Page 112 - The Disneyization of Society

Chapter Five

Performative labour

Mini Contents

Emotional labour 104
Why promote emotional labour? 105
Emotional labour in the Disney theme parks 107
Precursors of emotional labour 110
The diffusion of emotional labour 111
Airline cabin crews 112
Shop workers 113
McDonald’s 114
Other restaurants 115
Hotels 117
Telephone call centres 117
Zoos 119
Other domains of emotional labour 120
Is emotional labour bad for you? 121
Aesthetic labour at the Disney theme parks and beyond 122
The spread of performativity 124
Conclusion 127

There is a growing trend for work, particularly in service industries, to be
construed as a performance, much like in the theatre. The employee becomes like
an actor on a stage. By ‘performative labour’, then, I simply mean the rendering
of work by managements and employees alike as akin to a theatrical performance
in which the workplace is construed as similar to a stage. In the Disney theme
parks, the metaphor of the theatrical performance is explicit with the references
to ‘cast members’, ‘auditioning’, ‘onstage’, and ‘backstage’. For the two manage-
ment consultants who coined the term ‘the experience economy’, the metaphor
of the theatre is central when they suggest that at ‘every level in any company,
workers need to understand that … every business is a stage, and therefore work
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is theatre’. The work of the person who stages the experience is crucial for the expe-
rience to remain in the customer’s memory. They urge worker-performers to
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engage customers ‘as if your work depended on it!’ One of the main elements in
generating the sense of a performance that is particularly notable at the Disney
theme parks is through emotional labour, which is the main focus of this chapter.

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