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Introduction

LUXURY SERVICE AND THE NEW ECONOMY

When Mr. Jones, a guest at the five-star Luxury Garden hotel, began to prepare for an early business meeting, he realized he had forgotten to pack his dress shoes. Panicked, he called the concierge desk. Not to worry, said Max, the concierge. Max called a local department store, asked the security guard to help him contact the manager, and convinced the manager to open the store two hours early for the desperate guest. At the same hotel, room service workers know that when Mrs. Smith orders breakfast, they must slice her papaya along a straight line, forgoing the usual serrated edge. At the Royal Court, a small luxury hotel nearby, Mrs. Frank looks forward to the hazelnut butter on her French toast, which the chef whips up just for her. In a third upscale hotel, the gift shop does not carry the Silk Cut cigarettes Mr. White prefers. No problem, he is told; we can send someone to get them. Each time the guest returns thereafter, the cigarettes await him in his room. A legendary housekeeper in the same hotel has a habit of rifling through guests’ wastebaskets; she is trying to identify their favorite candy bars and magazines in order to enter these into a computer database that helps workers keeps track of guests’ preferences for the future.

I heard these stories from luxury hotel managers I interviewed in the late 1990s as part of my preliminary research on this book. I talked with mid- and upper-level managers in all different kinds of urban hotels—economy, midprice, convention, and so on—about the challenges of running the hotel, the service they offered, the types of guests they catered to, changes in the economic climate and the structure of the industry, and their views about unions. But managers in luxury hotels recounted especially captivating anecdotes. Like the examples above, these tales described hotel staff going to great lengths to observe guests’ preferences, recognize each guest's individuality, and meet—even anticipate—the guests’ wishes. These hotels promised, in the words of an ad for the Four Seasons, “service that cares for your every need.”¹

Managers and hospitality industry literature insisted that this caring service is more important than the physical characteristics of the hotel or its amenities. Asked what differentiated the Luxury Garden from its competition, for example, the hotel's sales director told me, “The service, because we all have beds and bathrooms.” It was, managers said, the main reason guests paid daily rates as high as eight hundred dollars for rooms and three thousand dollars for suites. The staff played a crucial role in this enterprise. One manager commented, for instance, “The room helps, the views help, but it's really the people.”

Managers characterized the guests who consume luxury service as “truly wealthy.” As one manager put it, “They're not looking for discount coupons.” Another told me that guest wealth “blows my mind.” I wondered: if it blew the managers’ minds, what did the workers think about it? Workers in these hotels earned ten to fifteen dollars per hour and in some cases tips and commissions; that could add up to a substantial wage, but it was nothing compared with guest wealth. And managers talked about the services their hotels offered as providing care. But caring for guests appeared also to mean catering to them. What was it like when your job was to ensure that the guest's every desire, no matter how insignificant, was fulfilled? Did workers feel subordinated by guests’ seemingly unlimited entitlement to the workers’ personalized labor and attention? And how did guests feel about luxury service, which seemed to involve a fair amount of potentially intrusive surveillance of personal preferences and habits, and about the workers who served them? Finally, I was curious about how managers tried to guide the production of this intangible, interactive service, especially given its dependence on the workers themselves.

Customized contacts with workers are a major part of what clients are paying for in many luxury sites, including high-end hotels, restaurants, spas, resorts, retail shops, and first-class airline cabins. However, the limited sociological literature on hotels and other service industry organizations has rarely focused on luxury.² And few sociologists since Thorstein Veblen, over a century ago, have investigated the luxury sector at all, let alone luxury service specifically.³

To understand luxury service, I decided I needed to participate in its production, which led me to conduct twelve months of ethnography in two luxury hotels. Based on the data I gathered and on interviews I conducted, this book looks at how managers, guests, and interactive workers negotiated unequal entitlement to resources, recognition, and labor as they produced and consumed luxury service. These issues matter for two reasons. First, they are important for our understanding of interactive work and its links to relationships and to selfhood. Second, they are significant for our conception of how work is connected to class. These questions are particularly important given the rise of both service work and economic inequality in the United States.

THE LUXURY MOMENT

The turn of the twenty-first century was an especially timely period in which to look at luxury production. In 1999, at the height of the high-tech boom, luxury spending in the United States was increasing at more than quadruple the rate of overall spending.⁴ Demand was rising for luxury goods, including clothing, accessories, cars, exclusive housing, private jets, fancy wine, and premium cigars.⁵ This active economic sector included many examples of extreme service as well as tangible products. New “boutique” medical practices, for example, offered services ranging from same-day appointments and house calls to heated towel racks and personally monogrammed robes in doctors’ offices.⁶ Services available to first-class airline passengers included chauffeured limousine pickups, customized meals, onboard massages, and “in-flight beauty therapists.”⁷ Some retail employees, such as those at the Dunhill store in Manhattan, were required to undergo butler training to improve their interactions with clients.⁸ Wealthy people were increasingly hiring servants to care for their enormous houses, and training programs for these servants were expanding.⁹

After the bubble burst, around 2001, luxury consumption declined somewhat; but it rebounded quickly, thanks to high-end customers, who are often considered “recession proof.” (After 9/11, for example, demand for chartered jets surged 40 percent, as wealthy people tried to avoid travel hassles.)¹⁰ As of 2005, the sector has made its comeback. Spending on jewelry, private airplanes, and boats constituted 1.07 percent of consumer spending in the first quarter of 2004 versus .71 percent a decade earlier. Luxury stocks, such as those in Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom department stores, were up.¹¹ In the all-important Christmas retail season of 2004, luxury spending increased, while lower-end retailers saw a drop in revenues.¹² “Mass luxury” has been on the rise as well.¹³

Luxury is omnipresent in the media and popular culture. Reality television places “ordinary” people in Palm Beach mansions and European chateaux to be waited on as they vie for the million-dollar prize or the spouse of their dreams.¹⁴ The media relentlessly detail luxury consumption among celebrities; a 2005 photo in People magazine, for example, shows tennis champ Serena Williams soaking in a five-thousand-dollar bath, consisting of a thousand bottles of Evian water, in the penthouse at the Hotel Victor in Miami.¹⁵ The New York Times “Styles” section regularly features luxury services and products ranging from six-thousand-dollar haircuts, seventeen-thousand-dollar diamond-encrusted flip-flops, and sixteen-hundred-dollar pink sapphire tennis bracelets for toddlers, to at-home “tuck-in services” for adults (including a facial, a massage, crystal healing, and a bath) for only a thousand dollars.¹⁶ The media also revel in stories of astronomical CEO compensation and spending; most famous, perhaps, is former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, who spent over two million dollars (half of which apparently belonged to his company) on his wife's birthday party in Sardinia, as well as six thousand dollars on a gold-threaded shower curtain. Wealthy party-givers pay millions for bigname acts to entertain at their birthday parties and their daughters’ bat mitzvahs.¹⁷ Best-selling novels of this period, such as The Nanny Diaries (the story of a young nanny's trials working for an overly entitled Upper East Side mother) and The Devil Wears Prada (the story of a young personal assistant's trials working for an overly entitled female magazine editor), satirize the entitlement of rich people and their mistreatment of assistants and servants.¹⁸

The rise of luxury consumption and production not only feeds a public preoccupation with the lifestyles of the rich and famous but also illuminates key features of what is often called the “new” U.S. economy. First, the new economy is a global one. Sites of luxury service are frequently what Manuel Castells calls “nodes” in the global “space of flows”—local places crisscrossed by movements of people and capital.¹⁹ Luxury clients, purchasing services in London or Beijing, are often the mobile corporate executives who make the global economy run. Hotels and restaurants are located in the growing range of “producer services,” which are used by high-end professionals but create nonprofessional and often low-paying jobs in the service sector.²⁰ At the same time, workers in hotels, restaurants, and retail are frequently immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Luxury service companies are also often transnational, belonging to international chains and conglomerates that offer services worldwide.

Second, the new economy is a service economy. Like more than 85 percent of workers in the United States, luxury service workers (and usually consumers too) are employed in the service sector.²¹ Many of these workers provide face-to-face, or “interactive,” service, in which the product consists, to varying extents, of the interaction between workers and customers.²² In contrast to “old economy” manufacturing jobs, in which the people who produced the products did not personally encounter the people who bought these products, the selfhoods of both worker and client come into play in these interactions. In luxury settings in particular, this interactive product is more than “service with a smile”; it is, rather, recognition of the customer's limitless entitlement to the worker's individualizing attention and effort.

Finally, the new economy is a deeply unequal one. It has created the conditions for the rise of luxury consumption by fostering higher incomes among the wealthy in what has been called the “new Gilded Age.”²³ It is these astronomical incomes that allow consumers of luxury service to spend hundreds of dollars on lunch at five-star restaurants or on designer clothes at exclusive boutiques. High levels of income inequality are reflected in the relations between workers and clients in luxury sites, where workers can rarely, if ever, afford to purchase the services they produce.²⁴ Furthermore, in these sites, people who occupy increasingly distant positions in “social space” come together in “physical space.”²⁵ The “top 1 percent,” as one luxury manager often put it, stand face to face with the members of the middle and working classes.

Luxury service is not representative of the new economy in a numerical sense, because most people neither produce nor consume it. But studying luxury service can shed light on questions of interactive work and social class, because such service brings together structural inequality and subordinating interactive work in a particularly noticeable way. Structural inequality is the context for luxury service; interactive subordination of workers and the corresponding entitlement of clients are its content. Therefore, looking at luxury in light of what we already know about service work can shed light both on the specificity of luxury and on service work more generally.

SERVICIS, SELVES, AND CLASS

From Industry to Interaction

For much of the twentieth century, sociologists of work were interested primarily in productivity, efficiency, and human relations, mainly in manufacturing workplaces. They took capitalist labor relations for granted and usually assumed a congruence of interests between workers and capitalists.²⁶ In 1974, Harry Braverman inaugurated critical labor process studies with Labor and Monopoly Capital, a scathing indictment of capitalist production methods and worker deskilling. Using a Marxist approach, Braverman looked at how the separation of mental and manual labor allows managers to control workers’ labor power. Braverman's analysis spawned a generation of studies concerned with managerial control of workers within the labor process, in varying institutional and historical contexts.²⁷ Responding to what many believed to be an overly mechanistic and pessimistic view on Braverman's part, scholars in this tradition also began to look at worker subjectivity, agency, resistance, and gender.²⁸ The contemporary critical sociology of work remains indebted to the work of Braverman and his intellectual descendants.

For labor process theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, class was key. In this view, workers and owners by definition (in terms of their relation to the means of production) belong to different classes.²⁹ The challenge for capitalists and their managerial representatives is to control and appropriate workers’ labor power in the service of securing profit (or other economic benefits). Thus, class relations are generated in the factory, through shop-floor domination. Consistent with this orientation, the vast majority of this literature has looked at manufacturing, Marx's paradigmatic site.

The study of service work, which Marx called “unproductive labor,” was quite limited through most of the twentieth century, even as this sector grew and manufacturing declined.³⁰ But with Arlie Hochschild's groundbreaking 1983 study of flight attendants, The Managed Heart, service work—especially face-to-face service—began to garner attention. Subsequent researchers have looked at fast food workers, insurance agents, domestic servants, waitresses, temporary workers, nursing home workers, lawyers, paralegals, delivery drivers, bank tellers, supermarket checkers, business services workers, casino dealers, sales clerks, bill collectors, and hairdressers, among others.³¹

Much of this research focuses on two principal differences between interactive service work and traditional factory labor. First, the product of service work consists at least in part of intangible interactions between workers and customers. Rather than engines or electronics, the treatment of the client by the worker is a key part of what is being bought and sold. To describe this aspect of the product, Hochschild coined the term emotional labor, which refers to the paid worker's managing her own feelings in order to create a certain state of mind in the customer.³²

The second, though related, difference is in the central role consumers play in service labor processes. In manufacturing, goods are sold in a market distant from the factory, which might be in Detroit or in Bangladesh, so customers who buy these products never see the workers who make them. Not so with service clients, who are not only physically present as the interactive product is created but also, in fact, participate in its production. A dyadic relationship between managers and workers becomes a tripartite one among workers, managers, and clients.³³ Interactive work also means that production and consumption occur simultaneously, linked in time just as they are brought together in space.

Self at Work

In regard to these characteristics—the importance of intangible workerclient interactions and the client's participation in the production of services—the literature on service work has tended to concentrate less on structure and class than on selfhood, interaction, and gender. First, scholars debate the effects that the performance of emotional labor has on workers who operate in what C. Wright Mills called “the personality market.”³⁴ Hochschild drew on the Marxist notion of alienation to suggest that emotional laborers can be estranged from their emotions; subsequent work has looked at the pros and cons of emotional labor for workers in different settings.³⁵ At a theoretical level, some analysts have discussed the broader social and cultural effects of commodifying and routinizing emotional labor, especially the possible loss of authenticity in human interaction generally.³⁶ Despite research showing that emotional labor is not alienating for workers in all work situations, an implicit opposition between an “authentic,” agentic self and an estranged, alienated, and performative one often marks this literature, with authentic selfhood, for the most part, seen as located outside work settings.³⁷ For example, researchers often talk of a self that needs to be “protected” at work or suggest that workers preserve their agentic selves through resistance.³⁸ Many scholars have also looked at how service work occupations and interactions are gendered.³⁹

A second focus of this research has been on how the self is managed in interactive work. Because the worker's presentation of self and capacity to interact constitute part of the product, managers must control the worker herself in order to control production. This requires extending managerial influence to areas that have traditionally been private, which can incur worker resistance. Depending on the setting, managers can try to routinize work by developing standard procedures, scripting interactions, and controlling customers, as they do at McDonald's.⁴⁰ Or managers can attempt to transform workers’ selves in a more fundamental way, through extensive training and techniques, to ensure what Hochschild calls “deep acting.”⁴¹ (This approach is more appropriate in luxury production, in which workers have more autonomy, as we will see.) Furthermore, these scholars point out, service workers have another kind of manager: the client. Customer feedback and monitoring create a “second boss,” who supervises the worker even in the absence of managers.⁴²

Service work researchers tend to cast both manager-worker and client-worker relations as antagonistic, involving subordination and struggles for control.⁴³ As in traditional labor process theory, the language of “control” and “resistance” remains dominant. Workers are seen as responding to managerial dictates and customer demands either with passive compliance or active resistance, which ranges from refusing to smile to cursing at customers.⁴⁴ Even when workers describe elements of their relations with customers as meaningful, scholars tend not to theorize the positive aspects of these contacts.⁴⁵ Robin Leidner has offered a less pessimistic view, suggesting the possibility of shifting alliances among workers, managers, and customers, but few scholars since Leidner have looked closely at positive moments of client-worker relations. Furthermore, these studies rarely incorporate, methodologically or theoretically, the client's perspective.⁴⁶

In the Marxist manufacturing paradigm, how managers and capitalists benefit from extracting workers’ labor power is clear: that extraction is the source of economic gain. Service work researchers have imported this sense of worker-manager antagonism into their view of the worker-client relationship, but they fail to theorize precisely how the client benefits from consuming workers’ labor and why this benefit is antithetical to workers’ interests. Partly this assumption has to do with the potential for individual customers to treat workers badly and with the belief that emotional labor has negative effects on workers, but these links are not often theoretically elaborated.⁴⁷

In her ethnographic study of domestic servants and employers, Judith Rollins suggests that a moment of “psychological exploitation” stems from “the personal relationship between employer and employee.” She sees this exploitation as giving employers “the self-enhancing satisfactions that emanate from having the presence of an inferior.” Profit is not extracted, but the relation is exploitative because of its psychological benefit. Rollins also claims that domestic servants function to “validat[e] the employers’ lifestyle, ideology, and social world, from their familial interrelations to the economically and racially stratified system in which they live.”⁴⁸ In this way, Rollins usefully theorizes interactive subordination and links it to structural inequality; however, she tends to map the interactive moment very closely onto the structural one, denying the possibility of positive interactions between workers and clients. Indeed, Rollins focuses primarily on workers’ deep resentment of and disdain for their client-employers, which she sees as stemming from this inequality. And although she implies that employers need the validation that workers provide, she does not investigate conflicts that employers might feel about their own entitlement to consume workers’ labor.

One could argue, alternatively, that structural inequality benefits workers and that workers are happy to serve clients more affluent than they. Some researchers argue that wealthy clients or employers treat workers better than less-rich ones.⁴⁹ Another perspective suggests that workers identify with well-off clients and aspire to their lifestyle.⁵⁰ These scholars tend not to use a class analysis, coding interactions as ways to mitigate “social distance” rather than unequal class relations.

Overall, despite significant progress in understanding interactive service work, most researchers have adopted the critical tone of labor process analysis without rethinking its theoretical basis in Marxist analysis of manufacturing production. This tendency, which also leads to dichotomous formulations of control and resistance, authentic and inauthentic selfhood, work and not-work selves, and production and consumption, has been limiting in several ways. First, the exploration of selfhood in interaction has been circumscribed by a focus on managerial dictates rather than on workplace relations and by the assumption that the authentic selfhood of workers arises outside work. Second, and related, consumers of services have primarily been seen as a source of constraint on workers rather than as a source of enjoyment or alliance or as a subject of study in their own right as participants in production. Finally, the literature has generally not theorized the classed nature of interactions or the links between structural inequality and interactive work. My study attempts to break down some of these limitations, looking at both the multiple ways workers and guests negotiate asymmetrical relations and the consequences of these negotiations for the reproduction of unequal entitlements to material resources and attention.

LOOKING AT LUXURY

Luxury service, in particular the luxury hotel, is a good place to explore in more depth the connections among work, class, and self. First, the worker's self is deeply implicated in the highly personalized and attentive service she provides. And it is a self-subordinating service, as guests’ every wish must be workers’ command. Research has established that workers value dignity on the job above most other considerations,⁵¹ but their dignity, in this case, seems constantly compromised by their subservience to guests. If any interactive workplace is likely to produce alienated and resentful workers, the luxury hotel is the one. On the other hand, the importance of service is a source of worker autonomy vis-à-vis managers, because the success of the guest's intangible experience rests largely on workers’ shoulders. The discretion that interactive workers must exercise makes them hard to control, monitor, and standardize.⁵² Thus, workers might have more power and autonomous selfhood in these sites.

The upscale hotel is also a good place to look at customers and class. Like other luxury establishments, this site is structured by the unequal distribution of resources. Workers and guests nearly always occupy different class positions, by any definition.⁵³ Furthermore, asymmetries in power, authority, and entitlement also inhere in the relationships between workers and guests. Workers demonstrate deference and subordination; guests enact entitlement to human attention and labor.⁵⁴ As a result, both are constantly performing class differences, or “doing class.”⁵⁵ Each actor must occupy her position appropriately in these classed interactions, thus also “doing self” in a classed context. Furthermore, in the luxury setting, both the structural inequality in which the interaction is embedded and the interactive inequality of which the luxury product consists are totally visible to both workers and hotel guests.

Thus, the following questions remain: How do workers reconcile their desire for dignity and power with the self-subordinating imperatives of their work? How do managers organize the production of this intangible, self-subordinating relation? How are workers’ and guests’ selves constituted or compromised? How do workers and guests make sense of their class differences and negotiate their unequal entitlements? Finally, what can the process of production-consumption of this interactive product, marked by inequality, tell us about classed identities and the legitimacy of class inequality more broadly? These are the questions that guided my research.

Sites and Methods

Via contacts obtained through the preliminary interviews, I gained access to directors of human resources in two luxury, nonunion hotels, the Royal Court and the Luxury Garden, located in a major American city.⁵⁶ I explained to these managers that I was interested in how their hotels defined and met a luxury service standard. Because managers themselves are very interested in this question, I persuaded them relatively easily to allow me to conduct ethnographic research in these sites.

This research took place in 2000-2001, when the labor market was extremely tight. High union density and activism marked the local hotel industry, meaning that even these nonunion hotels could not afford to antagonize workers for fear of union influence. This atmosphere made these sites especially favorable for looking at worker power vis-à-vis managers.

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

I then spent five weeks working the 3:00-11:00 P.M. shift in room service, both taking guests’ phone orders and delivering their fried calamari and seasonal sorbets. During this period I also worked as a food runner in the restaurant on a few occasions. Finally, I spent a month shadowing housekeeping workers, mainly room cleaners (during the day) and turndown attendants (in the evenings).⁵⁸ Though my focus was on interactive workers, this comparison of interactive and noninteractive work allowed me to explore the specific characteristics of jobs that involved relations with guests, to look at racial and ethnic variation among workers, and to explore what interactive and noninteractive workers thought about each other.

When my stint at the Royal Court was over, I worked in a second luxury hotel, the Luxury Garden, for four months (November 2000-March 2001), in order to look at the effects of organizational features on the production and consumption of luxury service.⁵⁹ The Luxury Garden was larger than the Royal Court, with 160 rooms, and it was corporately managed. The hotel commanded the highest rates in the city—$500 to $750 a night for a room, as much as $3,000 for a suite—and catered mostly to business travelers.

For two months, I worked four shifts weekly as a concierge at the Luxury Garden, which primarily involved procuring restaurant reservations, car and driver services, flowers, massages, rental cars, and tickets to theater or sporting events, plus meeting other, more unpredictable guest requests. For another two months, I continued to spend two shifts each week at the concierge desk, but I also shadowed room cleaners, turndown attendants, bellmen, doormen, business center workers, telephone operators, and reservationists for two shifts each week, spending between one and five shifts in each area. Here I was an unpaid intern, though I was permitted to keep tips and cash commissions.

I socialized with workers from both sites, but especially those at the Royal Court, with whom I often went out for drinks after the evening shift. Both on and off the job in both hotels, I talked extensively with workers about their jobs, the work environment, and their personal lives. Though these were not formal interviews, they allowed me to get a sense of what workers thought about a broad range of issues, and I quote them frequently in the text.⁶⁰

I participated in employee orientation and training sessions in both sites. I also analyzed comment cards and guest letters from both hotels, representing a four-month period in each case (approximately two hundred cards total). In addition, Luxury Garden management granted me access to detailed reports, comprising hundreds of pages, written by mystery shoppers whom they had hired to evaluate the hotel's service. During and after my ethnographic stints in these hotels, I conducted formal interviews with twelve upper-level managers, each lasting sixty to ninety minutes.

In addition to hundreds of ethnographic encounters with hotel guests, I carried out formal, open-ended interviews with nineteen people (twelve women and seven men) who frequently stayed in luxury hotels. Many of these interviewees did not come from wealthy backgrounds, though all were currently quite well-off. These interviews were generated through snowball sampling unrelated to the hotels. (See appendix A for details about ethnographic access, ethical issues, the composition of the interview samples, and other reflections on the research.)

CONSENTING WORKERS, POWERFUL SELVES,

NORMALIZED INEQUALITY

Both the sociological literature and popular books such as The Nanny Diaries led me to expect disgruntled workers and rude, demanding guests in the hotel. However, when I began work at the Royal Court, I was surprised to find that this was not the case. Rather than expressing resentment or alienation, workers were engaged in their work and wanted to do it well. They sometimes complained, avoided work, or adopted the falsely performative mode Hochschild calls “going into robot.” But they did not appear to be trapped between passive, alienating acquiescence and active, empowering resistance. For the most part, in fact, they seemed to enjoy their jobs, often including their relationships with guests. This made sense, because guests treated workers quite well most of the time, thanking them, tipping them, and even bringing them gifts. On the other hand, workers rarely expressed either a desire to live as guests did or any belief in their own capacity to obtain such a lifestyle.

I was also surprised to find that unequal entitlement was both constantly invoked and completely unquestioned. Workers often told stories of outrageous demands guests had made or talked about the high prices they paid for rooms and fancy services. Yet these unequal entitlements had a taken-for-granted quality. Although workers frequently criticized or made fun of individual guests, they did not talk about class difference explicitly or critique the system that allowed guests so much more wealth than they. The gulf between workers’ and guests’ 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 position.

My central 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, guests use a variety of practical and interpretive strategies, similar to those of workers, to assuage conflicts about their consumption of and entitlement to luxury service. These strategies are supported by particular features of the hotel setting. At the same time, guests are interpellated into a sense of class entitlement through their participation in luxury service; the service itself constitutes them as legitimate consumers. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of service work and class.