Eileen M. Otis
In 2007 the service sector became the largest employer worldwide (International Labour Organization 2007). Services are now an employment mainstay not only in advanced economies but also in many developing countries around the globe. Despite the regional and international proliferation of services, cultural diversity has thus far largely been neglected in the analysis of interactive service labor. The expansion of services across regions and cultural domains, as well as the export of services from Western nations, reveals a seemingly obvious yet frequently overlooked fact: service labor requires workers to be culturally competent. A central component of most service labor is interaction between a worker and a client or customer. This interaction requires that workers recognize and manipulate culturally dominant forms of civility and etiquette. In common parlance, we often restrict our use of “culture workers” to the cultural elite—artists, musicians, actors, and writers. Yet service workers are also culture workers.
The inattention to cultural processes in service has led to a blind spot in scholarship, which overlooks culturally variegated norms of interaction and expectations for social exchange that are the basic substance of service interactions. By assuming these norms to be universal, scholarship not only misses variation in the substance of service interactions but also inadequately grasps processes of cultural diffusion. For example, scant attention is paid to ways in which Western transnational service retailers serve as conduits of cultural globalization by introducing new standards of interaction based upon culturally specific norms of civility to new domains. And as locally operated services proliferate, employers adopt repertories from international firms because they are proxies for reliability, credibility, and trust. These repertories necessarily become absorbed into existing organizational and interactive practices. Such cultural transactions are rarely addressed in the service work literature. In this essay I explain why culture is left out of studies of service and why culture matters for service labor. I show how we can bring culture into our understanding of service work without abandoning the search for patterns and explanations, even as a cultural analysis unveils a bewildering array of practices, norms, and beliefs.
The essay proceeds as follows. I first assess the utility and limits of existing frameworks for the study of interactive service work across diverse cultural settings, reviewing central concepts in the study of interactive service. These concepts tend to illuminate generic organizational dynamics without regard to cultural variation across space and time. In particular, I explore three bedrock assumptions in the sociology of service that present limitations to extending our analytic reach to new domains of culture. The notions of separate spheres, method acting, and metaphors of performance that inform prevailing theories of service work limit the applicability of these concepts across cultural arenas. Finally, I address the problem of cultural diversity. Once we open the Pandora’s box of culture and find endless cultural variety, are we left to merely inventory the myriad cultural practices observed in service labor? How are we to appreciate patterns and explain differences in service labor practices? I suggest two heuristic concepts that can help make comparative sense of cultural heterogeneity within interactive service labor— embeddedness and consumer markets. These concepts promise to bring order to an otherwise bewildering array of cultural norms practices, meanings, and beliefs that unfold in the service labor. Data on service work in China illustrates these ideas.
In the 1970s, the service sector in the US began outstripping manufacturing as a source of revenue and employment (Block 1990). Other advanced economies were also fast becoming “service societies,” as they moved their manufacturing to export-production platforms in newly developing countries. The service sector was employing more Americans than ever, often in low-wage, insecure work. And US firms were exporting services abroad, with the global development of hotels, fast-food chains, and retail stores. The tectonic shifts occurring in the employment landscape begged for new theories and new concepts. With these shifts sociologists gradually began to examine service-sector labor processes.
But unpacking the basic competencies of interactive service labor proved a daunting task because the product is intangible and ephemeral. As a category of economic activity, service is defined by what it is not. Unlike its cousin sectors, manufacturing and agriculture that produce items of physical substance, the service sector produces products that are not tangibly material. Moreover, service “products” cannot be separated from the people who produce them; services involve direct interaction between the producer and the consumer. Especially in lower-wage consumer-service occupations, the primary content of labor is interaction with customers.
Service labor unfolds in the fugacious realm of human sentiment, sensibility, and culture. The product is not material; it is not a bolt, a handbag, a car, or a kitchen appliance. Rather, the product item is an affective response created in a consumer (Hochschild 1983). Service workers are paid to produce a range of affect for customer consumption: a sense of security, happiness, calm, delight, excitement, or even titillation. Although the product contains value to be exchanged on a market, it is quite literally immaterial. Therefore the conditions, the production, and the outcome of interactive service labor easily elude empirical analysis.
For this reason, ethnography is often the method of choice for examining service work (although an important exception is Wharton 1993). As an “embodied” methodology that engages the researcher’s multiple senses, ethnography requires immersion in the work setting. The ethnographer ventures close to experiencing firsthand how workers “do interaction” and navigate social relationships with customers and managers. In-depth interviewing allows ethnographers to explore how workers themselves understand the process of producing a range of affect in their work. Using ethnography, sociologists began to make legible types of work that had been taken for granted, naturalized, often feminized, sexualized, and assumed to be low skilled. With their studies, scholars have developed a variegated repertory of concepts for analyzing the labor dynamics of the service sector.
In particular, Arlie Hochschild’s book The Managed Heart (1983) dramatically altered labor scholars’ perception of service work. She cast light on the mental-emotional proficiency required of service workers who interact with customers. She termed the emotional adjustments that service workers perform on their own moods “emotion work.” The concept illuminated a set of competencies that had previously been invisible. Service laborers do not assemble parts, or build bridges, or solder or weld, she explained. They labor on the self, exercising a profound degree of control over their emotional states with the objective of producing affective responses in customers. Hochschild compared the flight attendants she studied to method actors who do intense emotional labor to actually self-induce the sentiments that they seek to portray in their characters. Through similar methods of emotional labor, workers replace their own learned emotional responses with the affective imperatives of the firm. Hochschild argued that such deep work on the self, enacted in the interest of profit, threatens the authentic selfhood of workers.
Multiple adjustments, specifications, elaborations, and applications of Hochschild’s work followed. Scholars investigated the labor of security guards, secretaries, paralegals, waitresses, fast-food workers, hotel workers, beauticians, and retail sales people. One major adjustment in Hochschild’s original framework stemmed from a study of fast-food workers at McDonald’s. In this research, Leidner (1993) argues that the routinized interactive scripts employees are required to follow are not so much a compromise to a deeply felt sense of authenticity, as Hochschild’s work suggests. Instead workers use scripts as a shield to protect their private senses of self. Scripts provide interactive armor against the endless streams of customers with whom workers contend, by allowing employees to control and process service interactions.
In another critical contribution, Lan (2001) shows that retail service workers not only perform emotion work, but also do “physical” labor that requires using the body as a vector of symbols and codes to promote products to customers. Service workers’ bodies are highly controlled: they become objects of display for commodities—like cosmetics— so that customers can inspect the use of products directly. Furthermore, the workers’ body is a vehicle for messages about status and sexuality that become associated with the service product and the firm (see also Kang 2003).
In research on nursing-home attendants, Lopez (2006) revisits the issue of authenticity, showing that instead of depriving workers of an authentic sense of self, some employers actually create an employment environment that incubates, encourages, and rewards authenticity. In contrast to Hochschild’s contention that service firms eliminate the possibility for workers to enact authentic selfhoods (sets of emotions that express their own underlying dispositions and interests) as they interact with customers, Lopez finds that some nursing homes do in fact strive to create social and material conditions that enable workers to enact authentic selfhoods, that allow them to draw upon their own empathy and compassion as they care for the elderly.
Not only have labor studies of service investigated the reshaping of selfhoods in pursuit of labor control, they have also complicated dualistic worker–manager models of the labor process that derived from industrial labor. They do so by recognizing the central role of the customer in the disciplinary dynamics of labor. These analyses reveal the triangles of potential conflict and cooperation between consumers, managers, and workers, as actors forge situationally strategic two-way alliances to gain an advantage over the third party. To optimize control over this three-way labor interaction, management attempts to recruit customers into the labor process as both objects and agents of discipline (Fuller and Smith 1991). Employers coordinate control of employees and customers by enlisting customers for surveillance (Fuller and Smith 1991), using tipping systems (Sallaz 2002), routinizing interactions (Leidner 1993), and transforming the identities and bodies of workers to influence customer behavior (Leidner 1993; Macdonald and Sirianni 1996).
Sociologists’ analyses of service-sector labor processes tend to capture generic organizational dynamics of service, but overlook the rich variation in cultural norms of service across communities of interaction. The neglect is in part a byproduct of disciplinary practice: sociology’s predominant geographical focus is the US, and practitioners often generalize (often implicitly) about multiple settings based on observations derived solely from the US. Moving studies of service beyond the US, including following US service firms across national boundaries, can address these shortcomings.
Since few sociological analyses of service work venture beyond US borders or explore the cultural presuppositions of service interactions, they tend to take for granted regionally and historically specific norms of civility and etiquette (exceptions include Gottfried 2003; Hanser 2006; Poster 2007). Given its affective nature, interactive service work is particularly subject to longstanding cultural practice, including rules of etiquette, norms regarding how and when to express feelings, and guidelines for maintaining appropriate social boundaries. To enact service labor successfully, the worker must have expertise in shared understandings of what, for example, is considered pleasant, appropriate, and respectful behavior. In the arena of service labor, where work tasks require interaction and, more specifically, induce an emotional effect in a customer, cultural ideals informing appropriate, satisfying, and aesthetically desirable interaction are particularly central to producing emotionally resonant service interactions with customers.
One limitation in transposing Hochschild’s innovative analysis to other settings stems from its roots in Western institutional and normative traditions. She bases her central critique of emotion work on a notion of separate spheres—a non-commercial, domestic, private sphere, and a commercial, public sphere. She argues that service work enters and defiles a sanctum of human authenticity otherwise protected in the private sphere, which is presumed to be non-commercial. Yet the domestic sphere is a preeminent site of the consumption of commercial products and a place where money entwines with and enables intimate relations (Zelizer 2007). But the extent to which a private/public divide (a byproduct of Western industrialization) is maintained or how the lines between spheres are drawn in other social settings remain open questions.
Another impediment to applying Hochschild’s analysis across cultural settings is a definitional reliance of the core concept of emotion work on Stanislovskian performance theory, popularly known as method acting. Emotion work is defined as the labor of displaying an emotion so as to elicit an intended feeling in a customer. Hochschild draws an analogy between method acting and emotion work to illuminate the latter’s basic psychological mechanics. Simply put, the method involves conjuring a memory with emotional resonance to prompt the expression of a desired emotion, which in turn allows the actor to create a highly naturalistic display of feeling. Actors can induce the most natural display of emotions, it is assumed, by drawing upon deeply affective memories.
The theory reflects a strongly individualist disposition in that it focuses solely on the personal interior as the wellspring of emotions and affective displays. Other schools of acting, such as the Brechtian method and traditional Chinese performance theory, are less individualistic approaches to performance. For example, the Chinese performance tradition, which extends from the fourth century BCE to Mao’s twentieth-century socialist realism, focused less on the actor than on the relationship between the actor and audience, which was understood as a pedagogical relationship. Actors focused more intently on the reception of the performance by the audience, and their own relationship to the audience, than on the degree of authenticity or naturalism displayed. As Schechner observes:
From an early day, theater was seen as a way of reaching ordinary people who could not read. And at various times, theater served Confucian or Taoist thought, disseminated imperial edicts regarding proper behavior, helped people understand their place in the social hierarchy, or sowed revolutionary ideas.
(Schechner 1999: x)
Service workers whom I interviewed in China echoed the pedagogical orientation. Thus, as one waitress at a luxury hotel in Beijing described her interactions with customers, “I teach them through my smile, so they can improve their breeding” (Otis 2008: 28). If interactive service performance in the US is measured by a standard of naturalism and authenticity, in China service interaction tends to be viewed as a conduit for displaying appropriate social norms and values. The alternative Chinese school of performance theory also diverges from method acting in its focus on the social context rather than emotional memory as a source of feeling. Rather than manufacture an emotion by enlisting individual memories that are resonantly affective, a Chinese approach (and a Brechtian one as well) places the actor in a social environment, or some semblance thereof, which allows the desired character to emerge.
There are also limits to the analogy of drama and interactive service labor. We can gain leverage on understanding the labor politics of service work by recognizing the differences as well as the similarities between acting (for an audience) and interacting (with a paying customer). Unlike service workers, actors do not anticipate or respond to the needs of paying patrons. Actors are not required to do the bidding of customers. On the contrary, actors are more likely to exercise control and influence over the audience through their arts. Actors create a world apart for their audience, a world that the audience enters. Indeed, actors have been deemed “elite emotion managers” (Orzechowicz 2008). Workers, on the other hand, are more likely to enter into and navigate the class and cultural worlds created to appeal to their customers. These service environments are more likely to reflect the tastes and aesthetics of the customers than the employees. Although the theater analogy has been useful for highlighting certain elements of interactive service work, it presents limits for the study of service by diverting attention away from the specific emotional and interactive content of service interactions as well as the power hierarchies formed in particular service contexts.
Although the dictionary of concepts developed by labor scholars of interactive service reveals some of the key organizational dynamics of this type of work, it is time we trained our analytic lens on the cultural content rather than the more formal organizational properties of service labor. If interactive labor is defined by emotion work, then which emotions are produced and under what conditions? If it is routinized and scripted, what exactly are the interactive forms that are subject to standardization? If interactive labor is “authentic,” what is the behavior that is considered to reveal authenticity? Furthermore, exactly how valued a cultural norm is authenticity across cultural spheres? By focusing on how and why specific emotions, gestures, and actions are produced in particular service contexts, researchers can more clearly perceive the micropolitics of service labor processes, as workers negotiate new contexts of interaction. But this promise of “bringing culture in” comes with the peril of facing a perplexing assortment of norms, meanings, beliefs, and understandings in the study of service “culture work.”
How can we make sense of the potentially wide-ranging cultural practices that services in diverse settings encompass? How can we adapt existing concepts to better understand cultural variation and interaction, as firms develop within—and move between—diverse cultural settings? To address these issues, I suggest two heuristic concepts. The first is a notion of institutional embeddedness that points to articulations between the relatively formalized organizational dimensions of service work and those attributes of labor that are particular to time and place. The second is a working definition of consumer markets, which configure service-labor regimes.
I propose applying the concept of embeddedness to understand and compare the cultural substance of service labor. Embeddedness is used by economic sociologists to reveal the non-economic substrate of economic organization and exchange (Block 1990; Polanyi 1957). The concept helps to show the mutual constitution of formal market processes and cultural institutions, at the same time countering the belief (widely held by neoclassical economists) that modern economies are highly rationalized organizational forms that transcend “non-rational” modes of human activity like religious, ritual, and informal cultural practices.
Service firms codify, systematize, choreograph, and even routinize forms of interaction between customers and workers. To do so they draw on widely accepted social understandings of interaction that are considered pleasant, appropriate, and civil. Hence firms tap into, or embed within, culturally resonant symbols, meanings, gestures, and language in order to elicit a given desired response in customers. As hotels, fast-food chains, and other international service firms export operations to new regional settings, they introduce novel organizational models, forms of civility, and norms of interaction that are part of the interactive service product. But to implement these novel protocols service firms inevitably adapt to localized markets, institutional legacies, and the local cultural schema of employees.
Service work is particularly prone to embeddedness because it is not as peripatetic as industrial labor (Otis 2008). Service is an industry that directly follows and serves its consumer markets; therefore it must be spatially proximate to those markets. In other words, consumer service workers “produce” in the same place and at the same time that consumption occurs. The spatial proximity contrasts sharply with manufacturing, where the customer’s purchase and consumption of items takes place far from the point of production. This means that, unlike manufacturers who nimbly dart about the globe in search of low-cost labor, service firms cannot readily relocate (Silver 2003).
In short, manufacturers follow labor markets, whereas service firms follow consumer markets. Because service firms operate in the midst of their consumer markets, it is nearly impossible for these firms to threaten to relocate if workers and managers do not accede to firm demands. The locational commitment, along with the fact that service workers deliver the product directly to consumers, means that service firms experience much greater pressure than manufacturing firms to adapt to pre-existing employment practices and the cultural schema that local employees bring into the workplace.
Service firms’ decisions about location are shaped by their strategies for appeal to the status aspirations (or distinction struggles) of particular sets of customers—in other words, consumer markets. Economists use the term “consumer market” to refer to the purchasing preferences of individuals. They conceive of consumer preferences as highly individualistic, driven by rational self-interest, and cemented long before individuals are exposed to advertising and marketing. On the other hand, social scientists tend to view consumer markets as driven by marketing; consumers’ choices are deeply influenced by the elaborate marketing and promotion activities of corporations (Marcuse 1964). A way of recognizing both the “agency” of the consumer and the “structure” of marketing is to employ Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of distinction struggles. For Bourdieu (1984) class struggles for distinction occur in the realm of consumption. Accordingly, the way that consumers exhibit taste through consumption preferences is a preeminent means that groups draw on to position themselves within a class hierarchy and to naturalize and legitimate class inequalities. This positioning involves perpetual struggle, as Bourdieu writes:
Because the distinctive power of cultural possessions or practices … tends to decline with the growth in the absolute number of people able to appropriate them, the profits of distinction would wither away if the field of production of cultural goods … did not endlessly supply new goods or new ways of using the same goods.
(Bourdieu 1984: 230)
In other words, struggles for distinction pivot around exclusive consumption of goods and services. Firms enter into these distinction struggles by promoting goods and services as status-enabling—and often exclusive—in an effort to generate revenue. Drawing on these ideas I define consumer markets as the institutionalization of struggles for distinction between social groups by firms. As firms adapt services to distinction rivalries, they organize labor accordingly—to provide experiences that resonate with the culturally based distinction strategies of different classes, genders, and nationalities of consumers.
Although technically we can say that labor practices are embedded in local consumer markets, it is useful to distinguish between the strategic, profit-driven activity involved in designing labor practices to appeal to a consumer market, and the embedding of these practices within pre-existing, local cultural and institutional conditions. In other words, the design of labor practices may originate in firms’ appeals to distinction struggles among status groups that in effect constitute consumer markets. But they are then adapted to, or embedded within, local institutional legacies as well as cultural expectations and practices of employees (schema).
Hence the actual implementation of labor practices is organized in relationship to preexisting institutional legacies, that is, longstanding practices that shape relationships between employers and workers. I observed these processes at an international, luxury hotel in China, the Beijing Transluxury (a pseudonym). The hotel was connected to a US-based hotel conglomerate that imported Western executive managers to operate the hotel. During my ethnographic research I found that managers organized workers to provide individually customized services to their wealthy, high-profile clientele of Western businessmen, diplomats, and professionals (Otis 2008). Female interactive workers (waitresses, hostesses, butlers, and room attendants) were taught to adopt US middle-class, feminine dispositions: smiling, making eye contact, and walking “like ladies.” They were required to adopt new bodily treatments, including makeup, daily showers, and use of deodorant. Yet a set of collectivist work legacies from the earlier Mao era affected the implementation of these new work practices: workers received generous monetary benefits, including healthcare, housing subsidies, and regular distribution of in-kind welfare, like large bottles of cooking oil as well as twice-daily meals in the staff canteen. Managers coordinated regular events for workers like collective weddings, singles parties, holiday soirees, and outings to plays. The Chinese Communist Party recruited members from among staff and held regular meetings at the hotel. These practices fostered a collegial environment that allowed middle managers to comment on the intimate details of worker appearance with the objective of standardizing service delivery. Managers carefully informed workers that they should wear deodorant to suppress body odor, brush their teeth to eliminate garlic breath, learn new ways of walking to act like ladies, and take birth control to adhere to the one child per family policy and avoid out-of-wedlock childbirth. In the end, managers successfully transformed young women workers by embedding new body and interactive processes in more familiar Mao-era relationships and language. But the transformation was not total; these workers filtered new service protocols through their own particular cultural dispositions.
Because interaction with customers is a form of production that draws from workers’ own personality and emotions, the labor necessarily engages (or embeds within) workers’ own pre-existing cultural dispositions—their perceptions, values, expectations, and physical demeanors. Despite the firms’ highly choreographed designs for interaction with customers, workers continued to tailor interactive practices to suit their own needs for respect on the service floor. In other words, workers filtered new interactive protocols through their own norms of civility and etiquette. In so doing, they adapted, tempered, and reworked interactive routines introduced by management to pursue their own culturally defined standards of dignity and respect. It is these locally defined frames of meaning and practice that root service work in employees’ everyday cultural worlds.
To return to the example of the Beijing Transluxury Hotel, female staff members frequently viewed it as their job to teach customers how to act appropriately, by being paragons of proper behavior themselves. In other words, they held a view of their work as pedagogical. They also combined the imported, US middle-class femininity learned at the hands of managers with local cultural schema of “face.” “Giving face” refers to a conferral of status and honor involving semi-ritualized, culturally encoded enactments of deference. It is a hierarchical model of interaction (Yang 2002). Repeatedly, Transluxury workers told me that it was their job to “give face,” that is, to confer status upon the customer. They did not view their work as making customers feel comfortable or happy or satisfied but, rather, as giving face. As a form of emotion work (Hochschild 1983) “giving face” is not conditioned by an expectation of individual authenticity; workers at the Beijing Transluxury tended not to view giving face as offering care or nurture. Since these workers were not striving for authenticity in interactions, they achieved greater scope to interact strategically, potentially to exploit their own construction of customer status, and to acknowledge the centrality of their status-giving to revenue. Giving face reflects a hierarchical, and ritual, mode of interaction that departs dramatically from US service-work models that are more democratic and reciprocal (Sherman 2007). Labor may be designed with consumer struggles for distinction in mind, but service workers absorb new interactive protocols into their own cultural understandings and expectations. And they do so within organizational contexts affected by historical legacies of employment. The concepts of consumer markets and embeddedness facilitate comparison of the cultural adaptations of service across time and space.
Some sociologists are using case studies from cultural contexts outside the US to understand contemporary shifts in service work as well as the specific cultural underpinnings of service in diverse contexts. Of particular note is Winifred Poster’s (2007) work on call centers in India, where managers subject workers to immersion in American cultural practices, which she terms “national identity management.” Hanser (2006) examines the impact of socialist organization on a department store in China. Gottfried (2003) uses the term “aesthetic labor” to grasp service labor in Japan, a term that leaves capaciously open the possibility of inquiring about the cultural and historic specificity of the aesthetic of service labor. Collectively, these are promising points of departure, first, for reaching beyond US boundaries and addressing some of the culturally bound assumptions that have been part of US-focused labor studies of service work, and, second, for specifying how and under what conditions the more generic properties of the labor process occur, as well as how they combine with local forms of organization. The task remains, though, to build these studies into comparative frameworks that can explain how cultural practices are reshaped by and reshape service labor in diverse time and places.
An embeddedness framework can help us develop systematic cross-cultural analyses of these and future case studies, which in turn promises to enrich our capacity for developing theories of labor that respond to the particularities of service work, which has fast become the most common type of labor on the planet. The concepts of embeddedness and consumer markets allow researchers to compare and discover order in the otherwise bewildering and variegated proliferation of practices, norms, and beliefs introduced by bringing culture into the service-work equation. Use of the meso-level heuristic concepts can allow researchers to recognize cultural diversity without abandoning systematic analysis and search for patterns in the face of a panoply of cultural forms. It can help us fully appreciate the myriad ways in which service workers are, in fact, culture workers.
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