Working Bodies E-Book

Linda McDowell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Studies in Urban and Social Change
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 572

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Through a series of case studies of low-status interactive and embodied servicing work, Working Bodies examines the theoretical and empirical nature of the shift to embodied work in service-dominated economies. * Defines 'body work' to include the work by service sector employees on their own bodies and on the bodies of others * Sets UK case studies in the context of global patterns of economic change * Explores the consequences of growing polarization in the service sector * Draws on geography, sociology, anthropology, labour market studies, and feminist scholarship

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Editors’ Preface

Preface and Acknowledgements

1 Service Employment and the Commoditization of the Body

Introduction: Narratives of Change

Servicing Work as Waged Employment

Theorizing Embodied Work

Place Matters

Structure of the Book

Part I Locating Service Work

2 The Rise of the Service Economy

What is Work?

The Expansion of Service Employment

3 Thinking Through Embodiment: Explaining Interactive Service Employment

From Labouring Bodies to Desirable/Desiring Bodies

Theorizing Embodied Identities, Exploring Complexity

Class Practices and Ethnic Penalties: Recognizing Complex Intersectionality

Racialized Others

Part II High-Touch Servicing Work in Private and Public Spaces

4 Up Close and Personal: Intimate Work in the Home

Gender Divisions of Labour and ‘Work’ in the Home

Doing Emotional Work: Caring for Embodied Others

The Domestic is Global: Ethnicity, Race and Spatial Divisions of Labour

5 Selling Bodies I: Sex Work

Delimiting the Sex Trade and Those Who Work In It

Social and Spatial Divisions of Labour in Sex Work

Foreign Bodies: The ‘Exotic’ Other as an Object of Desire

Conclusions: Sex and Money

6 Selling Bodies II: Masculine Strength and Licensed Violence

Multiple Masculinities and Working Lives

Men Writing About Men and Masculinity

Pugilism: The Body Work of Boxers

Doormen, Bouncers and Other Workers in Britain’s Night-Time Economy

Risking the Body: Other Forms of Dangerous Masculine Body Work

Part III High-Touch Servicing Work in Specialist Spaces

7 Bodies in Sickness and in Health: Care Work and Beauty Work

Bodies, Emotions, Care and Femininity

The Social Construction of Nursing: The Lady with the Lamp

Empathy and Stress in Customer-Oriented Bureaucracies

Caring as Body Work/Dirty Work

Providing Care in the Community

What About Male Nurses?

Gender, Ethnicity and Race in a Care Home

Maintaining the Perfect Body

Working in Beauty Parlours: Physical and Emotional Work

8 Warm Bodies: Doing Deference in Routine Interactive Work

What is Happening to Young Men in the Consumer Service Economy?

Warm Bodies for Hotel Work

Naming Workers for Specific Tasks

Conclusions: Warm Bodies and the International Division of Labour

9 Conclusions: Bodies in Place

Continuity and Change in the Labour Market: Grand Narratives, Crises and Dramas

The Spaces of Work: Place Matters

Generalizing from Case Studies

Meatspace, Virtual Space and Disembodiment: Does the Body Still Matter?

References

Index

Studies in Urban and Social Change

Published

Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment andWorkplace Identities

Linda McDowell

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Cities of Europe

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Cities, War, and Terrorism

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Cities and Visitors: Regulating Tourists, Markets, andCity Space

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Dennis R. Judd (eds)

Understanding the City: Contemporary and FuturePerspectives

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Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption

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Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City

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Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change andConflict in Post-Socialist Societies

* Out of print

Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe, and Ivan Szelenyi (eds)

The People’s Home? Social Rented Housing in Europeand America

Michael Harloe

Post-Fordism

Ash Amin (ed.)

The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in aMexican City*

Mercedes Gonzalez de la Rocha

Free Markets and Food Riots

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Fragmented Societies*

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Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader*

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Cities and Regions in a Global Era

Alan Harding (ed.)

Urban Social Movements and the State

Margit Mayer

Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: NeoliberalizingSpaces in Developmental States

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This Edition first published 2009

© 2009 Linda McDowell

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McDowell, Linda, 1949–

Working bodies: interactive service employment and workplace identities/Linda McDowell.

p. cm. - (Studies in urban and social change)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-5977-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-4051-5978-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Service industries. 2. Sexual division of labor. 3. Body, Human. I. Title.

HD9980.5.M3885 2009

331.7′93–dc22

2009006549

List of Illustrations

Figure

2.1People aged 16 and over in employment: by sex and occupation, 2007, UK

Tables

2.1The growth of interactive service employment, Great Britain, 1951–20012.2Employment in ‘body work’ in Great Britain, 20052.3Percentage of the population falling below 50 per cent of the contemporary median income in the UK, 1979–20077.1Non-UK born care workers 2006

Plates

1Divisions of caring labour: a mother hands her toddler to the childminder before leaving for her own waged work2Selling sex in public spaces3The ‘sweet science of bruising’: the embodiment of masculinity, class and ethnicity4Institutionalized care work: the commodification of women’s ‘natural’ skills5Learning to mop: the acquisition of ‘feminine’ skills in a diner

Series Editors’ Preface

The Blackwell Studies in Urban and Social Change series is published in association with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. It aims to advance theoretical debates and empirical analyses stimulated by changes in the fortunes of cities and regions across the world. Among topics taken up in past volumes and welcomed for future submissions are:

Connections between economic restructuring and urban changeUrban divisions, difference, and diversityConvergence and divergence among regions of east and west, north, and southUrban and environmental movementsInternational migration and capital flowsTrends in urban political economyPatterns of urban-based consumption

The series is explicitly interdisciplinary; the editors judge books by their contribution to intellectual solutions rather than according to disciplinary origin. Proposals may be submitted to members of the series Editorial Committee:

Neil Brenner

Matthew Gandy

Patrick Le Galès

Margit Mayer

Chris Pickvance

Jenny Robinson

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is both a review of some of the exciting case studies and ethnographies of waged work in the service sector that have appeared in the last two decades or so and a synthesis of some of my own work in the area. Its focus is on jobs that demand the co-presence of the provider and the purchaser of a service, jobs in which the embodied identities of workers are on display and affect the exchange in ways that are uncommon in manufacturing employment. Embodied performances are an essential element of everyday interactions in service sector workplaces. It is a book about the associations of the body with deference, shame, disgust and dirt, as well as with beauty, health and fitness, adornment and decoration and the ways in which these characteristics and attributes become associated with differently gendered, raced and classed bodies, and so are rewarded or penalized in different ways within the labour markets of advanced industrial nations. The main, although not sole, focus is workplaces in Great Britain, although there are also examples drawn from US labour markets and workplaces. Furthermore, global migration means that even the most local of workplaces in a particular nation-state may include employees from a wide range of countries. It is a book about socioeconomic change, as well as migration, about the growth of low-status and often precarious forms of work and their distribution across what geographers term spatial divisions of labour: the places where work takes place and the connections across space that produce their specificities.

I want the book to be useful as a source for students and their teachers: it provides a set of case studies that can be dipped into as well as, or instead of, being read in its entirety. The first three chapters, however, are essential reading as they lay out the empirical and theoretical bones of the argument about the significance of interactive service employment. In the chapters that follow I discuss a range of case studies or ethnographies of different types of what I define as high-touch interactive work. In these chapters I explore not only the findings of the different studies but also discuss how they were carried out. This focus on methods should help those contemplating their own research on particular types of work as well as provide some ammunition to answer those critics of qualitative methods who argue that case-study approaches are ‘too anecdotal’ or ‘not representative’. The bibliography is large, providing details of a large number of studies which should lead to yet more.

Many of my discussions about service sector employment have taken place in lectures and classes for a course on the geographies of work and employment that I have taught over the last decade in Cambridge, London and Oxford. I am grateful to all the students who have taken the course or done their doctoral work with me, sharing their experiences of the labour market as both researchers and temporary employees. Their working lives and the range of jobs held in vacations were often much more varied than mine and helped me think harder about what happens in daily life at work. Four Oxford students – Ian Ashpole, James Cohen, Kat Hardy-King and Laura Putt – read the book just before their finals in summer 2008 and Sarah McDowell did the final proofreading. Special thanks to them. I should also like to thank old and new colleagues for making each of the departments that I have worked in both enjoyable and distinctive environments, each with its own particular working culture.

Some of the chapters are partly based on revised versions of articles that I have previously published and draw on work supported variously by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the British Academy. I thank these funding bodies for their support. The work in a hospital and a hotel that is part of the subject matter of chapters 7 and 8 was undertaken with Adina Batnitzky and Sarah Dyer and I am extremely grateful to them not only for their input into the research but their willingness for me to include aspects of it here. Particular thanks are due to the Leverhulme Trust who granted me a two-year Major Research Fellowship between October 2006 and 2008. That award gave me the space and time to read and think and then to write this book. Two anonymous reviewers read the manuscript at a crucial stage and their tough but invaluable comments have made this a better book. If I knew who you were, I would thank you in person. Finally, Neil Brenner, editor of the series and Jacqueline Scott, at Wiley-Blackwell, were always supportive at just the right times.

The author and publisher would like to acknowledge the editors and publishers for permission to reproduce here in revised versions sections from papers in the following journals: Antipode 2006, 38 (4), pp. 825–50; EconomicGeography 2007, 82 (1), pp. 1–28 and Progress in Human Geography 2008, 28 (2), pp. 145–63. While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for permission, the publishers would be grateful to hear from anyone who is not acknowledged and will correct this if a second edition of the book appears.

Linda McDowell

Oxford

1

Service Employment and the Commoditization of the Body

It is illiberal and servile to get the living with hand and sweat of the body.

William Alley, The Poore Man’s Library, 1571

Work is no less valuable for the opportunity it and the human relations connected with it provide for a very considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic, aggressive and even erotic, than because it is indispensable for subsistence and justifies existence in a society.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930

Introduction: Narratives of Change

This is a book about bodies at work. It is about who does what sort of waged work in the contemporary service economies that dominate the western world. Its aim is to explore who does what, where, with whom, for whom and to whom, and with what consequences for the financial rewards and social status that accrue to different workers. Its focus is on the social division of labour, on the ways in which class, gender and ethnicity, as well as age, looks and weight, are key attributes in explaining who is employed in what sorts of work in the first decades of the new millennium. The types of work discussed are those where both the worker and the consumer are present and, in the main, where the service provided is used up at the time of the exchange. Through the lens of the workplace, the emphasis is on the sorts of embodied interactions that take place in everyday exchanges between the three sets of actors involved in these exchanges: workers, managers and clients/customers. As a consequence, the book is about a smaller and more local spatial scale than geographers are used to. Traditionally, economic geographers’ scale of analysis is local or regional labour markets, although there is also a strong geography of the firm. Sociologists are more typically analysts of workplace interactions, yet they too often ignore the significance of the local, neglecting to ask what is specific and different about the places they study. The aim here is to bring a geographical and sociological perspective together. Although the focus is the workplace – be it an individual home, the street, a shop or a hospital – through this lens, the changing national and international spatial divisions of labour that produce increasingly diverse workforces in the cities of western economies are also revealed. The examples are drawn in the main from UK workplaces, as well as from the USA, but the workers whose identities are at the heart of the book are extremely varied in their national origins.

In the new millennium in the economies of the western world, it may seem as if we have entered a new era or at least have been passing through a period of significant change since ‘around 1973’: the date that David Harvey (1989) identified as the start of the transformation from the old Fordist model of economic organization to a new condition of postmodernity. Since then, growing numbers of individuals have become part of the social relations of waged work, and many seem to be working in new types of work under different conditions compared to workers in a former era, especially those in manufacturing industries. Change is the key motif of contemporary discussions of waged work. In both the popular and academic literatures about waged work and the labour market titles that indicate a radical change with the past are common. The ‘new capitalism’ (Sennett 2006), the rise of ‘post-Fordism’ (Amin 1994), in a period of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) are all part of the titles of books purporting to describe the changes that are evident in what some have identified as a ‘new’ economy (Carnoy 2000; Jensen and Westenholz 2004). ‘One of the most striking things about much of contemporary theorizing about work and identity is the epochalist terms in which it is framed’, in which the ‘logic of dichotomization establishes the available terms in advance’ (Du Gay 2004: 147).