Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

questions, which was often, they would acknowledge their ignorance and call the guest back with the information. The hotel observed guest preferences in terms of rooms and food, and some frequent travelers had their own special requirements. However, workers did not often record the kinds of information required to surprise guests with needs anticipation, instead taking note of only complaints or problems.²

      The friendly service was well-matched with the Royal Court's clientele, which was composed of at least half leisure travelers and about half women.³ Most of these travelers were not affiliated with convention or tour groups. The sales manager told me that 85-90 percent of the guests were from the United States; many of the leisure travelers lived in the area and would come to spend a weekend in the city. Most of the rest hailed from Japan, Canada, and Great Britain. At least 25 percent had stayed in the hotel before. The overwhelming majority of the guests were white; a few were Asian or Asian American, but I very rarely saw African American or Latino guests.

      MANAGERIAL REPERTOIRES

      Managers in both hotels drew on a similar repertoire of explicit strategies for regulating worker behavior, primarily having to do with hiring, training and standards, and the regulation of workers’ self-presentation. First, managers I interviewed frequently argued that hiring the right type of worker was key to providing luxury service.⁴ They consistently talked about finding the right person rather than creating him, saying specific skills could be learned if the worker's personality was appropriate for the job. Sebastian, the general manager of the Luxury Garden, said in an interview, “People don't get into the business for the money; they have to want to serve, and you can't teach this.” The Royal Court's general manager, Mr. Weiss,⁵ told me that he wanted workers with “a positive outlook toward the human race”; he felt the job required “80 percent personality, 20 percent skills.” The tight labor market, however, constrained this strategy of selection. In September 2000, I asked Nicole at the Royal Court what she looked for in a prospective employee. She responded, “At this point it's speak English, be available, smile, be personable.” She characterized the hotel as “desperate” for workers.

      Second, managers in both hotels used a variety of means to regulate workers’ selfhood and their interactions with guests. They standardized appearance by requiring that workers adhere to particular (and gendered) norms; as in many service enterprises, these included specifications about fingernail length, jewelry, makeup, hairstyles, beards, and so on. Managers also attempted to develop standards of behavior, which were sometimes quite specific, to guide employee interactions. Training workers in regard to these standards was, at least theoretically, a major managerial concern. Finally, both hotels used mechanisms 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.