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Service Labor and Symbolic Power : On Putting Bourdieu to Work

Jeffrey J. Sallaz
Work and Occupations 2010 37: 295
DOI: 10.1177/0730888410373076
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Service Labor and

Symbolic Power: On
Putting Bourdieu to
Work

Work and Occupations

37(3) 295319
The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0730888410373076
http://wox.sagepub.com

Jeffrey J. Sallaz1
Abstract
The subfield that is the sociology of service labor continues to generate
vibrant internal dialogue. It was the authors 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 Bourdieuespecially his theory of political
representation and the accompanying concept of nomination struggles.
Keywords
service work, Bourdieu, labor, South Africa
The most resolutely objectivist theory must take account of agents representation of the social world and . . . thereby to the very construction of this world,
via the labour of representation (in all senses of the term) that they continually
perform.
Bourdieu (1999a, p. 234)

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:
Jeffrey J. Sallaz, PO Box 210027, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Email: jsallaz@email.arizona.edu

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The service occupations today saturate our lifeworlds. They pour our lattes,
pluck our eyebrows, empty our bedpans. Nor can there can be any ambiguity
about the effect on sociological scholarship of this shift from an old, manufacturing-based economy to a new service society. The result has been a veritable paradigm shift in the sociology of work. Ethnographers intent on
documenting the organization of the labor process no longer trudge off to the
factory but, rather, to the local fast-food franchise. Scholars of labor movements increasingly focus their gaze not on the bureaucratic unions that long
dominated heavy industries and crafts but on the social movement unionism that holds hope for organizing low-wage service workers (Fantasia &
Voss, 2004; Lopez, 2004; Milkman, 2006). Also, the past two decades have
witnessed a proliferation of new theoretical frameworks for making sense of
the specificities of service work (MacDonald & Korczynski, 2009). Emotional labor, care work, and three-way interest alliance are all concepts of
recent origin, and all represent significant additions to the theoretical toolkit
passed down from classic studies of industrial sociology.
During the same period in which the sociology of work has been shaken
up the canon of sociological theory in America also has been. Parsonian
structural functionalism fell from favor during the late 1960s and 1970s, in
the face of both a radical resurgence of Marxist sociology and the emergence
of new theories centering the lived experience of women, minorities, and
other subalterns (Gouldner, 1970). The past two decades, meanwhile, has
witnessed a growing interest among American sociologists in the sociological research program pioneered by the late Pierre Bourdieu (Emirbayer &
Johnson, 2008). Although surprising in the sense that American sociology
has historically eschewed continental theory, Bourdieus theory represents a
powerful synthesis of the sociologies of Karl Marx (in its emphasis on power
and domination), Emile Durkheim (in its attention to the interplay between
cultural categories and social structure), and Max Weber (in its theorization
of legitimacy as an institutional process). Bourdieu is now one of the most
cited theorists in top American sociology journals (Sallaz & Zavisca, 2008).
Given these trends, it would be fair to say that the ground is ripe for dialogue
between these two emergent fields. In fact, sociologists of work have thoroughly explored at least one of Bourdieus key ideas: that of the habitus, the
embodied sens of reality through which social agents perceive and act on the
world. Desmond (2007), for instance, documented how the U.S. Forest Service
manages its labor supply by manipulating young mens rural-masucline habitus. Scholars of service and culture industries have in turn examined how
employers, to ensure the performance of aesthetic labor, actively encourage
(especially female) workers to cultivate particular embodied dispositions

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(Dean, 2005; Hanser, 2008; Pettinger, 2005; Warhurst & Nickson, 2007;
Williams & Connell, in press; Wissinger, 2009; Witz, Warhurst, & Nickson,
2003). As illustrated by these studies, the value of the habitus concept is that
it expands our purview beyond the labor process, on to the larger field of
experiences and meanings that workers bring with them into the workplace.
What though of the other key elements of Bourdieus theory? Do they also
hold potential for advancing our understanding of the dynamics of contemporary service work? This article considers the relevance of Bourdieus political sociology for elucidating new objects of inquiry at the point of production.
It commences, in a section called Labor and Representation, by reviewing
the corpus of Bourdieus writings to see how he analyzed the subject of labor.
Over the course of his career, I conclude, Bourdieu moved away from arguments about the habitus and work organization to establish the principles of
a general sociology of symbolic power. At this point, the article critically
interrogates three key assumptions of the sociology of service work through
the lens of Bourdieus political-cultural sociology. Doing so provides a
framework for analyzing the actors and strategies involved with the symbolic
struggles that undergird even the most basic bread-and-butter issues at
work.
The second half of the article shows how Bourdieus political sociology
may be put to work. It presents qualitative data drawn from my own ethnographic study of labor inside a large entertainment complex in contemporary
South Africa. It was during such fieldwork that I discovered a puzzle. Rather
than seeking to encourage emotional labor, managers in this competitive
tourism industry refused to label employees interactive work as service.
In turn, workers actively advocated for such a designation. Such struggles
over the definition of workers labor were not peripheral to, but rather were
key elements of, the larger production regime. We thus conclude by elaborating on the relevance for the sociology of work of one of Bourdieus key
ideas: that of the nomination struggle in situ.

Labor and Representation

From Earthly Labor to Symbolic Power: The
Trajectory of Pierre Bourdieu
How can the theory of Pierre Bourdieu be used to advance our understanding
of service labor? Insofar as Bourdieu himself never explicitly addressed the
subject, we are required to do a brief excavation of his overall body of work.

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What follows here is my own interpretation of this corpus, based on close

reading of all available English translations of his books and articles. I argue
that, for our purposes, this body of work can be divided into three phases:
first, early ethnological studies of work in the colonial context (especially
Travail et Travailleurs en Algrie, published in English as Algeria 1960 in
1979); second, a series of monographs on culture and fields in modern France
(Distinction in 1984, representing the crowning achievement); and third, a
public sociological critique of globalization and neoliberalism (works such
as Firing Back in 2003). The overall picture to emerge is of a shift from
analysis of work in its local context to that of culture in a global context.
Bourdieus first major research project was an ethnological study of the
rural Algerian people known as the Kabyle. They lived, Bourdieu argued, in
an undifferentiated social space without autonomous fields such as universities and labor markets (Bourdieu, 1977). As a consequence, their schemes of
perception, or habitus, were traditional; they were attuned to the past and
generated in the Kabyle people a desire to conform to inherited models
(Bourdieu, 1979, p. 9). On a day-to-day basis, this meant that labor (of which
the tasks of farming were primary) was performed as it had been for centuries
before. But this system was disrupted by French colonization. Forced off the
land, the peasant migrated to the city where his traditional habitus proved to
be ill equipped for a modern economy. He was unable to imagine his labor
power as a commodity to be sold at market nor could he accumulate savings
to plan for periods of unemployment. Like the proverbial fish out of water,
the newly urbanized peasant fell into a traditionalism of despair.
After returning from Algeria, Bourdieu began a series of studies of modern France as an example of what he called a differentiated society, that is,
a social world characterized by multiple fields and species of capital (cultural, economic, etc.). Dispositions still mattered. For instance, in Distinction
(Bourdieu, 1984), his monumental study of consumption and taste, Bourdieu
depicted modern France not as a static social order oriented toward fidelity to
the past but as a dynamic game of culture. Artists continually vie to outdo one
another with formal innovations, resulting in a permanent revolution of
cultural forms. But to enter this game in the first place, one must have experienced a particular form of socialization: a childhood in which one was
assured of having ones basic material needs met. Working-class children, in
contrast, endure scarcity and hardship, resulting in a taste for necessity that
hinders their ability to play the games of culture found in the various elite
fields.
In general, however, fields are autonomous spaces, such that the cultural
games played within them are rarely overdetermined by material constraints.

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In fact, the work of artists, politicians, and other professionals is characterized by nuanced strategies of framing, categorizing, and classifying symbols.
It was one of Bourdieus enduring contributions to elucidate these strategies
and the principles underling themto expose, that is, a modern economy of
symbolic power. Curiously though, the world of work for the most part
escaped his gaze. His empirical studies focused on the education system
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979), the political field (Bourdieu, 1996), the art
world (Bourdieu, 1993), and housing markets (Bourdieu, 2005). It was not
until the end of his career that he would return, if but briefly, to the subject of
work.
In what I label Bourdieus third phase, he assumed the role of public intellectual to critique the global spread of neoliberal ideology. Emanating from
the United States, this ideology demands the simultaneous withdrawal of the
state from the realm of the social and the ascendency of market forces as the
ultimate arbitrator of value and exchange (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999). In
works such as The Weight of the World (Bourdieu, 1999b), Bourdieu speculated as to how neoliberalism affects workers, trade unions, and the working
class as whole. Once more he invoked his dispositional theory, now to explain
how workers respond to the economic precariousness produced by
neoliberalism:
Insecurity acts directly on those it touches (and whom it renders incapable of mobilizing themselves) and indirectly on all the others,
through the fear it arouses . . . [These are] the prerequisites for an
increasingly successful exploitation of these submissive dispositions
produced by insecurity. (Bourdieu, 1998b, pp. 82-83)
As this summary shows, Bourdieus work, although it neglects to consider
explicitly the structuring of service labor, is replete with possible lines of
inquiry.

A Sociology of Representation: Nomination Struggles at Work

This article expounds on one of Bourdieus key theoretical contributions: his
analysis of the symbolic politics of nomination struggles. There is of course
an excellent branch of research examining how workplaces can be sites of
contention over meanings, identity, and dignity (Hodson, 2001; Lopez, 2006;
Sherman, 2010; Vallas, 2006). Room exists, however, to flesh out in full how
Bourdieus work on symbolic representation allows us to analyze the workplace as a site of micro-political contestation over the existence and meaning

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of service work. In brief, I argue that scholars too readily take for granted
the existence of service work as a category of analysis. They prematurely
black box the notion, thereby neglecting to consider that the very concept
can be a stake of contestation on the shop floor.
To elaborate, the emergent sociology of service work makes three assumptions that are problematic from a Bourdieuian perspective. First, that service
work (or some similar term) is a self-evident concept that can be defined a
priori by the analyst. The typical work in the field begins by offering a new
label and definition for the phenomenon under consideration. Hochschild
(1985), for instance, introduces the term emotional labor and defines it as
work in which management attempts to control a customers feelings by controlling a workers emotional displays. Leidner (1993) in turn uses the term
interactive labor to denote all employment in which workers have face-toface or voice-to-voice contact with clients. Each then proceeds from their
initial definition, through a series of modalities (i.e., logical operators that
assume the validity of the initial premise or concept; see Latour, 1987), and
onto a set of empirical conclusions.
Bourdieu, in contrast, argued that there may occur definitional struggles to
establish wherein lie the boundaries between formal work and other forms of
labor. The task of the sociologist is hence to objectify objectification: to
take as ones data the history behind any given system of classifications
(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 7). In Practical Reason (1998b), he gives the example of
an attempt by altar boys in the Catholic Church to form a union. The courts
denied their claim, arguing that a church is not to be considered a business
entity nor are those who labor inside it to be thought of as employees. And in
the United States, there is ongoing debate as to the legal status of home health
care aides. Currently they are classified as companions, not employees,
and so are eligible for neither protections such as those provided by minimum wage legislation nor benefits such as overtime pay. As these examples
demonstrate, work can be a stake in struggles to mobilize symbolic power.
Actors will seek to grant or deny to a particular activity the title of work:
a being-perceived guaranteed as a right (Bourdieu, 1999a, p. 239). By
implication, just as the work/nonwork boundary can constitute a site of struggle so too may the work/service work boundary (Sherman, 2005). When does
a form of labor constitute service? When will key actors (especially workers and management) seek to advance, challenge, or defend such claims?
Such questions lead to our next extension.
A second common claim made by sociologists of work is that service will
represent an additional demand imposed by management on workers. All
forms of labor, this reasoning goes, will involve some noninteractive

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duties. Both forklift drivers and flight attendants transport heavy carts up and
down aisles. Both chemists and barristas pour hot liquid from one flask into
another. Service workers, however, face an additional layer of responsibility:
that of managing their emotional expressions so as to generate in customers
an appropriate feeling state. The classic example is Hochschilds (1985)
comparison of an 18th-century child factory laborer with a modern flight
attendant. The former was likely estranged from his body insofar as his muscles and tendons were gradually worn down to produce profit for someone
else. The boys emotions, however, were safely his own. The flight attendant,
in contrast, sells not only her physical labor power but also her capacity to
engage in emotional labor. As capitalism steadily pulls emotions into the
realm of commodity production and circulation (what Hochschild calls a
transmutation of emotion systems), service workers are at hazard for not
simply physical alienation but emotional alienation as well (Grant, Morales,
& Sallaz, 2009).
When viewing work through a Bourdieuian lens, service appears not as
an additional claim placed on workers but as a potential counterclaim to be
made by workers. Symbolic acts of nominationthat is, moves to classify an
object as a certain sort of thingare also always acts of claim making
(Bowker & Star, 2000). By lobbying the government to label the labor of
home health care workers as formal employment, advocates seek to guarantee these workers an array of rights and material benefits, ranging from
protection against discrimination to social security eligibility. But can the
same hold for achieving the official label of a service worker? Although
state agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics use a variety of
schemata for classifying different forms of work, regulatory systems rarely
draw a significant distinction between manufacturing and service jobs for the
purpose of determining rights and benefits. Nonetheless, this does not rule
out the possibility that at the level of the individual enterprise or workplace,
symbolic struggles (with very real stakes) may take place over the service
work label. But to analyze such micro-political struggles requires that we
consider as well the issue of managerial action within economic fields.
This brings us to a third extension that can be brought about by a
Bourdieuian perspective. This one problematizes the assumption that decision makers within a firm, when planning work routines and requirements
regarding service, operate in line with a basic economic logic of product
differentiation. The various strands of scholarship on service work are here in
agreement that competition will beget a demand for high-quality customer
service. Industries in which some entity possesses a monopoly on the goods
or service will provide managers with little incentive to induce a service

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orientation in workers. Consumers are a captive market, whereas training and

monitoring costs for emotional labor are not negligible. The paradigmatic
example is the government post office, universally reviled for its long lines
and its workers surly demeanors. In contrast, competitive industries should
use quality service as a means of product differentiation. If consumers have
a choice as to where to purchase an item or service, all else (especially price)
being equal, they will choose the firm that offers them the most pleasant
experience.
But Bourdieus (2005) own work on the contemporary economy argues
that industries resemble less competitive free markets than complementary
fields of production. Dovetailing with recent approaches in economic sociology (Fligstein, 2002; Podolny, 2008), Bourdieu (2005) depicted economic
fields as stable structures wherein dominant firms establish the rules of the
game, whereas smaller firms must be content to occupy peripheral niches.
Producers share a common understanding of how firms will compete with
one anotherconcerning, that is, those aspects of the production process that
will be standardized versus those that can be manipulated by managers. And
what are the implications of these arguments for the study of service work?
In brief, rather than viewing service as an abstract commodity, we should
seek to delineate the specific meaning it has for managers, workers, and consumers. Such meanings, furthermore, must be situated in relation to the history and structure of the particular field under consideration.

Service Struggles in South Africa

To illustrate the utility of a Bourdieuian approach to studying service work, I
present evidence from one of my field studies. It was a case in which ongoing
conflict occurred between workers and management over the status of the
tasks performed. Each side advanced claims as to whether or not it was
appropriate to label such tasks as customer service. But there was no final
recourse to an outside entity (such as the state or an appropriate labor bureau)
nor could either side mobilize sufficient symbolic power to settle the issue
once and for all. The result was a stalemate and ongoing hostility between the
two sides.
The field site was a large entertainment complex in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. It contained a hotel, shopping mall, casino, and several
food courts. Fieldwork was conducted over the course of two ethnographic
stints, one in 2001-2002 (a 9-month research project) and the other in 2006
(a 3-month site revisit). As these dates indicate, all fieldwork was performed
during South Africas post-apartheid period (White rule ended with the 1994

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electoral victory of the African National Congress, or ANC, over the incumbent National Party). The author was granted access to the field site as an
official intern of the company, called herein Empowerment Inc., that
owned the complex, called herein Rainbow City. (Because operation of
several of the retail outlets and restaurants in the complex was outsourced to
other firms, the analysis herein is restricted to employees of Empowerment
Inc.; these workers constituted 80% of the workers on-site at any given time.)
Several characteristics of the site, firm, and workforce are relevant for
understanding the subsequent struggles that emerged around the classification
of workers labor as a service job. The firm, Empowerment Inc., had been in
operation since the late 1970s. It had operated resorts throughout rural South
Africa during the apartheid era, and most of the current managerial employees
were Whites who had been with the company for 10-plus years. (Blacks had
been informally barred from managerial positions during apartheid, in line
with what was known as the color bar.) Following the end of White rule, the
firm had been permitted to continue operations in South Africa but only on
condition that it adhere to a strict plan for Black economic empowerment
specifically, a nationwide system of numerical quotas for hiring previously
disadvantaged individuals into low-level positions throughout the organization (Webster & Omar, 2003). This category included all those typically considered service workers in the literature, such as food servers (Paules, 1991),
casino dealers (Goffman, 1982), and cashiers (Smith, 1992).
The work performed by these employees certainly seemed to meet all the
scope conditions for an emotionally demanding service job as specified in the
literature. Workers engaged in face-to-face encounters (i.e., interactive labor)
with clients, and the emotional state of these clients was considered by management to be important. Diners, for instance, were to leave the restaurants
content, losing gamblers consoled, and so on. And as a firm operating in a
competitive urban marketplace, Empowerment Inc. actively promoted in its
marketing material the idea that guests would have an unparalleled, worldclass leisure experience. Given such conditions, we would be justified to say
that the sociology of service work would predict managers to require workers
to perform customer service for clients.
But allow me to report the following empirical puzzle: This prediction did
not hold true. Managers did not ask workers to perform service for clients. On
the contrary, managers vehemently denied that workers should play any sort of
role in the process of creating for clients an enjoyable experience, whereas
workers actively sought to claim an identity as a service worker. What is
interesting is the issue of what sort of stakes each side saw as up-for-grabs in
such symbolic struggles over the nature of service as well as the strategies they

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used to pursue these stakes. In short, the very definition and relevant properties
of service constituted an active battleground at Rainbow City.

Service Is Shit in South Africa: Managerial Mythology Laid Bare

Let us start by considering managers. All top executives with Empowerment
Inc. were veteran White employees of the company and thus had decades
worth of experience running leisure resorts in southern Africa during apartheid. Many looked back at this time as a golden age in which the oversight of
a leisure resort was relatively easy. On one hand, the lack of state regulation
allowed the firm to routinely discriminate against Black staffa service sector counterpart to the racial Fordism that characterized South African
industry generally (Webster, 2002). On the other hand, the firm regularly
recruited experienced professionals from Europe to manage its properties. In
a given resort, a renowned chef from Germany might head the kitchen,
whereas an experienced croupier from London would direct the action on the
casino floor. Corporate executives trusted that these expats would ensure the
quality of goods and services. The firm, in short, had no explicit service philosophy or policies; it decentralized customer service routines to propertylevel managers.
Following the fall of apartheid, new labor legislation specified that the
general workforce and property-level management must be diversified in line
with a larger Black Economic Empowerment plan (Buhlungu, 2009). As for
incumbent White staff, a few were promoted into the ranks of corporate management, a few were able to retain their positions, but most resigned. At this
same time (the mid-1990s), Empowerment Inc. executives began a thorough
review of corporate policy and procedures regarding marketing issues. It was
decided that the company needed a new brand identity, and after several days
of brainstorming, executives came up with a new motif emphasizing fun,
excitement, and festivities. A corporate mission statement was drafted, containing a series of principles putting the guest at the center of everything
the organization does. At the Rainbow City Resort, posters were placed
throughout the back of the house areas (such as the cafeteria, near the
employee time clock, and in the break-room) extolling the virtues of giving
world-class service to guests.
The executive managers I interviewed and observed during my fieldwork
appeared to have completely bought into this new idea that customers emotions were now something to be managed by the firm. They spoke of those
who came to the resort to gamble as depressed individuals who needed to
be distracted and cheered up. They spoke matter-of-factly about the new

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imperative to provide the hotels guests with a world-class leisure experience. And they proudly displayed on their desks bronze plaques bearing
phrases such as The customer is always right.
But beneath this general rhetoric, there was something curious about how
managers went about creating a positive experience for guests: They believed
that customer service on the part of the firms frontline employees was to
play no part in it. Consider the following quote from the manager of Rainbow
Citys slot machine division. He is describing a new plan to generate enthusiasm among gamblers at the casino:
MGR: We got this new promotion event planned, we call it Lucky Slot
Madness. Everyone will be sitting there playing their machines,
when at some point in the night there will be a great commotion and
all the lights on all the machines will start flashing. One by one, the
lights will go off until theres only one left on, and this will be the
winner. The lucky slot.
JS: So whats the point of that? What do they win?
MGR: Oh something small, just a bottle of wine or something. The
important thing is that it will create a sense of excitement.
As this manager narrates an upcoming event, he illustrates that the firm has
dedicated significant energy to planning how to manipulate the consumers
emotions and overall experience. But notice too what is absent from this narrative: workers. All the operators intended to manipulate consumers (lights,
music, wine) are objects, not persons. This is puzzling given that workers
saturate the complex and are an obvious conduit for facilitating firmclient
contact. Here though lies the rub: managers explicitly removed customer service from the overall formula of experience-production. The words, demeanor,
and appearance of workers were all to be neutralized, not accentuated.
Managers explained their denial of employees service potential in several
ways. Most were essentialist arguments concerning the inability of Black
workers to provide quality customer service. For instance, and as the companys operations director explained to me in an informal conversation:
The African mentality is that they deserve something for nothing.
Theyve been a bartender for two years and expect to be promoted to
food and beverage manager. Back in the U.K., youll find an old man
who has been tending bar for 20 years and can give good service to
400 people. Here you can assign 400 Blacks to work a bar serving one
person, and theyll still find a way to muck it up.

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Another executive stated,

If youre a Black guy doing a service job, youre dreaming of being a
manager in a big office with nice carpet. Youre not thinking about the
job at hand, and youre definitely not thinking about the needs of the
customer standing there in front of you.
The general accusation conveyed by these quotes is one of a cultural incompetence, induced by a lack of patience and undue expectations. Several managers specifically mentioned culture when I asked them directly why they
dont ask workers to perform customer service. Its culture, all the obstacles,
they just dont have the tools. Consider as well the following statement, in
which workers standards of cleanliness are mocked:
Well weve met our equity quotas, exceeded them actually. The [provincial regulators] are happy, as weve even got 30% of our workers
from a nearby squatter camp. You cant even imagine how tough this
has been. We give them brand new white tuxedo shirts, and they go
home and wash them in the dirty little river. Now everyone is wearing
brown shirts! Just bloody brilliant.
Another line of argumentation specified that workers, even if they were
capable of providing quality service, would not want to. Black workers
resent having to do the service thing, one hotel executive stated, Especially
if the customer is White and wealthy. All sort of bad associations are brought
up. Here, the executive is referencing the status order of apartheid, wherein
those classified as Black were expected to exhibit deference to Whites in
everyday interaction. It is important to note too that managers claims regarding service expectations did not extend down to customers themselves. It is
true that clients of the Rainbow City entertainment complex (the majority of
whom were White) could no longer expect Black workers to be completely
servile in their demeanors. But, on the other hand, many expressed frustration that workers were not encouraged to provide any sort of service at all.
The final result of managers myriad truth-claims regarding workers service abilities was an adamant denial that customer service can or should
function as a means of product differentiation in the industry. For instance, in
an interview with the CEO of one of Empowerment Inc.s rival companies, I
had the following exchange:

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JS: So what steps does your company take to get workers to provide
good customer service?
CEO: [chuckling] Look, service in South Africa is shit. Its as simple
as that. Of course we all have an imagination that there would be
ideal service like there is in New York or Las Vegas.
JS: And what does that mean, ideal service?
CEO: Where you sit down at say a blackjack table, and within a minute, a waitress has come over to you, she smiles, and takes your
order for a drink. Or when you get to the hotel reservation desk, and
the clerk greets you and makes conversation.
AU: But those sort of things, they dont happen here?
CEO: No, and I cant see them ever.
To summarize the argument thus far: sociologists of work predict that, in
competitive industries, a positive consumer experience will become a means
of product differentiation, whereas workers service will be a part of such
differentiation strategies. This is a straightforward and logical hypothesis,
one in accordance with basic economic principles. But my findings from the
leisure industry in contemporary South Africa present an anomaly: They
validate the first part of this argument but not the second. The leisure industry
in Johannesburg is undoubtedly competitive. And executives within the firm
I studied have recently come to see a positive guest experience as an essential part of their marketing plan. Today, they actively strategize ways to control and manipulate clients emotions. But managers refuse to acknowledge
worker service as a possible means for doing so. Interviewee and interviewee
voiced a fatalistic resignation to the fact that service in South Africa is shit,
to invoke the fecal metaphor mentioned above. When pressed to justify this
argument, they referenced the abilities and desires of workers. Blacks,
their argument went, were unable and/or unwilling to perform service for
clients.
Workers themselves, however, had a different take.

But We Are Service Professionals! Workers Counterclaims

Did managers arguments accurately reflect the capacities and desires of
workers? Based on my cumulative fieldwork observations, I argue not. On
repeated occasions, and in various forums throughout the leisure resort, I
witnessed workers challenge managerial claims. Nor were these isolated and
idiosyncratic events, as these counterclaims were patterned and displayed a

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definite logic. The goal of this section is to use Bourdieus political sociology
to illuminate and interpret these patterns. The overall picture to emerge is of
Rainbow City as a veritable battleground for symbolic claims over the meaning of seemingly commonplace notions such as customer satisfaction, service work, and professionalism.
Management depicted workers as constrained by various elements of their
culture. The three tropes most commonly used were that of the uppity
Black who was too busy dreaming of an office job to concentrate on service,
the incompetent Black who lacked the tools to relate to the firms respectable clientele, and the angry Black who would be offended if asked to
prove service. In reality, though, most workers fit none of these stereotypes.
The 2,000-plus employees of Rainbow city were primarily Black South Africans, and they were diverse in terms of gender, age, and prior work experiences. For many, it was their first job, and some surely did lack the skills that
would be necessary for world-class service (such as the new restaurant
server who was only partially fluent in English or the cocktail waitress whose
body type failed to meet managers expectations concerning ideal standards
of beauty). But few workers viewed service as inherently difficult or
demeaning. On the contrary, the typical worker with whom I interacted was
open to the idea of providing service and to a more general conception of
service professionalism.
Workers claims to a service identity had both material and ideal bases.
For instance, one issue around which service disputes often crystallized was
the companys tipping policy. In the late 1990s, Empowerment Inc. decided
to ban tipping throughout all of its South African properties. Signs were
posted notifying customers that they were not to offer gratuities to workers.
Today, if a worker does receive a tip, he or she is required to hand it over to
a supervisor, with the money then going into the propertys general revenue
account. Cameras and security guards monitor workers to insure that they do
not surreptitiously keep a tip; workers found guilty of doing so are considered guilty of theft and could be dismissed.
Not surprisingly, the no-tipping policy was unpopular with workersand
customers too. It would not be an understatement to say that both groups
thoroughly despised it. For example, I attended a monthly staff meeting held
in the large arena usually reserved for concerts and boxing matches. During
the question-and-answer period, a female casino dealer stood up and asked
the property manager: I just want to know one thing. Where do our tips go?
They should be mine! From the staff came sounds of clapping and shouts of
support: You go girl, Uh-huh, you tell them. The manager responded by
taking the microphone and explaining to the room that tip income is quite

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volatile, whereas the companys flat wage provides a stable income. Some
days, workers make lots of tips but some days they make hardly any. Nor,
he explained, do workers now have to worry about kissing up to people.
For these reasons, the no-tip policy was actually in workers best interest. The
young woman was not satisfied, however. She stepped back up to the microphone and declared, But I am here to be a service professional. This policy
makes me unhappy, and if I am not happy then the guest is not happy!
This interaction, reported verbatim, illustrates well how conflicts between
management and workers over bread-and-butter issues played out in relation
to the issue of service. It may also be considered a classic example of a nomination struggle in situthat is, an interpersonal joust to impose a binding
definition on an otherwise unnamed phenomenon. To start, the worker is
making a claim in which are linked a series of items. First, she has expropriated and endorsed the official company rhetoric (expressed throughout the
workplace) concerning the importance of customer satisfaction. Clients are
guests whose emotional happiness is integral to the organizations success. In direct contrast to managerial thought, which considers its own actions
as the sole instrument for affecting clients (through means such as music,
contests, and alcohol), Suzanne is inserting into the equation a new (independent) variable: the service provided by employees such as herself. In this
context, good service can be said to possess a positive or downstream
modality (Latour, 1987, p. 23) insofar as it is rhetorically framed as a necessary prerequisite for the subsequent production of customer satisfaction (If
I am not happy, then the guest is not happy).
But Suzannes truth-claim concerning customer service can also be said to
possess an upstream modality. To take the claim seriously on its own terms
requires moving back in time, to reconsider the origins of a corporate policy
already in place. The companys practice of prohibiting and confiscating tips
makes her unhappy because it is an unfair theft of what is rightfully hers. Her
anger and unhappiness are thus justified through reference to a series of more
general principles of equity (Boltanski & Theverot, 2006). Who could be
cheerful and give good service when one is the victim of an ongoing crime?
As logically sound as Suzannes argument was, it could not but fail to
prevail insofar as it rested on an assumption to which managerial thought was
hostile. This assumption was precisely that workers emotional labor could
influence customer satisfaction. Managers practical logic assumed that no
matter how hard a Black tried (if he or she tried at all), the service provided
would be of an inferior, ineffectual, and sullied sort. But it is important to
examine precisely how the property manager attempted to counter Suzannes
claim. It would have been entirely inappropriate to articulate this racialized,

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stereotypical assumption publicly (thereby risking a discrimination claim or

lawsuit). Instead, he sought to counter the truth of the upstream claim, the
one equating the no-tipping policy with theft. Far from being an unwarranted
act of larceny, the manager argued, the policy is actually an act of benevolence. Because tip income fluctuates, the company wants to make sure that
workers are able to rely on a guaranteed income source. Hence, they should
not be unhappy or upset about the policy. (Of course, workers were not consulted about this policy change nor is it apparent why they could not both
receive a stable salary and accept tips.) It should also be pointed out that the
no-tipping policy was highly unpopular among clients. On several occasions,
I witnessed a gambler, on winning a large bet at a roulette table, tell the dealing staff that he or she would be happy to meet them down the road, at the
petrol station, after work. The underlying message was that a tip would be
handed off in a clandestine location, so that workers could be rewarded for
the good dealing service they had provided the bettor.
In addition to tipping, a second common point of contention between
managers and workers centered on what I came to label managements Disney hypocrisy. Ill provide some background. During the period in which
top management decided to implement a consistent, company-wide service
philosophy, Empowerment Inc. established a multiyear contract with the
Walt Disney Company. Disney advisors traveled to South Africa and assisted
with planning and theming the companys properties. They also gave several
presentations to the workforce at Rainbow City about the importance of customer service. Although employees may often view such seminars with cynicism (Kunda, 2006), workers at Rainbow City seemed not to have viewed
them as corny or just company speak. On the contrary, they were enthusiastic to hear about the Disney service philosophy, and many appeared to
have imbued it with an emancipatory meaning. They appreciated how it
framed employees as the companys most valuable asset as well as its emphasis on empowering frontline workers to take responsibility, make independent decisions, and engage in positive, respectful interactions with clients.
For many workers, it was the first time they had ever heard such rhetoric. It
certainly had not been found in any workplaces (service or otherwise) during
apartheid.
At the time of my fieldwork, a full 2 years after the contract had ended,
Rainbow City employees still regularly referenced the Disney experience.
It represented a powerful symbol of the inconsistency between the official
rhetoric of service and the reality of managerial practice at Rainbow City.
Although many current workers had not been present at the original presentations by Disney consultants, there was another vehicle through which Disney

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memories were kept alive among the workforce. For, as part of the contract
with Disney, Empowerment Inc. had allowed a group of around 20 Rainbow
City workers to perform internships with Disney at the companys entertainment empire in southern Florida. These entailed spending a year in the United
States and working at a variety of service jobs at the Magic Kingdom. The
idea at the time, as internees understood it, was that they would acquire
hands-on experience with the Disney service philosophy and then return to
South Africa to assist with implementing it at Rainbow City. And although
this may even have been the original intention of the company executives
who inked the deal, workers were disappointed to find on their return that
property-level managers were not too interested to hear about the Disney
Way let alone make major alterations in how they ran their facility.
Though disappointed, the former interns experienced a new role and newfound status among their coworkers. For they constituted living proof that
there was no inherent flaw in the Disney service programit did exist in
concrete reality, in the United States. The fact that workers were not treated
as service professionals in South Africa could thus be attributed to ulterior
motives on the part of entrenched managers. In effect, the Disney interns
became powerful spokespersons for the workforce as a whole. Their individual stories and complaints came to represent the hopes and frustrations of
all employees. For instance, when I first began fieldwork in Rainbow Citys
marketing department, workers repeatedly referenced Disney as evidence
of the companys hypocrisy. When I would inquire further, they would tell
me that I should go and talk to Nombuso, a current employee in the hotels
call center, because, as one worker stated, she has been there and seen it
with her own eyes. I was eventually able to make my way down to the call
center, and arranged to have lunch with Nombuso later that day. Over our
meal, she told me her tale.

They All Need to Go to Disney: Nombusos Story

Nombuso (a pseudonym) is 26 years old. She is from Soweto (short for
southwest township), a large Black settlement of more than one million people, not too far from the Rainbow City complex. Her father had been a taxi
driver before passing away in 1998. Her mother still lives in Soweto and
makes a decent living as a dressmaker. Nombuso has obtained a fairly high
degree of education. Because her parents had both kept steady work during
her childhood, they had been able to send her to a private secondary school.
She graduated in 1995 and was accepted into a 1-year hotel management
course in 1996 (as part of the first class that accepted Black students). She
completed the course with honors and in 1997 was hired to be the assistant

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chef at a Japanese restaurant in a suburban Johannesburg mall. After 6 months

of trying unsuccessfully to learn how to slice sushi, Nombusa received a job
offer from a large hotel chain based in Pretoria. She took the job but soon
grew bored and dissatisfied, as she spent the majority of her time doing routine labor as a switchboard operator. This, she says, was not what I went
to school for.
It was at this time that Nombuso registered with a staffing agency. It
arranged for her an interview at the Rainbow City resort, and she was offered
a job in the marketing department in the spring of 1999. I was so excited
yippee!that when they called me on Friday to offer me the job, I said I
wanted to start that very next Monday. At first, she was put on the switchboard again, receiving and directing calls, but soon her portfolio of tasks was
expanded. She helped to design organizational flowcharts for the human
resources department and received some basic photography lessons while
assisting with the design of marketing material. Then came the day she saw a
notice on the employee bulletin board advertising available internships at
Disneyworld in Florida. She submitted her resume to the HR coordinator and
was one of four Rainbow City staff to be selected for that round (she is not
sure how many had applied total). They left in early 2001 on 1-year
contracts.
I asked Nombuso why she thought that the company had been willing to
release her to do the Disney internship. She replied that the HR coordinator
here at Rainbow City had told her that the program was being run through
corporate and that they were sincere about sending some promising staff persons over to the United States, to learn Disneys techniques and philosophy
of customer service. They really did want to become known as a global,
world-class service company.
Nombuso recounted for me her first reaction to the Disney system as well
as her impression as to how it compared with the companies shed worked
for in South Africa. First off, she answered, I have nothing negative to say
about my experience at Disneyworld. She spent her first 3 months learning
how to do event planning on a Disney cruise ship. She performed so well at
this job that her next assignment was as a bussing coordinator at the Epcot
Center theme park. Nombuso is charismatic and gregarious, and 6 months
into her internship, she received an award for her customer service skills
(cast member recognition, as its called). By the time her internship in Florida ended, she was herself training new interns in the Disney principles of
good service.
The Disney style of management had been entirely new to her. They
actually encourage you to take initiative, to think independently. Most of her

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supervisors had been young, like her, and not as concerned with power or
status. Furthermore, an open-door policy was the norm, which you would
never find here. And of course there were rules, but they were more like
guidance. I mean, this was a place where you could be free! As a tour operator, shed often had peoples lives in her hands. This proved how much trust
management placed in her and gave her a great sense of responsibility and
confidence. At Rainbow City, in contrast, she had to run to management
for clearance to do anything. This difference, Nombusa says, was puzzling,
because most of her managers at Disney were White, but they didnt act as
did the managerial staff at Rainbow City, that is, very formally. In general,
she labels the latter as insecure and too concerned with discipline.
It was like I was living in a dream, because I had to wake up. So Nombuso described her return to South Africa. Even though she had been assured
that leaving to do the internship would not negatively affect her employment
with Empowerment Inc., she discovered that her old job had been filled, and
the company had not arranged a new position for her. She talked to the marketing department head, who explained to her that because of financial pressures they could not create for her a new spot nor could they credit her work
history so as to grant her the small annual wage increase that other employees
had received. For the year prior to our interview, she had been floating
around the resort, filling in for sick employees or on busy days. Even worse
than this lack of a clear role, nobody [in management] wanted to talk to me
[about the Disney experience]. Nombuso requested meetings with the various department heads to describe in detail how the service philosophy worked
in practice at Disneyworld. More important, she wanted to show them the
formal assessments she had brought back with her from Disney, attesting to
her excellent service skills. But no one would commit to a time to meet with
her, and to this day the assessments sit on a shelf in her kitchen. This all has
left Nombuso quite disenchanted: It is the opposite of the open-door policy.
They all need to go to Disney.
Unable to talk to her managers, Nombuso shared the story of her experience overseas with her coworkers. They were anxious to hear any news at all
about life outside of South Africa and listened intensely to her tales about the
culture of service professionalism at Disney. Later, I spoke to other former
Disney interns at Rainbow City, all of whom reported both a lack of interest
from managers and high levels of interest from their colleagues on returning
from the United States. In the marketing department today, Nombuso enjoys
a special status as one who could speak to managers with a degree of authority concerning their hypocrisy in regard to service. And she readily accepts
the role of spokesperson, a representative who embodies and gives voice to

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the discontent latent in the workforce as a whole. Hence I, as were many new
employees at the resort, was advised to go see Nombuso to learn about
Rainbow Citys hypocrisy.

Analysis and Implications

This article commenced with broad and all-too-brief overviews of both Pierre
Bourdieus theory and the emergent sociology of service work. We divided
Bourdieus work into broad phases: an initial ethnology of the intransigence
of habitus in the colonial labor market, a series of empirical monographs on
culture and stratification in France, and finally, a public sociology in opposition to global neoliberalism. We then laid bare several key assumptions of the
service work literature: notably, that good service is an unproblematic,
even a priori, category of thing and that managers in competitive industries
will have an interest in asking workers to provide it. Admittedly, both of
these summaries are guilty of oversimplification. Exceptions and counterreadings could easily be found for every component of each. Nonetheless, I
judged it worthwhile to make such generalizations to expose fruitful points
of dialogue between the two theory/research programs.
The two theories were then taken into the field, as I reported on a major
ethnographic project within a leisure resort in postcolonial South Africa.
Somewhat surprisingly, it was not Bourdieus well-worn concept of habitus
that proved most relevant for understanding the labor regime found therein
nor was it the service work literatures overarching concern with emotional labor
management. Rather, it was Bourdieus theory of political representation
and in particular the notion of nomination struggles. For this was a workplace
ripe with ongoing struggles to define the very nature of service. During a year
of fieldwork at Rainbow City resort, I found that there was no consensus that
the labor performed by employees was service work (and even though it met
the basic definitional standards found in the literature, such as face-to-face
contact with clients). Workers sought the label service professional and,
following a presentation by Disney consultants, actively promoted the idea of
a customer-centric organizational philosophy. Management, however, sought
to remove workers from the customer service equation. They defined workers as background equipment, more akin to manual laborers than to qualified
service professionals.
Symbolic struggles such as these are not exceptional and inconsequential;
they can have important material effects. For instance, workers at Rainbow
City strove to constitute themselves as service workers in order to reform the
companys tipping policy. But they also, as Nombusos story illustrated,

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recognize that service worker is a title that carries at least some connotations
of honor and responsibility. To name an activity a service is to attach to it a
series of other claims, such as respectful treatment of the workers providing it,
professionalism, autonomy, and a concern for the emotional well-being of both
worker and client. And to deny that a form of work is service is to repudiate
such claims. As a principle, we as researchers should be on guard against preestablishing a definition of service work. Such premature naturalization may
be warranted but never at the risk of being blind to the very real symbolic battles that may occur over how work and service are defined and
categorized.
Such classification struggles can themselves by classified. At one extreme
are informal, interpersonal disputes over character and identity, the paradigmatic example being that of an insult shouted in the heat of the moment
(Youre an idiot!). At the other extreme is the power of the modern state to
confer legitimate titles. The current debate in the United States about the
status of home health care workers illustrates well this fact, as it features
social movements, employers, unions, and other groups lobbying to have this
form of labor classified (or not) as formal employment. The state, as the
holder of a monopoly of symbolic power, represents the ultimate arbiter of
struggles to name and classify.
The conflict at Rainbow City over whether or not employees could claim
the title of service workers did not fit either of these extreme positions.
Workers claims were not spontaneous or individual outbursts. By the time of
my arrival, they had been somewhat institutionalized, with workers regularly
using phrases such as I am a service professional during conflicts with
management and with the emergence of particular spokespersons (such as
Nombuso) representing the widespread discontent among workers. But on
the other hand, there was no obvious authority beyond the workplace to
which one side or the other could turn for final resolution of the dispute. The
state in South Africa does make a distinction between manufacturing and
service workers but only for the purpose of collecting statistical information
on the economy. No worker I encountered was aware of these governmental
statistics nor does the state use this classificatory system to confer special
rights on certain categories of workers (Seidman, 2008). Institutionalized yet
lacking a final arbiter, symbolic struggles over service were at a stalemate.
Although neither side could declare a final victory, the balance of forces
undoubtedly favored management, which resolutely refused to label or treat
the work of workers as customer service. Rainbow City employees were part
of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the countrys labor union
federation, but none of the micro-political contestations documented herein

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fell within the ambit of the formal process of contract negotiations

and grievance procedures (Wood & Psoulis, 2001). Informally, workers
could and did protest, but they were unable to change any of the policies that
would have afforded them treatment as service professionals. As sociologists, we cannot overlook such symbolic struggles nor dismiss them as
secondary to more material issues. Definitional disputes over service provide
a window into the larger political economy of post-apartheid South Africa.
By treating them as a worthwhile analytical object, we may observe linkages
between macro-level processes (such as new employment equity laws) and
micro-level ones (such as the everyday experience of employees). In short, a
Bourdieuian approach to service work requires that we move from unreflective representations of labor to careful study of labors of representation.
Acknowledgments
For taking the time to provide valuable comments and ideas on this articleand for
inspiring him to finally finish itthe author thanks Katherine Chen, Marek
Korczynski, Robin Leidner, Steve Lopez, Sean ORiain, and Steven Vallas.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The research on which this article is based was supported by grants from the National
Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.

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Bio
Jeffrey J. Sallaz is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Arizona.
He is the author of The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and
South Africa (2009) and is currently researching politics and labor in the global outsourcing field.

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