Rachel Sherman

Producing the superior self Strategic comparison and symbolic boundaries among luxury hotel workers

In the luxury hotel, unequal entitlements between workers and guests - both to human attention and labor and to social and material resources generally - are prominent. Participant observation in two hotels shows that one of the myriad ways interactive workers respond to their subordinate position is to establish themselves as superior to others. They use comparative strategies of self to situate themselves as privileged on a range of symbolic hierarchies, including those of competence, authority, status, need, morality, intelligence, and cultural capital. Comparative ethnographic data on these judgments shows that they are not fixed categories in people’s heads but rather contradictory, context-dependent orientations. The article further argues that even as they establish workers as symbolically superior, these strategies also constitute some people as legitimately entitled to workers’ labor, thereby normalizing inequality between workers and guests.

“Time Is Our Commodity” Gender and the Struggle for Occupational Legitimacy Among Personal Concierges

The emergence of personal concierge and errand services in the past decade offers a rare opportunity to look at a fledgling occupation with uncertain prospects and in particular to examine its rhetorical struggles for legitimacy. Providers of these services are attempting to commodify household and personal tasks largely associated with women’s labor. Based on interviews and participant observation, this article demonstrates that this association of concierge work with women’s work impedes its symbolic and monetary valuation in the market. In response, concierges primarily use gender-neutral frames to legitimate their product and cast themselves as professionals. This analysis illuminates multiple dimensions of legitimacy-seeking and documents the continued influence of gender on rhetorics of work and value in the market.

Beyond interaction customer influence on housekeeping and room service work in hotels

The literature on the role of customers in service work has neglected work that does not involve significant face-to-face interaction, assuming it to be distant from customer influence and thus highly routinisable. This article uses ethnographic data from housekeeping and room service in two urban luxury hotels in the USA to look comparatively at how customers influence this work and its management. It argues that customers affect several non-interactive dimensions of these jobs, including timing, pace and effort. These effects also influence managerial strategies for organising labour processes, making routinisation impossible and shaping alternatives. These findings indicate the need for a reconceptualisation of customer influence in work.

Rethinking the Ethnographic Local Identity, Culture, and Politics at Work in the Global Economy

This article reviews four recent books on workers in the global economy. Taking a range of approaches, these monographs draw on qualitative data to describe workplaces and workers in a variety of economic, cultural, and political contexts. Wilson’s analysis of “intimate economies” in Bangkok brings together economic processes with the multiple social identities of worker-consumers. Adler and Adler offer a deeply grounded portrait of diverse types of workers in Hawaiian resort hotels, who make meaningful selfhoods in an environment of transience and unstable temporalities. Chari brings the politics of production together with history, culture, and identity discourses to explain the particularities of garment manufacture in one South Indian town. Esbenshade evaluates the myriad efforts to monitor garment production worldwide, highlighting the tensions between private models, which are largely ineffective except in the area of public relations for manufacturers, and an independent model that aims to promote worker empowerment.

Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work

Guizhou stack up on a global scale. Finally, there was no discussion of non-governmental organizations, domestic or (particularly) international, which are active in these provinces, especially in fields such as HIV/AIDS, and environmental protection. As luck would have it, I read this book just prior to a trip to Guizhou. Energized by Donaldson’s ‘‘small is beautiful’’ mantra, I was stunned to see that Guizhou has now done an about turn: there was large-scale industry, rapid urban development, the construction of super highways and bridges across the province, and a push into largescale tourism. It left me wondering if microdevelopment should be seen as a stage creating a strong base for a ‘‘take-off’’ to rapid growth, rather than an end in itself.

Freelancing Expertise: Contract Professionals in the New Economy

Prior studies have documented how deindustrialization poses a bleak outlook for both individuals and their communities: longterm unemployment, elevated poverty, and the erosion of once vital areas. What can people do to mitigate the effects of declining industries that once employed several generations of workers? More importantly, how can collective action help transform society into realizing diverse interests, rather than just a few, narrowly defined interests? Jeremy Brecher’s Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley shares a much-needed account of how such efforts unfold in Western Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, a community known for its brass manufacturing since the 1800s. An historian by training, documentarymaker, and resident of Naugatuck Valley for three decades, Brecher conducted over 100 interviews with leaders, staff, and locals for this book. He also conducted archival research and attended over 100 meetings as a participant-observer. The interviews provide the bulk of the data for his case studies of collective action regarding job preservation, job creation, and the construction of affordable housing via more democratic forms of organization. The challenges confronting Naugatuck Valley are depressingly familiar even to the most vibrant of communities and cities: multinational companies take over locallyowned factories and treat these as commodities, rather than as sources of livelihoods and identities, job prospects shift to the poorly-compensated service sector, and longtime renters face rising housing costs as developers deplete the affordable housing stock by converting rental units into condominiums. On the other hand, an influx of new residents poses another challenge that could potentially reinvigorate the community: how to integrate newcomers and incorporate their interests. Rather than relying upon the state or the market to address these issues, Naugatuck Valley residents organized to pursue mutual interests via collectivities run by the community, employees, or residents. Brecher posits that three conditions are necessary for such ‘‘local action’’ and ‘‘democratic economic vision’’—‘‘grassroots organization, democratically controlled enterprises, and supportive public policies’’ (p. xxi). Brecher first recounts how existing organizations, with the help of Ken Gladstone, a community organizer trained in Alinskyite organizing, formed the Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP) in the 1980s. Rather than focusing on one particular project, this ‘‘community alliance’’ has promoted grassroots organizing to revitalize their area. The NVP both formed new ties and built upon existing network ties in the workplace and small businesses, unions, churches and other organizations; this collective identified existing problems and possible solutions. Brecher describes how Gladstone deploys Alinskyite techniques for the unfamiliar ends of economic development—in this community, creating jobs or housing through corporations owned and run by residents. The Alinskyite techniques involve listening to locals to identify issues, selecting possible leaders, and then organizing collectivities to address these issues. These techniques use the power of organized groups—in these cases, residents, and workers—who otherwise have difficulties as individuals eliciting accountability to their interests from the state or their workplaces. The resulting redefined relations help democratize a political process that previously only catered to elite interests. To support his claims, Brecher delves into several case studies to illuminate the challenges, setbacks, and rewards of selforganizing. The first case illustrates how employees need support in honing their selfmanaging skills, but also shares individuals’

Unions in a Globalized Environment: Changing Borders, Organizational Boundaries, and Social Roles.Edited by Bruce Nissen. M.E. Sharpe, 2002. 293 pp. Cloth,

absent from the theoretical discourse, which is a pity, because today’s neoMarxist structural explanations of international movement certainly have enough “space” in them to accommodate transnationalism and its dynamic, multilocal nature. Perhaps as another refreshing adventure, this scholarly, indepth treatment of Dominican-U.S. circulation and migration might well be reincarnated to incorporate transnational notions into the explanatory framework. Moving on to dwell upon the evolving contexts and evolving changes in Dominican’s international circulation and migration strategies would appear an essential next step. This would, from necessity, involve investigation of conditions at both the sending and receiving contexts and involve a more informed analysis of the complete circuit — its involved family, households, and communities and the concomitant circulation of people, capital, information, goods in kind, cultural practices, and survival strategies between island and metropolitan enclave community. Despite this last observation and a call for an even more holistic treatment of Dominican migration to the U.S. than is delivered herein, Ramona Hernández has provided us with a refreshing, evocative analysis and a thoroughly readable and detailed structural explanation of this important life strategy for Dominicans. The tenor of the argument is refreshing, the sharpness of insight is engaging, and the coverage/recognition of the everyday racism, inequality, and disadvantage that awaits today’s Latino immigrant is to be welcomed as an absolutely critical reality check. This is an exemplary text that deserves a place on any serious scholar’s bookshelf. I am certainly glad it’s on mine.