Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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 consent to both managerial and customer appropriation of their labor. However, there are several differences between games in the service theater and those on the shop floor; the most important have to do with the guest's role in the labor process. I further show that games allow workers to think of themselves as autonomous, skilled, strategic, and powerful—in short, as not subordinate. The two hotel cases demonstrate that the character of each managerial regime affects workers’ capacity to play games and to deploy certain strategies of self.

      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,