Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

social positions and workers’ obligation to provide self-subordinating service seemed commonplace, simple facts of life.

      When I later worked at the Luxury Garden, I found the same held true there. Managerial styles and strategies were very different, because the Luxury Garden was more corporate and offered more consistently professionalized service than the independent, informal Royal Court. But workers at the Luxury Garden also became absorbed in their work, offering emotional and physical labor to guests willingly, for the most part. Likewise, inequality was always apparent but rarely discussed as such.

      These findings led me to two concepts on which I draw throughout the book. The first is the notion of consent. Used most notably in Michael Burawoy's study of factory production, consent is active investment in work. In Burawoy's formulation, workers who have some autonomy become involved in and engaged with their jobs by means of small incentives and choices, which become meaningful in the context of particular shop-floor status hierarchies and cultures. In consenting to exert labor, workers unintentionally also legitimate the broader conditions of its appropriation. In the factory Burawoy studied, workers played the game of “making out,” which allowed them to make choices about exerting effort. As they played the game, consenting to (and defending) its rules, they both ensured productivity and consented to the structural order in which the fruits of their labor (the surplus value they produced) accrued to the company.⁶¹

      This concept, though rarely invoked in the contemporary work literature, is sometimes used (incorrectly, in my view) to connote passive, unresisting, or “coping” workers.⁶² In fact, like resistance, consent highlights workers’ agency. Unlike the concept of resistance, however, the concept of consent allows us to think of workers as using their agency to participate in work rather than to refuse to participate. Explaining consent entails taking seriously the reasons that workers like their jobs and the rewards they derive from them, without losing a critical perspective on unequal social relations of appropriation.⁶³ Like resistance, consent has the potential for oppositionality. Workers can withdraw their consent in several ways: by refusing to invest themselves in their work; by quitting; and by organizing some kind of collective action that challenges the organization of work or the distribution of rewards from work. As we will see, workers who withdrew consent in my sites (more common at the Royal Court than at the Luxury Garden) tended to do so individually, by exiting.

      The second concept is the idea of normalization, which refers to the taken-for-granted nature of both interactive and structural inequality. Unequal entitlements and responsibilities were not obscured, because they were perfectly obvious and well-known to interactive workers. Nor were they explicitly legitimated, since workers rarely talked about them as such. Rather, they simply became a feature of the everyday landscape of the hotel. Conflicts over unequal entitlement were couched in individual rather than collective terms and in the language of complaint rather than critique.

      In the bulk of what follows, I show how consent and normalization arose as functions of worker strategies for constituting themselves as not subordinate vis-à-vis managers, coworkers, and especially guests.⁶⁴ Rather than negotiate between authenticity and performativity or between agency and passivity, workers drew on a range of complex and sometimes contradictory strategies of self-articulation to cast themselves as powerful. First, they established themselves as autonomous, skilled, and in control of their work, especially by playing games. Second, they cast themselves as superior, both to their coworkers and to the guests they served, by using comparisons and judgments. Finally, they constituted themselves as equal to guests by establishing meaningful relationships with them on the basis of a standard of reciprocal treatment. These strategies were not necessarily intentional; as Bourdieu has repeatedly argued, strategic action is not always conscious.⁶⁵

      Organizational characteristics and conditions, often seen as oppressive to workers, actually became crucial resources in the creation of nonsubordinate selves. The features of luxury, including discretion, guest wealth, and luxury service standards, helped interactive workers recast themselves as powerful. Organizational elements such as corporate culture, the hotel's division of labor, and the distribution of authority, allowed workers to establish skill, professionalism, and prestige. Differences in the character of these elements between the two sites help to explain why workers at the Royal Court tended to withdraw consent more often than those at the Luxury Garden. At the Luxury Garden, it was easier for workers to forge powerful selfhoods, because managerial rhetoric emphasized professionalism, status, and organizational belonging, and managers more clearly defined workers’ autonomy and prestige within the hotel. At the Royal Court, managers offered fewer such discourses, and they organized work in such a way that workers had more trouble seeing themselves as autonomous and privileged vis-à-vis their coworkers. Finally, guests also helped workers to constitute themselves as powerful. Guests provided the raw material for the games workers played; they served as objects of strategic comparison; and they acted as agents of equality through emotional and financial reciprocity. Far from being in constant tension with workers, then, guests played a central role in generating workers’ consent.

      Yet the work environment was not the only source of self-constitution; biographical and cultural resources were also important. At a personal level, the preexisting dispositions of individual workers were key to how they inserted themselves into the organization.⁶⁶ Some workers, for example, took on professional identities that led to investment in the hotel, while others cast themselves as independent of the workplace. At a broader level, workers drew on “cultural repertoires” in shaping themselves as powerful.⁶⁷ An especially central cultural narrative was the “norm of reciprocity” that both workers and guests articulated and practiced in their relations with each other.⁶⁸ This norm repeatedly emerged in a way that may be distinctly American, evoking as it does a sense of egalitarianism, of downplaying power differences in interactions.⁶⁹

      For the most part, workers’ capacity to create powerful selves, sustained by guests and managers, engendered consent and muted the sharp edges of unequal entitlement. 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