Eileen M. Otis

Bridgework Globalization, Gender, and Service Labor at a Luxury Hotel

Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global lu...Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global luxury hotel in Beijing, China, reveals how women workers learn to span cultural divides as gendered capacities. These workers must not only “look good and sound right,” they must look familiar and sound understandable. Adopting the term “bridgework,” the research tracks the institutionalization of labor requiring acquisition of the body and the feeling rules of western customers, which reflect the global cultural hegemony of the United States. Managers conceive of these rules as universal, natural feminine orientations, even as they systematically deconstruct and teach them to women workers. Workers bear responsibility for putting rules that bridge divides into practice. When misunderstandings occur, managers attribute them to a failure of the worker’s femininity, rather than the customer’s lack of facility with local practice. Bridgework creates cosmopolitan capital, a form of status accruing to a white, western male business class through ease of movement and preservation of a sense of competence while traveling across borders.

Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist TransformationsMigrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations, by NgaiPun. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. 204 pp.

Part of the narrative of girls’ success is that it comes at boys’ expense. Some respondents mentioned that boys are disadvantaged in this girls’ world because boys are judged more harshly for being too studious or caring too much about school or are subject to more disciplinary actions from teachers when they goof off in class. Nevertheless, the boys and girls in this study discussed the differing expectations and experiences by gender, noting that boys have a broader range of behaviors that qualify as success, including being the class clown, a role girls could not successfully achieve. So, while boys indicated that their class clown behavior was sometimes problematic, both boys and girls indicated that boys have more opportunities for transgression than girls.

22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780745671758.

Skill is central to inequality in the workplace, as a basis of material reward and status recognition. While much research treats skill as a set of abilities possessed—or not—by a worker, scholars have yet to grasp the organizational processes whereby jobs come to be taken as rudimentary and the worker performing them unskilled and therefore deficient. To illuminate these processes, we travel to Beijing, China, where workers are loquacious about inequalities confronted in relatively new forms of labor. By juxtaposing two service workplaces where similar sets of work tasks carry contradictory value, we discover the social relations that demote workers and their jobs based on identities, femininity in one workplace, rurality in another. We argue that formulating job tasks as skilled or unskilled is itself a kind of organizational work, which recruits the efforts of managers, colleagues, and customers. Unskilled workers do not appear in the workplace already deficient, but become so through organizational processes.

The Deficient Worker: Skills, Identity, and Inequality in Service Employment

represent the voices of women who use traditions as a means to challenge the patriarchal social order in which they are subordinates. While much of the literature on social change focuses on more public forms of activism, this book demonstrates that equally important are the variety of understated methods such as storytelling and daily decisions and choices that are used to challenge the status quo and build solidarity. Using folkloristic and critical approaches together with feminist and ethnographic methodologies, the book is rich in data, drawing on more than two decades of research conducted in Nepal. Davis skillfully theorizes and analyzes the stories in order to provide the reader with a nuanced understanding of the stories as well as the lives of Maithil women. Overall, Davis provides an impressive discussion of the current theoretical literature on folklore studies; however, given the centrality of gender in the analysis, missing is a critical discussion of the gender theories that could provide additional insights into the significance of the stories being examined. Nonetheless, this book makes an important contribution to existing scholarship by putting the worldview and experiences of Maithil women at the center. This book will appeal to a wide variety of liberal arts and social science audiences. More specifically, it will certainly appeal to those in South Asian studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, gender studies, folklore studies and those in related fields engaged in studying artistic and narrative traditions. However, the richness of the folktales and the powerful life lessons embedded in them is likely to make this book interesting to a wider nonacademic audience.

Book Review: Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China by Leta Hong Fincher

Chinas gradualist transition to markets, in which the Communist Party maintained pre eminent authority, spawned an economic ex pansion that has been anything but gradual. Thanks to the spectacular economic growth, the total number of people dwelling in poverty plummeted from 250 to 32 million in just over 20 years (Davis and Wang forth coming). But, soaring growth has also creat ed vast disparities in living standards. How do Chinas socialist-era institutions shape cur rent modes of stratification? Where are the major, new fault lines of inequality? Three new books put Chinas economic transforma tion into perspective, as they assess central dimensions of inequality. Together they pro vide a detailed picture of the new mecha nisms producing gaping social and econom ic disparities. In The State and Life Chances in Urban China, Xueguang Zhou examines macro historical trends in stratification covering the Mao era and the initial 14 years of the mar ket reform period (1949-1994). Building up on research on socialist stratification mecha nisms by Yanjie Bian and Andrew Walder, Zhou carefully constructs a portrait of social ist and reform-era social inequalities. Based on life-history surveys of over 5,500 respon dents in 22 variably sized cities and munici palities selected from six provinces, the find ings are especially useful for placing Chinas socialist and reform eras in comparative per spective. For example, Zhou finds that unlike the USSR and Eastern European socialist so cieties, which formed an ossified nomen klatura elite that consolidated its hold on power and privilege (Djilas 1961; Konrad and Szelenyi 1979), China did not develop an en during bureaucratic class with pronounced material advantages. Even though party cadres enjoyed minor privileges over rank and-file workers, political campaigns and mass mobilizations (such as the anti-rightist movement that purged over 530,000 intellec tuals from the party, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution) prevented the bureaucratic class from securing an enduring Thbe State and Life Chances in Urban China: Redistribution and Stratification, 1949-1994, by Xueguang Zhou. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 400pp.

Socialist Market Inequality

75.00 cloth. ISBN: 0521835070.