Page 136 - The Disneyization of Society

PERFORMATIVE LABOUR

organizations whose representatives attended such courses and that have since
introduced Disney ways of managing people. 117 Examples include: Volkswagen
Group dealerships, Start Holding (a temporary employment agency in Gouda in 127
the Netherlands), and University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System, which
is itself the focus of a case study of the application of Disney principles. 118 Regina
Eisman attended one of the courses (‘The Disney Approach to People Management’),
which lasted three days and covered hiring, training and motivation approaches,
supervisory skills, programmes designed to enhances job satisfaction, and strate-
gies for listening to employees and customers. 119 Among the 52 course partici-
pants there was a hospital administrator, a personnel director at a tobacco and
confectionary wholesaler, and a sales manager at a radio station. At the course
McGill attended, there were executives from the Flamingo Hilton in Las Vegas,
utilities, hospitals, education, airlines, and banks. 120 While Disney itself is by no
means the only source of the aspect of Disneyization covered in this chapter, it
would seem to have an important impact.

Conclusion

The main thesis of this chapter is that increasingly, frontline services are being
influenced by the notion that work is a performance. Emotional labour and
aesthetic labour are the primary forms in which this notion manifests itself. In
much the same way that work at the Disney theme parks is construed in terms of a
theatrical performance metaphor, in which the actor seeks to make an impression
at least in part through the display of emotions and through the presentation of
an embodied style, so too we find in many other areas of service delivery a similar
set of impressions being created. One of the main moving forces behind this
diffusion of performative labour is the growing recognition of the need to deliver
a quality service and that frontline service staff are key to this requirement. In
the case of many services, it is the main or at least a significant component of the
service. According to the advocates of customer care programmes that adopt the
consumer sovereignty principle, many of which have been influenced by TQM, it
is crucial to leave customers with a set of memorable and positive impressions so that
they are more likely to return. In restaurants, for example, the quality of the ser-
vice provided can be almost as important as (if not more important than) the
quality of the product. Moreover, the principles associated with emotional labour
are spreading. Sturdy has shown that the growth of consumerism and the emer-
gence of TQM and human resource management practices in Europe and the Asia
Pacific region have been associated with more and more use of customer service ini-
tiatives, which invariably encourage emotional labour. 121
As with other aspects of Disneyization, emotional and aesthetic labour form an
important weapon in the battle for differentiation. Good, memorable service thus