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The intangibles

• really work on your smiles. Your smile is your
  biggest asset.
• How to deal with drunk, lecherous, sick, rude
  passengers relax and smile.
• Trainees are asked to think of the cabin (where
  she works) as her home (where she doesnt work).

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Control

• Emotions are to be hidden, disguised, suppressed.
  Emotional pollution is to be controlled smile
  when you feel like crying, make it look real,
  look interested when you feel bored. Master deep
  acting surface acting just wont do. Emotion
  work is no longer a private act, but a public
  display.

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Relax and smile
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Conclusions

• The everyday world of work in interactive service
  industries involves the construction of a
  gendered performance in which attributes of
  masculinity and femininity are an integral part
  of selling the service merchant banking, airline
  attendants, selling fast food, selling sex or
  ones body thus have a great deal in common with
  one another.
• Selling these products also involves selling
  oneself. The person becomes part of the product

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