Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ However, the path to normalization was not always smooth. Workers’ right to power—even the limited power I am describing—was a site of constant negotiation and occasional open conflict. Workers struggled to maintain their power against coworkers who resisted their authority, incompetent or inconsistent managers, and guests who failed to respect their basic humanity. When workers’ methods of establishing their own entitlements were thwarted, they avenged themselves by withholding labor or by enacting small punishments, usually imperceptible to managers and guests.

      These actions constituted moments of resistance, but they were also mechanisms of consent. It was often precisely these instances of refusal or revenge that allowed workers to feel autonomous. And, in these transgressive episodes, workers were usually defending, rather than contesting, already-established rules about how they would be treated. These rules, and workers’ symbolic enforcement of them, recast social relations as ties between individual workers and guests, managers, or other workers, rather than promoting collective identifications. Finally, these acts of resistance rarely had broader repercussions for production, the organization of work, working conditions, and so on. Thus, I argue, workers’ actions can constitute both resistance to a specific imperative at a particular time and consent to a larger order in which guests are entitled to workers’ labor.

      Finally, I found that workers are not the only ones who constitute themselves in the production-consumption site. Guest selfhood is also enacted and created in a variety of ways in the hotel. Despite their enjoyment of luxury service and its pampering, most guests prefer to avoid thinking of themselves as excessively entitled or exploitative. To justify their consumption of workers’ caring labor, they draw on a range of interpretations of themselves, from deserving or disadvantaged to especially moderate relative to others. And they cast workers as powerful, skilled, knowledgeable, and prestigious, mirroring workers’ own constructions. Guests also go out of their way to constitute workers as equal, primarily through practices of emotional and financial reciprocity. On the other hand, luxury service itself continually reassures guests that they are entitled to consume the caring and self-subordinating labor of others. Workers thus school guests in both their rights and their obligations. In a sense, the hotel and its workers produce guest subjects who are comfortable with and equipped to occupy their advantaged class position.

      My central argument, then, is that both workers’ consent and the normalization of guest entitlement arise from workers’ ability to construct powerful selves. This capacity is contingent on immediate, organizational factors and individual and cultural ones, though I focus primarily on organizational characteristics, which are illuminated by the comparison of the two hotels. The ways workers manage to create dignity and power in the face of subordination, paradoxically, lead them to accept rather than to challenge the inequalities that define their workplace, making it less likely that they will develop structural critiques of class inequality. Guest fears of not belonging and of exploiting others are put to rest by some of the same processes, which in fact constitute them as entitled subjects and thus further normalize unequal power relations.

       From “Shop Floor” to “Service Theater”

      If we are to move once and for all to studying the service sector in its own right, it is necessary to use an image that changes our perception of the space under consideration.⁷⁰ I have chosen the metaphor of the “service theater” instead of the manufacturing image of the “shop floor,” for several reasons. First, resonances with the dramatic theater pervade the hotel. Both are spaces divided between front and backstage, which are themselves further subdivided.⁷¹ Both are open to those members of the public who can pay to get in, and both depend on the reviews of professionals and publics to succeed.

      A major similarity between the service theater and the dramatic theater is the importance of meaningful performance. Actors take on roles, which they may or may not be comfortable executing. Performance is guided by learning done outside the theater as well as by norms within it. In the service theater of the luxury hotel, we see both performances of subordination and performances of class. But performance need not connote “inauthenticity.” As Hannerz paraphrases Goffman's view: “Even if the individual is aware of making a presentation, he may be doing so in all sincerity.”⁷²

      The term service theater has other relevant connotations as well. The sense of “operating theater” calls to mind an arena of skill and of transformation. In the hotel, both social relations and personal identities are changed. The “theater of war” version connotes conflict. All three usages also describe, as I wish to, an arena of action set off from but linked to the outside world. Finally, like a theatrical spectacle or a surgical procedure, the hotel's service is produced and consumed at the same time. Therefore, throughout the text I also refer to the hotel as a site of production-consumption.

      OVERVIEW

      The focus in the first two chapters is on the luxury product, the organization of work, and the specifics of managerial regimes in both hotel sites. In chapter 1, I first offer a comprehensive description of luxury service in hotels, which comprises four elements: personalization; anticipation of, responsiveness to, and legitimation of guest needs; unlimited available physical labor; and deference and sincerity. Guests prefer to interpret luxury service as individualized, almost maternal care, but it rests on an imperative of self-subordination more analogous to domestic servitude than to mothering.

      Many labor processes underlie the production of luxury service; these are codified within an especially stark organizational (and usually racialized) division between noninteractive workers, such as housekeepers, and interactive workers, such as concierges. Characteristics of both work and workers allow managers to use constraining measures to organize noninteractive work; these workers experience limited interactive subordination as a result of their limited contact with guests. Interactive workers, however, have significantly more autonomy and thus cannot be routinized or tightly controlled; at the same time, interactive workers face the imperative of self-subordination head on. For these workers, I argue, inequality is normalized, constantly discussed but rarely critiqued. The rest of the book focuses on how this normalization occurs among interactive workers, but with an eye toward the important role of their non-interactive counterparts.

      One potential explanation for this normalization is that management transforms workers through corporate culture or sophisticated training sessions or both. In chapter 2, I look at this possibility, introducing the two hotels in more detail and comparing their managerial practices and rhetoric. The Luxury Garden's managerial regime was marked by “hierarchical professionalism.” Managers drew on a sophisticated corporate culture in the context of a specialized division of labor to organize professionalized service. At the independently owned Royal Court, a focus on authenticity, minimal job differentiation, and inconsistent managerial authority led to a regime of “flexible informality.” My ethnographic evidence reveals that, despite differences, overt managerial strategies of transforming identity were at best only partly successful in both hotels. Workers at the Luxury Garden responded to corporate culture as a mechanism of accountability as much as one of self-transformation; workers at the Royal Court, often more experienced than their managers, developed a fairly autonomous worker regime. In both sites, workers were largely self-regulated. The question of why this was so, however, remains.

      In chapters 3, 4, and 5, I look at workers on the job, analyzing their efforts to recast subordination as power and describing the role of guests in that endeavor. In chapter 3, I take up another possible explanation of consent and normalization: workers’ games.⁷³ Like manufacturing workers, hotel workers become absorbed in games, and this absorption fosters their СКАЧАТЬ