Page 132 - The Disneyization of Society

PERFORMATIVE LABOUR

difficult to escape the tendency for many members of the occupational group to be
female (and therefore deemed to be more likely to possess caring skills) and attrac-
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tive. This suggests that appearance is often an important component of managerial
constructions of the right kind of frontline service employee, along with a capacity
to exhibit emotional labour, and that hiring for jobs may in such circumstances take
notions of presentability into account. Witz et al. have sought to conceptually
disentangle this aspect of the service employee from the display of emotional labour.
They employ the term aesthetic labour to describe ‘a supply of embodied capacities
and attributes possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment’ that are
then built upon by employers to mould the worker into someone who has the right
kind of ‘look’ or ‘sound’ to represent the image of the company and of the kind of
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service it seeks to project. In the process, the employees’ bodies are commodified
in that they come to embody the company and what it stands for in return for
wages. Like emotional labour and indeed the other aspects of Disneyization
described in this book, aesthetic labour forms part of a differentiation strategy.
Witz et al. demonstrate the emergence of aesthetic labour in areas like the retail,
hospitality and banking sectors where a service-led orientation has become a major
emphasis. They show that at the point of recruitment, applicants frequently failed to
get jobs not because they did not have the right skills or experience (which were in
fact low on recruiters’ lists of priorities) but because they did not have the right look.
Having the right look includes such features as dress, body shape, and personal style.
Job advertisements frequently made reference to appearance as a qualification.
Frequently, it would seem that it is both aesthetic labour and emotional labour
that companies seek, suggesting that the two many often go hand in hand. For
example, the researchers were told that at one of the hotels in their investigation
(Hotel Elba), the sort of person the company wanted to recruit ‘had to be pretty
attractive looking people … with a nice smile, nice teeth, neat hair and in decent
proportion’. A manager told them: ‘There is probably a Hotel Elba look, not an
overly done up person but very, quite plain but neat and stylish … young, very
friendly … people that look the part … fit in with the whole concept of the
hotel.’ The quest for a particular look is transparent in these remarks, but the ref-
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erences to ‘a nice smile’ and ‘very friendly’ suggest that emotional labour or a
capacity for it are being sought in conjunction with aesthetic labour. Nor is it just
external features that are the focus of attention in that the authors found that for
jobs in telephone banking a particular kind of voice and accent was required.
As style and image becomes increasingly significant components of both every-
day life and commercial activity, it is quite likely that the requirement for
aesthetic labour will grow. It is very much part of the performative aspect of
labour that is the focus of this chapter. After all, acting requires that the actor pos-
sesses the right appearance, which is often embellished with make-up, props, and
clothing. Indeed, as one of the researchers’ informants from an upscale fashion
retail company remarked of her job: it ‘is a bit like acting. I mean it’s like being in