Work and Occupations

The sociology of service work has blossomed in the 10 years since Work and Occupations first published a special issue on this subject. This introductory essay chronicles developments and new debates around emotional labor, worker–customer relationships in the service triangle, and the nexus of gender and control in service work. Several neglected themes are highlighted, including the relationship between race and the organization of work on the shop floor, as well as a number of themes that were once prominent in industrial sociology but which have fallen into relative neglect in the sociology of service work despite their continuing relevance.

Sociologists of service work have firmly established that clients may become crucial allies for either workers or managers at conflict throughout the labor process. However, less attention has been given to how these colluding relations may extend beyond the limits of a service interaction. An ethnographic approach into the nature of the alliances between bus drivers and their passengers in Monterrey, Mexico, revealed a subterranean gender system that systematically structured workers’ struggle against management in ways that have not been considered by the sociology of service work. How might personal, emotional, and sexualized connections weave into class struggle? In this article, the author traces a series of strategies and counterstrategies developed by male bus owners and bus drivers in their quest for control over profit, highlighting the gendered motivations and means that sustain this gendered class struggle. The article concludes with a hypothetical overview of the contradictory ways class and gender systems may be articulated and how further research along these lines might deepen the understanding of class struggle.

The subfield that is the sociology of service labor continues to generate vibrant internal dialogue. It was the author’s original intent to push forward the frontier of theory within this field, by performing an ethnography of service work in a non-American context (that of post-apartheid South Africa). Once in the field, however, he found himself moving backward as he was forced to problematize basic assumptions concerning the very category of service. In brief, the author discovered that managers in a competitive tourism industry refused to label their employees’ interactive labor as “service,” whereas workers themselves actively advocated for such a designation. To document the interplay between material and symbolic politics of production, the author turned to the work of Pierre Bourdieu—especially his theory of political representation and the accompanying concept of nomination struggles.

Although some software engineers and developers work directly with the final users of their product to generate customized software, many do not. However, drawing on an ethnographic study of software developers in a U.S. firm in Ireland, this article argues that both software developers who work closely with customers and those who do not can be thought of as “service workers.” The article extends the analysis of the “service triangle” of workers, managers, and customers to software workers who interact with customers in the software development and support process. It then uses the case of software workers who do not interact with customers to rethink our definition of what counts as service work. For these workers, the customer also looms large in the workplace—but only as an abstract entity to which they should respond and be attentive, mobilized through organizational mechanisms that transmit and simulate market pressures rather than through concrete interactions with customers themselves. The irony is that an organization of production that mobilizes the customer as the driving force of the production process ultimately, and largely unintentionally, marginalizes the customer as irrational and incompetent—an outsider in the service economy, with little input into the technologies they end up using.

Upscale retail stores prefer to hire class-privileged workers because they embody particular styles and mannerisms that match their specialized brands. Yet retail jobs pay low wages and offer few benefits. How do these employers attract middle-class workers to these bad jobs? Drawing on interviews with retail workers and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, the authors find that employers succeed by appealing to their consumer interests. The labor practices we identify contribute to the re-entrenchment of job segregation, race and gender discrimination, and fetishism of consumption. The conclusion argues against rewarding aesthetic labor and suggests other rationales for upgrading low-wage retail employment.

This article charts changing power relations within customer services, focusing on frontline service sector managers (FLSSMs): what they do and how they do it. Although increasingly ghostlike in the sociology of customer service work, the FLSSM is a mediator of the often divergent interests of employees, senior management, and customers. Drawing on Kanter’s notion of power failure in management circuits, the article depicts a series of “triangle dramas” drawn from a variety of frontline settings that show how managers can be denied access to “lines of power.” The analysis questions the expectation that FLSSMs have sufficient power to resolve customer dissatisfactions or address structural failings.

There is an important research gap regarding how the service triangle in care work is affected by the use of surveillance technology. This article addresses this gap by reporting quantitative and qualitative research undertaken in three U.K. local government home care organizations. Through regression analysis, it is found that discretionary effort is positively related, and organizational commitment negatively related, to information technology as a controlling force and management hindering the delivery of client services. The qualitative research triangulates these findings and offers complementarity by showing that workers continued to give discretionary effort in order to maintain the delivery of meaningful care to clients, even as they lowered their commitment to the organization. The conclusion draws out the implications of these findings for understanding of the social relations of the service triangle in contemporary society.