Class Acts. Rachel Sherman
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Название: Class Acts
Автор: Rachel Sherman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежная деловая литература
isbn: 9780520939608
isbn:
In chapters 4 and 5, I turn more directly to workers’ views of and relationships with guests as they influence consent and normalization. The focus in chapter 4 is primarily on workers’ discourses and practices related to social hierarchies. Workers invoke multiple symbolic rankings vis-à-vis their coworkers, the guests they serve, and their communities outside the hotel. Workers situate themselves favorably in relation to these other interlocutors, using strategies of comparison and judgment that draw on whatever advantages they can glean from their own work situations. Again, this process differed somewhat in the two hotels, according to the organizational and interpretive resources workers had at their disposal.
In chapter 5 I analyze the imperative of worker subordination as it plays out in worker-guest interactions and relationships. Building on the finding that guests treat workers quite well, I show that workers adhere to and enforce an implicit contract, according to which their labors entitle them to emotional and financial reciprocity from guests. When this reciprocity is forthcoming, the relationship can be recast as egalitarian rather than subordinating. When guests fail to meet workers’ expectations, however, workers limit their own self-subordination in both symbolic and practical ways. Guests likewise articulate a sense of contract, describing their own rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis workers. In part, their reciprocal behavior stems from the generalized social norm of reciprocity, but it also arises from expectations constructed in the hotel. These relations are the cornerstone of normalizing guests’ entitlement to workers’ labor, because both workers and guests endeavor to see themselves as equal individuals.
In chapter 6, I look at guests’ perspectives on their own consumption and discuss how their class privilege is legitimated within the hotel. As I have suggested, guests use a variety of practical and interpretive strategies, similar to those of workers, to assuage conflicts about their consumption of and entitlement to luxury service. These strategies are supported by particular features of the hotel setting. At the same time, guests are interpellated into a sense of class entitlement through their participation in luxury service; the service itself constitutes them as legitimate consumers. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of service work and class.
ONE ‘Better Than Your Mother’
THE LUXURY PRODUCT
Then I pick up the telephone
and call Room Service.
Ooooooooo I absolutely love Room Service.
They always know it's me
and they say “Yes, Eloise?”
Kay Thompson, Eloise (1955)
One of my first interviewees was Martha, a white woman in her early fifties who frequently stayed in luxury hotels with her husband, the chair and CEO of a large recycling company. Asked to describe “incredible service,” she mentioned a particular hotel, calling it “great” for the following reasons:
Well, their linens, and the services, and they bring things, they're just so accommodating. They go out of their way to make you feel, y'know, like you matter. “If you weren't here, we would be very unhappy about it.”…They zero in on you, and they make you feel like you're not lost in this huge crowd. And I think that's really the nicest thing, because all of us, when we're traveling, we're not home. And to be taken care of and to have somebody who's gonna do things for you in a way that's, like, better than your mother!…It makes you feel good.
Martha starts by mentioning material items—the linens—but she quickly shifts to identifying the workers’ treatment of guests as the main element of luxury service. She describes personalized, genuine attention, the exertion of extra effort, and the legitimation of needs. She is talking about a sense of being cared for and made to feel special in a way beyond what she might expect even from her mother.
Though they usually use different language, managers’ comments echo Martha's intuitive emphasis on “positive human interactions” as the crucial feature of luxury.1 For instance, Isadore Sharp, chair and CEO of the Four Seasons chain, stated that luxury “isn't just building a different kind of building and adding more amenities; it comes through the service element.”2 Although managers I interviewed mentioned the physical aspects of the hotels—sophisticated, distinctive design; unusual, high-quality amenities; and comfortable rooms—managers saw distinctive service as the key to separating luxury from nonluxury hotels and to distinguishing luxury properties from one another.
This chapter explores the defining elements of luxury service as they emerged implicitly and explicitly in interviews with guests and managers, in industry literature, and in ethnographic observation. These aspects include personalization; anticipation, legitimation, and resolution of guests’ needs; unlimited available physical labor; and a deferential, sincere demeanor on the part of workers. Interactive luxury service entails more than broadly conceived “emotional labor,” which Hochschild defines as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” that is sold for a wage.3 It is, in fact, akin to intersubjective “recognition,” which Jessica Benjamin terms “that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, actions, and intentions of the self.” Luxury service entails recognizing a person's “acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence.”4
Guests prefer to interpret luxury service as care, akin to that provided by the idealized mother Martha invokes. But this service is also similar to the labor of another kind of reproductive worker: the domestic servant, who provides both physical labor and deference while lacking authority. I explore the twin issues of care and subordination in the context of structural inequality. I also describe the organization of luxury service, showing how its production is divided up among workers with radically different jobs and personal characteristics, and I analyze what this division of labor means for worker consent and the normalization of inequality. I begin with a short history of the luxury hotel.
THE RISE OF LUXURY HOTELS
The word hotel came into use in the United States in the late eighteenth century to designate taverns and inns that served upper-class clients, a new distinction in hospitality practices.5 The upscale Tremont Hotel, which opened in Boston in 1829, has long been considered the first “modern” hotel in the United States.6 The Tremont and other hotels that followed it during the nineteenth century demonstrated impressive technical achievements in architecture, services, and amenities. In the early years, these included gas lighting, private rooms, and indoor plumbing; later, hotels introduced electricity and elevators to marveling guests. Luxury hotels were defined by their large size, tasteful aesthetics, cleanliness, high-quality food, and prime location, as well as the privacy and security they afforded and service marked by “faultless personal attention.”7 The “highest achievement of the first class hotel” was that “each guest may easily fancy himself a prince surrounded by a flock of courtiers.”8 These “public” institutions were seen to represent modernity, technological innovation, and progress.9 Important СКАЧАТЬ