Class Acts
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In this lively study, Rachel Sherman goes behind the scenes in two urban luxury hotels to give a nuanced picture of the workers who care for and cater to wealthy guests by providing seemingly unlimited personal attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extended ethnographic research in a range of hotel jobs, including concierge, bellperson, and housekeeper, Sherman gives an insightful analysis of what exactly luxury service consists of, how managers organize its production, and how workers and guests negotiate the inequality between them. She finds that workers employ a variety of practices to assert a powerful sense of self, including playing games, comparing themselves to other workers and guests, and forming meaningful and reciprocal relations with guests. Through their contact with hotel staff, guests learn how to behave in the luxury environment and come to see themselves as deserving of luxury consumption. These practices, Sherman argues, help make class inequality seem normal, something to be taken for granted. Throughout, <I>Class Acts </I>sheds new light on the complex relationship between class and service work, an increasingly relevant topic in light of the growing economic inequality in the United States that underlies luxury consumption.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.
SERVICE AND INEQUALITY
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I first spent eight months (January-August 2000) working thirty-two hours per week at the Royal Court and then two months working on an on-call basis. The Royal Court is a 110-room, European-style downtown hotel with an award-winning restaurant and nightly room rates ranging from three hundred to five hundred dollars for a regular room to two thousand dollars for a suite. The Royal Court was independently managed, and its clientele was more or less evenly divided between business and leisure travelers.
I organized my research at the Royal Court to allow me to compare different kinds of work. I was formally hired, at a pay rate about half that of regular staff, and was treated like any other employee, except that I was allowed to do several different jobs. I started with interactive work: answering the telephone, reserving rooms, checking guests in and out at the front desk, doing concierge tasks such as making dinner and limousine reservations, parking guests’ cars, carrying their bags back and forth, and running errands for them. In all I spent about twenty-five shifts, over six months, in each of the following jobs: concierge/front desk agent, bellman/valet parker, telephone operator, and reservationist.57
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