Page 163 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

Worker resistance

154 Like Disney theme park employees, resistance among frontline service employees
can take a relatively passive form of trying to distance themselves from the task of
or the person performing emotional labour. This frequently involves surface acting
when deep acting is encouraged, if not required. This process of distancing can be
seen in the words of one of the customer service representatives at a call centre:
My way of handling it is coming in and saying to myself, ‘I do this shift from 2 to 10, it’s not a career, it’s
a job. I answer the phone and that’s it’. By not looking for anything more than that, that’s my way of han-
dling it. When I first came in, I thought it was maybe just me, but speaking to other people it’s the same. 85

Such strategies allow workers to establish some distance between the roles they
have to play and their true selves.
More active forms of resistance exist too. Leidner notes that at the McDonald’s
where she conducted her research she encountered some employees who would not
smile and others who did not include in their scripted interactions those portions
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that they felt frequently annoyed customers. Among the insurance agents she stud-
ied, there were those who also omitted parts of scripts that they disliked. At one large
American hotel, the introduction of a mystery shopper system resulted in a ‘smile
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strike’. An almost opposite form of resistance is described by a coffee shop waitress
in Harford, Connecticut, who claimed to adopt the tactic of dealing with customers
who were acting as though they were superior by becoming overbearingly polite:
‘Treat them overly politely, without being too obnoxious … give them a big, big
smile … they know you’re play acting but can’t really say anything because you’re
being nice.’ A waitress in an upmarket restaurant in the same area claimed that she
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reacted to diners who treated her badly by displaying an exaggerated deference.
One less obvious form of resistance that is related to emotional labour is the dis-
play of philanthropic emotional labour, which was referred to in the previous
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chapter. Sometimes such emotional labour is not a form of resistance because it
is consistent with management imperatives, even if it goes somewhat beyond
them. In some contexts, however, it can be depicted as a form of resistance. At the
call centre studied by Callaghan and Thompson, where there was a management
preoccupation with the duration of the average call, customer service representa-
tives would sometimes go beyond the emotional labour demands the company
made of them. This tendency was particularly apparent in interaction with older
people and with regular customers, who frequently called for a friendly chat. 90

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have demonstrated that control and surveillance are central to
Disneyization and not just to McDonaldization. Control is a key feature of the