Thinking through work: how much does the body matter

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Thinking through work how (much) does the body
matter?

• 18 Jan. 2008
• Seminar One
• Linda McDowell
• School of Geography, University of Oxford

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Focus and pre-amble

• Questions not answers
• Is our focus explaining divisions of labour or
  labour process (or some other issue)?
• Is it who does what or who does what to whom?
• At what scale?
• Political economy to performativity/embodiment or
  both and how is there a political economy of the
  body? Is the body primarily constructed through
  practice?
• Theorising intersectionality class, gender,
  ethnicity and bodies
• Methods as well as theory

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Structure of talk

• Transnational migration, divisions of labour and
  interactive work in service sector
• Theorising complexity
• More than embedded/local/case study analyses
• Appropriate bodies
• Gendered, classed and racialised identities
• Forms of complexity
• Conclusions

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The empirical content GeNet project

• ESRC funded 2005- 2010
• 10 projects on changing gender divisions
• Cross disciplinary psych, sociol, econs, geog.
• Several HEIs involved Cambridge, Essex, LSE,
  Open, Oxford
• British in focus
• Most projects quantitative in methods

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The projects

• Theme 1 Pathways to Adult Attainment
• Changing Occupational Careers of Women and Men
• Biographical Agency and Developmental Outcomes
• Gendered Pathways to Adulthood
• Theme 2 Resources, Gender, Ethnic and Class
  Inequalities
• Gender, Time Allocation and the 'Wage Gap'
• Within-household Inequalities and Public Policy
• Gender, Ethnicity, Migration and Service
  Employment
• Class and Gender, Employment and Family
• Theme 3 Policy Responses to Gender Inequalities
• Addressing Gender Inequality through Corporate
  Governance
• Tackling Inequalities in Work and Care Policy
  Initiatives and Actors at the EU and UK levels

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West Central Hospital and Bellman International

• Migrants in Greater London 29 pop. and 33
  labour market
• Diversity and EU accession
• In both skilled and unskilled occupations, but
  rising numbers in less skilled jobs
• Precarious work forms of contracts
• Key sectors health and hospitality
• Case studies 120 interviews plus managers and
  agencies

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Focus

• How a diverse migrant labour force is
• Assembled
• Segmented
• Maintained
• Context multiple locations global divisions of
  labour, national regulatory framework, local
  labour market specificity, social constructions
  of identity in workplace

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Nothing new/new questions

• Divisions of labour/segmentation
• Globalisation and transnational migration
• How are material transformations and new
  theorisations connected?
• Theoretical promiscuity
• How do we decide what matters?
• Multiple frameworks

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Theorising complexity

• Bodies/identity as fluid, contingent, open,
  unfinished, relational and multiple identities
• And yet, race, class and gender matter
• Status of categories
• Performative or structural differences or both?
• Complexity (anti, intra and inter-categorical
  complexity McCall)

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Questions about embodiment/identity

• Are identities situated accomplishments?
• If so, how do we engage with questions of
  structural inequalities and power?
• Does recognition of complexity mean abandonment
  of categories?Are identities constructed solely
  through discourse and practice?
• Should we focus on previously neglected
  intersections (and what might they be??)

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The issue here

• How are particular (migrant) embodied workers
  constructed as appropriate for low status
  interactive service jobs in the global economy?

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Managed migration policies

• Differentiation of labour by country skills
  social characteristics
• Rights in receiving country
• Construction of identities there and here
• And so, a range of questions to answer.

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Questions include

• How are connections and practices across spatial
  scales transformed when the subject being made is
  a migrant?
• Are the gendered identities/embodiment of
  migrants subject to re-negotations on entering a
  different space?
• How do traces of the regulatory structure of
  being there affect being here?
• How do previous cultural assumptions about
  bodies, gender attributes and capacities, about
  appropriate tasks for particular gendered
  categories and embodied workers work out across
  space and time?

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Cultural citizenship

• a cultural process of subjectification in the
  Foucauldian sense of self-making and being-made
  by power relations that produce consent through
  schemes of surveillance, discipline, control and
  administrations (Ong 1996, p 337).
• Thus becoming a citizen (or a worker LMcD)
  depends on how one is constituted as a subject
  who exercises power or submits to power
  relations (ibid, p738)

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Subjectification

• Ong Formal and cultural citizenship rights
• Butler heterosexual matrix grid of cultural
  intelligibility through which bodies, gender and
  desires are naturalised (1990, p 151) but how
  intelligible to migrants?
• Racialised identities white normativity?
• And so
  

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Labour market effects

• Racial and ethnic markers are highly gendered and
  impact on appropriateness for different jobs
• Skills, talents, bodies
• Schemas of racial difference, civilisation and
  economic worth position migrants as inferior
• human capital, self-discipline and consumer
  power are associated with whiteness (Ong 1997 p
  739) but multiple whitenesses.
• Impact of A8 migration on hierarchies of
  desirability

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Ideal recruits

• We look for someone whose got a very strong
  aptitude to interact with customers because
  that's key, that's what hospitality is about,
  whether that be on the front desk, whether that
  be in the restaurant, whether that be conference
  banqueting, even housekeeping, it's really
  important. We look for experience, we like them
  to have had large corporate hotel experience
  because then they tend to know a little more
  about what it's going to be like and what the
  demands of the job are going to be. We look for
  somebody who has a style basically, the kind of
  person that when you first meet, youll warm to
  because that's the image that Bellman has. It's
  all about hospitality, and we also look for
  someone whos very well presented, has made an
  effort, Ive got to say most of them come in a
  suit for an interview, from overseas which is
  quite different from here. And we look for
  someone who wants to progress as well, whos not
  just going to come and the sole reason for coming
  is not just to earn money, I mean obviously
  thats a big part of it but we like somebody who
  wants to really progress. (Anna BI HR)

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Embodiment in hospitality

• Divisions of labour in BI ethnicity catering
  and room attendants (significance of recruitment
  strategies agencies)
• Gender divisions of labour traditional
  assumptions about deference, authority etc
• Bodies sexualisation front desk skin colour

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Indians preferred to East Europeans

• We went to Hungary first and then to Latvia but
  so far it hasnt been very successful not like
  the Indian recruitment.
• Part of the reason was related to presentation of
  self the actual aptitude I was talking about,
  the smiley, bubbly hospitality attitude, is not
  as prevalent in the people we interviewed,
  they're a lot more serious . . . , so there
  wasnt a natural what I call personality or that
  demonstration of Im here for the customer, so
  that was a little bit of a concern. (Anna, BI HR)

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On the front desk

• Women get away with more on reception than men in
  terms of when you, for instance, cant give
  someone a certain type of room. You smile, fun,
  you make fun, you have a joke and its fine. But
  if its a man dealing with a man it gets a bit
  like . . . and then the supervisor needs to come
  out. (Bettina, front desk, from the Netherlands)

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Matrix of domination on the front desk

• Term is Patricia Hill Collins (2000) to capture
  intersectionality so here gender and skin colour
• Sophia, the assistant manager of the front
  office, commented sometimes guest get a little
  bit strange when its perhaps, how can I say,
  international colleagues, so if you are not
  European, sometimes they can be a bit strange,
  especially Asians or if you are Black or
  something.

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National stereotypes in housekeeping

• We used to have Vietnamese people before and the
  Vietnamese people are very soft and compliant,
  and perhaps they werent as challenging, so at
  the moment were quite challenged because I think
  the Polish people are quite headstrong. (Judith,
  head of housekeeping, S African)

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Dirty work takes longer

• Each cleaner is allocate 30 minutes per room
• Very dirty room, one hour is cleaning this room
  because everything is oh my God! Family, its
  one room and family, the children many children
  and all the rooms its oh my God! (Teresa,
  Polish agency cleaner)

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Dirty work and personal hygiene

• Sometimes youll be like everybodys nose is
  twitching and then youd go and find the poor
  individual whos making the nose twitch, and I
  always go along the line look, I dont want the
  guests to find you and I dont want the
  inaudible to talk about you, and sometimes it
  makes people cry, and imagine if you come here
  and youve got absolutely nothing and this is
  your first job and you dont get your pay cheque
  for a week, your priority is not deodorant is it,
  I dont know, it's not nice.. . . . I just tell
  the person straight you have got a body odour
  problem to clean rooms, go and have a shower,
  change your uniform. (Judith, head of
  housekeeping, S African)

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Embodiment in WCH

• National origins government agreements for high
  skilled agencies for low (different migrant
  division of in WCH conditions and length of
  employment
• Class origins and nature of work nurses body
  work
• Gendered assumptions about emotions, caring and
  empathy embodied and emotional care work (often
  undertaken by cleaners)

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Conceptual and methodological questions

• Are case studies, even individual stories and
  narratives, the only way to understand complex
  intersections of discursively constructed
  identities/embodiment of new workers/new
  citizens?
• Do theoretical perspectives that see identities
  as produced through historically and spatially
  specific practices logically imply the rejection
  of distinct categories?

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Complex inequalities

• Significance of categories?
• Anti- and intra-categorical approaches argue
  against imposition of a stable and homogenising
  order on a more unstable and heterogeneous social
  reality (McCall 2005 p 177).
• Is an intra-categorical approach the way to go?
• Methodological questions which differences
  matter? How decide? Are comparisons useful? Are
  case studies sufficient?
• Does it make a difference where you start
  theoretically?

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Concluding questions

• Same old differences in new form?
• What does notion of embodiment add that isnt
  captured by gendered identities?
• Is the key difference in the nature of
  interactive work?
• Is theoretical promiscuity the best way forward?
• And what about political resistance/ basis of
  struggles for (migrant) low status service
  workers in interactive jobs?