Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ of surveillance and especially customer feedback to monitor workers, as I have mentioned in the previous chapter.⁶ At the Luxury Garden, not just regulation but also transformation of self was a major theme.⁷

      Looming over managers in both hotels was the example of the Ritz-Carlton, the most prominent company in the industry to use the empowerment and corporate culture strategies common among enterprises trying to produce high-quality service interactions.⁸ Awarded the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1992 for its Total Quality Management (TQM) program, the Ritz-Carlton was the first hotel company and one of only a few service-industry businesses to receive this major honor, and its program has become very well-known.⁹

      The Ritz-Carlton program includes efforts to ensure quality, create standards, and promote employee identification with the company. Each employee is given a card to carry at all times with the company's “Gold Standards”: the “credo,” the “motto,” the “three steps of service,” the “employee promise,” and the twenty “service basics.”¹⁰ These are primarily statements of company philosophy and standards of conduct, not routines.¹¹ Uncommon in the industry, Ritz-Carlton hotels employ a “quality manager,” who produces daily “quality improvement reports,” which list the “defects” of the previous day, both “external” (guest-related) and “internal” (employee-related). Employees identify these problems and their solutions by filling out “quality action forms.” The program also features extensive on the job training, as well as philosophies of careful employee “selection,” team development, and “empowerment” (including allowing workers to spend up to two thousand dollars without managerial authorization to solve any guest problem). The hotel purports to value its employees as highly as its clients (describing workers as “internal customers”). As we will see, this program provided both an inspiration and a foil for management at the Royal Court and the Luxury Garden.

      The two hotels’ use of management rhetorics and strategies, especially corporate culture, training, and self-transformation, differed in important ways. But explicit strategies are not the only ingredients of a managerial regime. In examining these regimes it is important to look at how they play out in daily life in the worksite, rather than focus primarily on the elements of corporate culture as managers define them. Corporate characteristics and managerial decisions about hiring workers and organizing work, as well as local cultures of authority—what managers do and how they actually treat workers, as opposed to what they might say in interviews—are also important facets of the environment. I thus focus on three elements: the hotels’ organization of work, especially the division of labor and worker demographics; managers’ attempts to regulate workers’ selfhood and behavior and to gain their loyalty; and the way authority relations played out in daily life.

      At the Luxury Garden, a specialized division of labor, highly developed corporate culture, a clear managerial hierarchy, and consistent monitoring of worker performance led to a regime of worker accountability and professionalized service, which I call “hierarchical professionalism.” The Royal Court, in contrast, was characterized by “flexible informality.” Primarily as a result of the hotel's size and lack of corporate ties, this regime was marked by a flexible division of labor, including blurred boundaries between managers and workers; limited corporate culture and training with a corresponding emphasis on worker “authenticity”; and inconsistent managerial authority and surveillance. Instead of top-down, hierarchical organization, the Royal Court was characterized by a flexible, laterally organized process, largely regulated by workers themselves, and friendly authenticity was the hallmark of the hotel's service.¹² These differences are important for consent and the normalization of unequal entitlements, because they shape the ways workers can think about themselves; they are resources for nonsubordinate constructions of self. In later chapters I show how variation in these resources affected workers’ strategies.

      Table 3 summarizes the two regimes along the dimensions I will discuss in the rest of the chapter.

      TABLE 3 Comparison of Managerial Regimes

	Hierarchical Professionalism	Flexible Informality
Organization of work	Specialized division of labor	Flexible division of labor
	Internal labor markets	External labor markets (limited)
	Higher wages	Lower wages
Organizational identity	Professional	Authentic
	Corporate culture, standards	Limited corporate culture
	Limited worker sociability	High worker community
Authority relations	Hierarchical (managers)	Lateral (coworkers)
	• Managers regulate workers	• Workers regulate one another
	• Workers accept managerial authority	• Workers challenge managers

      HIERARCHICAL PROFESSIONALISM

      AT THE LUXURY GARDEN

       Who Does What: Diverse Workers, Internal Labor Markets,and Specialization

      The first element of the regime of hierarchical professionalism consists of the organization of work and the choice of workers. Although this dimension is not an explicit aspect of managerial rhetoric or culture, it constitutes the foundation of the regime as a whole. Interactive workers at the Luxury Garden were slightly more diverse ethnically than is usual in the industry. Workers at the front desk and concierges during my research there were Asian, Asian American, and Latino, as well as white, though I was told that usually more white people worked at the front desk. The semivisible reservationists and telephone operators were also ethnically diverse. And middle managers in the front office were white, Latino, and Asian American. In other respects, worker demographics were as we would expect from my discussion in chapter 1.

      Front desk workers and concierges were all older than twenty-five, and several of them were over thirty-five (including all but one of the concierges). Most of these workers were married and many had children, which as we will see was a contrast to the Royal Court. Many of them, including all the concierges, at least one bellman, and several front desk workers, were college-educated. Most had previous experience in hotels.¹³

      The hotel created active internal labor markets (possibly especially so, given the tight external labor market). Three of the front desk workers had started in other departments (housekeeping, telephone operator, and sales); these workers were Chinese, Latina, and Asian American, suggesting that the practice of internal promotion contributed to greater diversity at the front desk. Becky, a white concierge, had been promoted from the front desk. In the four months I was there, at least six workers and managers were reassigned to higher posts within the hotel.

      The corporate nature of the enterprise also conferred advantages on workers in terms of career ladders. The existence of other properties worldwide provided potential mobility (and possible places for workers to stay on vacation at reduced rates—a perk of the job). Both Jaya, a front desk worker from the Philippines, and Fred, a bellman from China, had worked for the Luxury Garden hotels in their native countries before immigrating to the United States. The possibility of promotion not only created a clear incentive for workers but also established hierarchies among particular jobs and between managers and workers.¹⁴

      The internal labor market was supported by a specialized division of labor (see appendix B). This specialization was demonstrated, first, in the arrangement of particular units or departments in the hotel. The front office (mainly the front desk) was separate from guest services (the concierge staff, the business center, and the front door), which meant primarily that the guest services workers had their own assistant managers (though СКАЧАТЬ