Abstract
Markets and Bodies by Elieen Otis is an incredible book that explores gendered and classed inequalities within the new service economy emerging in post-Maoist China. Most studies of globalization either start from the top-down, by examining how local spaces are transformed by larger political, economic, and global forces, or focus on micro-level dimensions, through an analysis of the interactive dynamics of service sector work. This book, brilliantly illustrates how the formation of China’s emergent service class has had a profound social and economic impact on global and local markets of consumption.
Otis conducted 13 months of ethnographic research in Beijing and Kunming’s formal and informal service sectors in 1999, along with several follow-up visits between 2005 and 2008. In the formal sector, she conducted research in two international hotels: a five-star hotel located in Beijing, which services mainly a Western clientele, and a luxury tourist hotel, located in Kunming that caters to the growing number of wealthy local Chinese tourists. She also spent time in the informal sector – restaurants, beauty salons, karaoke bars, saunas, and guesthouses that were spatially concentrated around the hotels. She conducted a total of 168 interviews across these formal and informal sectors of the economy: 55 in Beijing and 60 in Kunming with workers and managers, along with another 53 interviews with rural migrant women working in the informal economy. The breadth and depth of her research across multiple sites and cities are rarely seen among scholars who study service sector work.
Extending Arlie Hochchild’s concept of emotional labor, Otis theorizes bodies as vehicles that not only reflect affective responses but also anchor gendered and classed inequalities, naturalizing subordination. Otis introduces two concepts to explain the interactive labor specific to each setting. The first, market-embodied labor, ‘identifies the relationship between alterations of employees’ bodies at work and the struggles for status distinctions among consumers, as these are organized at the point of consumption’ (p. 154). The second, embeddedness, ‘points to the ways in which embodied labor practices take root in – and are reconfigured by – historical employment legacies, as well as workers’ own local schemata of perception and value’ (p. 155). Reflecting post-Maoist China, these concepts together offer a new way to examine the emergence of diverse labor processes as global capital meets local situations.
The book is oriented around three different styles of market-embodied labor processes, virtual professionalism, virtuous professionalism, and aspirational urbanism. Virtual professionalism – expressed in the Beijing Transluxury hotel that caters to Western clients – hinges on a model of emphasized femininity defined by care, sexual modesty, and putting others before oneself. Managers train young female staff to magnify, and care about, infinitesimal details of customer preferences by directing workers to collect customer information, which is stored on computers, to provide customized services. Emphasized femininity is displayed on women’s bodies as workers enact and embody the particular kind of classed status that is consonant with the niche markets of their guests. Workers develop ‘soft’ skills that involve an ineffable ability to observe behavioral evidence of the personal desires of others. The Beijing Transluxury hotel offers services comparable to other five star hotels outside of China. However, the structure of labor practices are also embedded within socialist work legacies. Otis illustrates this through the ways that workers interpret their work routines through a hierarchical model of relationships, which increases worker distance from customers.
As China begins to emerge as a leading economic power in the world today, the brilliance of this book lies in its comparative focus on the differences between global Western versus local Chinese styles of consumption. Virtuous professionalism – expressed in the Kumming Transluxury hotel that caters to wealthy locals – is a set of labor practices that enables workers to defend their dignity on the service floor. In contrast to the five-star hotels in Beijing, the luxury hotels in Kumming lower the price of the rooms but offer a variety of other services, including escort services in karaoke bars, saunas, and salons. As a result, female staff members construct symbolic boundaries to distinguish themselves from prostitutes, while simultaneously embracing professional protocols in order to avoid being indicted as rural and ‘backwards’ by managers and customers.
Expanding her ethnographic research outside of the formal sector, Otis also extends the concept of market-embodied labor to China’s informal sector. This service sector exists outside of the world of corporate service conglomerates. Instead, in this sector, rural migrants provide services to local Chinese urbanites. However, because of China’s household registration system, the institutional embeddedness of employment excludes rural migrants from legal protections, rendering them an extremely docile labor force. As a result, migrant women respond to their exclusion from urban citizenship through aspirational urbanism, where workers engage in self-disciplinary practices and docility. Workers seek acceptance in urban worlds by purchasing commodities and services that signal feminine urban sophistication. Accordingly, these ‘self-reinventions are embodied performances of femininity that shed the symbolic references to their putatively backward rural origins’ allowing the women to embrace modernity (p. 149).
The author does a marvelous job of extending theories of emotional labor by developing new conceptual frames to theorize the ways in which women’s bodies take on varied forms of emphasized femininities. Although female workers occupy the vast majority of service occupations in these hotels, more data and theory on the male service staff that worked in these spaces and how their market-embodied labors vary in relation to female service workers would have increased the already robust empirical and theoretical contribution of this book. How do male workers draw symbolic boundaries between themselves and the customers? How do men maintain a sense of status and dignity in feminized service occupations?
Far from indicating a weakness, the questions that this book raises attest to its outstanding contribution. It is rare to read an engaging book with such insightful observations of gendered and classed inequalities. As one of the only books that highlights the differences between Western and local styles of luxury consumption, this is an excellent text for graduate and undergraduate students interested in conducting multi-sited comparative ethnographies. This is an informative, nicely organized, and easily accessible book that should be read by policy-makers and scholars alike: Otis has written a book that is a must read for those interested in Asia, globalization, gender, labor, and migration studies.