Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ without rethinking its theoretical basis in Marxist analysis of manufacturing production. This tendency, which also leads to dichotomous formulations of control and resistance, authentic and inauthentic selfhood, work and not-work selves, and production and consumption, has been limiting in several ways. First, the exploration of selfhood in interaction has been circumscribed by a focus on managerial dictates rather than on workplace relations and by the assumption that the authentic selfhood of workers arises outside work. Second, and related, consumers of services have primarily been seen as a source of constraint on workers rather than as a source of enjoyment or alliance or as a subject of study in their own right as participants in production. Finally, the literature has generally not theorized the classed nature of interactions or the links between structural inequality and interactive work. My study attempts to break down some of these limitations, looking at both the multiple ways workers and guests negotiate asymmetrical relations and the consequences of these negotiations for the reproduction of unequal entitlements to material resources and attention.

      LOOKING AT LUXURY

      Luxury service, in particular the luxury hotel, is a good place to explore in more depth the connections among work, class, and self. First, the worker's self is deeply implicated in the highly personalized and attentive service she provides. And it is a self-subordinating service, as guests’ every wish must be workers’ command. Research has established that workers value dignity on the job above most other considerations,⁵¹ but their dignity, in this case, seems constantly compromised by their subservience to guests. If any interactive workplace is likely to produce alienated and resentful workers, the luxury hotel is the one. On the other hand, the importance of service is a source of worker autonomy vis-à-vis managers, because the success of the guest's intangible experience rests largely on workers’ shoulders. The discretion that interactive workers must exercise makes them hard to control, monitor, and standardize.⁵² Thus, workers might have more power and autonomous selfhood in these sites.

      The upscale hotel is also a good place to look at customers and class. Like other luxury establishments, this site is structured by the unequal distribution of resources. Workers and guests nearly always occupy different class positions, by any definition.⁵³ Furthermore, asymmetries in power, authority, and entitlement also inhere in the relationships between workers and guests. Workers demonstrate deference and subordination; guests enact entitlement to human attention and labor.⁵⁴ As a result, both are constantly performing class differences, or “doing class.”⁵⁵ Each actor must occupy her position appropriately in these classed interactions, thus also “doing self” in a classed context. Furthermore, in the luxury setting, both the structural inequality in which the interaction is embedded and the interactive inequality of which the luxury product consists are totally visible to both workers and hotel guests.

      Thus, the following questions remain: How do workers reconcile their desire for dignity and power with the self-subordinating imperatives of their work? How do managers organize the production of this intangible, self-subordinating relation? How are workers’ and guests’ selves constituted or compromised? How do workers and guests make sense of their class differences and negotiate their unequal entitlements? Finally, what can the process of production-consumption of this interactive product, marked by inequality, tell us about classed identities and the legitimacy of class inequality more broadly? These are the questions that guided my research.

       Sites and Methods

      Via contacts obtained through the preliminary interviews, I gained access to directors of human resources in two luxury, nonunion hotels, the Royal Court and the Luxury Garden, located in a major American city.⁵⁶ I explained to these managers that I was interested in how their hotels defined and met a luxury service standard. Because managers themselves are very interested in this question, I persuaded them relatively easily to allow me to conduct ethnographic research in these sites.

      This research took place in 2000-2001, when the labor market was extremely tight. High union density and activism marked the local hotel industry, meaning that even these nonunion hotels could not afford to antagonize workers for fear of union influence. This atmosphere made these sites especially favorable for looking at worker power vis-à-vis managers.

      I first spent eight months (January-August 2000) working thirty-two hours per week at the Royal Court and then two months working on an on-call basis. The Royal Court is a 110-room, European-style downtown hotel with an award-winning restaurant and nightly room rates ranging from three hundred to five hundred dollars for a regular room to two thousand dollars for a suite. The Royal Court was independently managed, and its clientele was more or less evenly divided between business and leisure travelers.

      I organized my research at the Royal Court to allow me to compare different kinds of work. I was formally hired, at a pay rate about half that of regular staff, and was treated like any other employee, except that I was allowed to do several different jobs. I started with interactive work: answering the telephone, reserving rooms, checking guests in and out at the front desk, doing concierge tasks such as making dinner and limousine reservations, parking guests’ cars, carrying their bags back and forth, and running errands for them. In all I spent about twenty-five shifts, over six months, in each of the following jobs: concierge/front desk agent, bellman/valet parker, telephone operator, and reservationist.⁵⁷

      I then spent five weeks working the 3:00-11:00 P.M. shift in room service, both taking guests’ phone orders and delivering their fried calamari and seasonal sorbets. During this period I also worked as a food runner in the restaurant on a few occasions. Finally, I spent a month shadowing housekeeping workers, mainly room cleaners (during the day) and turndown attendants (in the evenings).⁵⁸ Though my focus was on interactive workers, this comparison of interactive and noninteractive work allowed me to explore the specific characteristics of jobs that involved relations with guests, to look at racial and ethnic variation among workers, and to explore what interactive and noninteractive workers thought about each other.

      When my stint at the Royal Court was over, I worked in a second luxury hotel, the Luxury Garden, for four months (November 2000-March 2001), in order to look at the effects of organizational features on the production and consumption of luxury service.⁵⁹ The Luxury Garden was larger than the Royal Court, with 160 rooms, and it was corporately managed. The hotel commanded the highest rates in the city—$500 to $750 a night for a room, as much as $3,000 for a suite—and catered mostly to business travelers.

      For two months, I worked four shifts weekly as a concierge at the Luxury Garden, which primarily involved procuring restaurant reservations, car and driver services, flowers, massages, rental cars, and tickets to theater or sporting events, plus meeting other, more unpredictable guest requests. For another two months, I continued to spend two shifts each week at the concierge desk, but I also shadowed room cleaners, turndown attendants, bellmen, doormen, business center workers, telephone operators, and reservationists for two shifts each week, spending between one and five shifts in each area. Here I was an unpaid intern, though I was permitted to keep tips and cash commissions.

      I socialized with workers from both sites, but especially those at the Royal Court, with whom I often went out for drinks after the evening shift. Both on and off the job in both hotels, I talked extensively with workers about their jobs, the work environment, and their personal lives. Though these were not formal interviews, they allowed me to get a sense of what workers thought about a broad range of issues, and I quote them frequently in the text.⁶⁰

      I participated in employee orientation and training sessions in both sites. I also analyzed comment cards and guest letters from both hotels, representing a four-month period in each case (approximately two hundred cards total). In addition, Luxury Garden management granted me access to detailed reports, comprising hundreds of pages, written by mystery shoppers whom they had hired to evaluate the hotel's service. During and after my ethnographic stints in these hotels, I conducted formal interviews with twelve upper-level managers, each lasting СКАЧАТЬ