Melissa Tyler

EMOTIONAL LABOUR AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY

This paper examines service work within the contemporary airline industry which has recently been shaped by managerial initiatives aiming to deliver `quality service. We focus upon the gendered consequences of this. On the basis of original empirical research, three specific arguments are advanced: firstly, recent competitive pressures and accompanying managerial initiatives are intensifying demands upon female employees for the production of emotional labour, subjective commitment to organisational aims and sexual difference within parts of the airline industry; secondly, despite the enormous power of such managerial demands, the `spaces for female employees to comply, consent and resist remain `open within the aspects of the industry studied; thirdly, the power of the gendered managerial prescription investigated here is related to the way it is embedded within the structural and inequitable capital-labour relation. The paper is informed by an approach which places the process of gendering inside class relations, and stresses the need to empirically interrogate the historically-specific `lived experience of gendered power relations in order to adequately analyse and explain such phenomena.

Chocs Away: Weight Watching in the Contemporary Airline Industry

This paper draws on empirical research into the recruitment, training, and management of female flight attendants, working primarily in the transatlantic business travel sector of the contemporary airline industry. We argue that whilst the `skills which flight attendants are required to deploy are denied, being treated as somehow inherent abilities and thus neither trained nor remunerated, they are nevertheless managed in a directive way. This management involves, in particular, a focus on a flight attendants figure, and `dieting - what Naomi Wolf has referred to as `the essence of contemporary femininity (Wolf 1990:200) - as a recruitment, training and managerial strategy. The work of a female flight attendant involves adhering to culturally prescribed norms on femininity as well as organisational regulations governing her figure - its presentation and performance - whilst undertaking work which involves, at least in part, serving food to others. We conclude that this aspect of the work of flight attendants is thus `a symbolic representation of the subordination of women... a concrete expression of their position as servers and carers of men (Charles and Kerr 1988:84).

The Exchange of Aesthetics: Women's Work and 'The Gift'

Drawing on empirical research data on the work of flight attendants, this paper will explore Marcel Mausss theory of ‘gift’ exchange relations, with particular reference to his concern with the ‘exchange of aesthetics’ (Mauss 1954), as an analytical model which may contribute to our understanding of ‘womens work’ in contemporary Western societies, of which, we shall argue, the work of female flight attendants is a notable example. It will begin by locating the authors analytical and theoretical concerns with ‘womens work’ within the context of recent empirical research. It will then go on to outline briefly a Maussian model of exchange relations and to identify the potential utility of this analytical model for the study of womens work. This paper then goes on to offer an analytical account of empirical research into the work of flight attendants and to analyse the ways in which airline service provision constitutes a critical case study of womens work, certain elements of which involve a form of ‘gift’ exchange relations which operate, not as an alternative to, but inside — and in the interests of — commodity exchange relations. Finally, in the light of recent feminist work, this paper will conclude by suggesting the wider implications of this analytical model for the study of gender and work.

Flight Attendants and the Management of Gendered ‘Organizational Bodies’

The management of the ‘organizational bodies’ of flight attendants is our main focus in this chapter. Building on Witz, Haiford and Savage’s (1997) concept of temporally and spatially ‘organized bodies’, we use the term ‘organizational body’ here to refer to the mode of embodiment, the manipulation of the presentation and performance of the body, which must be maintained in order to become and remain an employee of a particular organization and to ‘embody’ that organization. In an examination of the gendered organization and regulation of organizational bodies in the context of waged work, the chapter draws on empirical research into the recruitment, training and supervision of female flight attendants as an example of the constitution of ‘organizational bodies’ as fundamental to the functioning of contemporary service organizations. In the case of a flight attendant, the achievement and maintenance of an ‘organizational body’ involves being subject not only to organizationally specific management techniques, but also to those occupational discourses which operate in the industry generally and which serve to define the role and identity of a flight attendant (Tyler and Abbott 1998). At least in part, this is as the embodiment of an organizational identity — as the material signifier of an organizational ethos — or as one Qantas executive put it, ‘the packaging of a product’ (cited in Williams 1988). A female flight attendant must, therefore, learn to practice certain ‘body techniques’ (Mauss 1973).

Ethnic variation in the female labour force: a research note

Dans le recensement anglais de 1991, la question sur lorigine ethnique permet danalyser la segregation professionnelle par sexe et groupe ethnique. Cette analyse montre que les femmes Noires des Caraibes ou dAfrique ont plus de chances detre economiquement actives (au travail ou a la recherche dun emploi) que les Blanches. Lanalyse confirme egalement que les femmes non-blanches ont plus de risques que les Blanches detre au chomage. Toutefois, letude revele dimportantes variations selon les groupes ethniques, en sorte quaucune tendance generale a subir une segregation uniforme vers les emplois a bas statuts ne peut etre observee pour les femmes non-blanches. En effet, les femmes Pakistanaises et Chinoises sont notablement sur-representees parmi les cadres et les professions liberales