Page 135 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

popular, museum staff become actors who don appropriate garb and demonstrate
long-forgotten skills to show off exhibits and interact with visitors in a manner
126 appropriate to the theme. For example, in his account of Quarry Bank Mill at Styal
in Cheshire in the north-west of England, Urry describes the following scenario:
Demonstrators, some dressed in appropriate clothing, show visitors how to spin cotton on a spin-
ning jenny, how to hand-weave, how a carding machine operated, the workings of a weaving mule,
and the domestic routines involved in cooking, cleaning and washing for the child workforce. … The
mill has made energetic efforts to attract the ‘non-museum visiting public’ by specifically increasing
the entertainment elements of display. This is partly achieved by the use of people to demonstrate
many of the processes and to interact in a role-playing way with the visitors. 111
When Handler and Gable conducted fieldwork at Colonial Williamsburg in
Virginia, they found different groups of staff involved in such work, including
‘character interpreters’ who were ‘“living history” performers who spoke to the
public in the “first person”… that is, as eighteenth-century people’. 112 In addition,
‘craftspersons’ practiced various trades of the time. Similarly, at Plimouth Plantation,
a living historical museum made up of buildings representing seventeenth-
century pilgrim life, a brochure encourages visitors to ‘talk with them, ask them
about their lives, and listen as they tell you, in the seventeen regional dialects
heard throughout the Village, what it was like to come to this foreign place and
build their future’. 113 At a reconstruction of a Viking village in a Viking theme
park in Norway, people attired in appropriate costumes conduct themselves as
characters in a play, while at another reconstructed Viking village, Fotviken near
Malmö in Sweden, costumed performers demonstrate handicrafts. 114 In all of
these instances, performances for tourists are meant to convey a sense of what it
was like to live during the period and at the location being represented, and as
such to create a sense of authenticity.
In many spheres, then, the notion of work as a performance is not simply
implicit, as it sometimes is with emotional and aesthetic labour, but explicit. In
the latter case, there is a growing tendency for frontline service work to be con-
ceived of as a performance much like in the theatre. This notion is particularly
apparent in the Disney theme parks which employ the theatrical metaphor with
its notion of employment as ‘being cast for a role in the show.’ 115 In other words:
‘Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes’. 116
In fact, Disney is itself an important wellspring for the diffusion of the theatri-
cal metaphor, the inculcation of emotional labour, and many other aspects of the
company’s distinctive approach to human resource management and customer
care. At one level, the numerous visitors to the Disney theme parks and the
frequent attention the parks receive in the mass media contribute to a basic aware-
ness of many aspects of the Disney approach to people management. In addition,
as we saw in connection with the Harrods personnel manager referred to on
p. 125, many executives visit the company and attend its training courses for non-
Disney executives. A book produced by the Disney Institute is full of references to