Carly was appointed to do eyelash extensions and was trained to do this at college. She has since been taught to thread by her Beauty Plus colleagues: there just weren’t enough takers for the extensions to keep her busy. She learned waxing during her NVQ, an altogether more brutal and messy hair removal technique. The shift to threading doesn’t come easily to her– as Ingold says, part of skill is the “coupling of perception and action” (2011; 53), and Carly can’t help but to stop and think. Whilst the other women who do the threading are employed because of their ethnicity — they learned to thread as a matter of course, as part of being a girl with Indian heritage — Carly is employed despite her ethnicity. She has her qualifications but few of the skills of her colleagues.  It’s been a few months since I saw her working there.

Reference

Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge.

It is not surprising then that companies spend a lot of money on sales techniques training programmes for their employees; personally, I have been in a couple of those seminars and workshops. They’ll tell you that, usually, a meeting with a customer could last up to 1 hour (rarely two), and a well-trained sales person would know what to do to take advantage of every minute. For now, let’s talk about the first seconds.

Imagine for a moment that you are the sales representative. It is extremely important to make a good first-impression in order to have a successful meeting with a customer. Usually, you only have 30 seconds to do it; that is, the time it takes to walk from the door to the customer’s desk and shake his/her hand.

source: http://www.soyentrepreneur.com/reglas-de-protocolo-para-vender.html

But even before entering the office a quick check is required: are your shoes clean? Is your forehead sweating? What about your breath? All these are signals sent to the customer; thus, avoiding use the wrong ones is a good start.

You’re standing in front of the customer. A bit of emotional management is required here, take a deep breath, or do anything that prevents you from revealing signs of stress like sweaty hands, redness on your face or neck, touching your hair excessively (mainly women), among others. The aim of every sales representative is to look confident. Though you might find it difficult, depending on the situation.

Now, how to use your hands? There are different kinds of handshakes.

The informal is more often used with friends or acquaintances, it could be too strong or too soft and might include kissing; this should be avoided with a customer because it reflects low levels of formality. The political is a handshake that shows a certain level of intimacy and “caring”. It requires both hands, your right hand shakes the right hand of the other person, and your left hand is positioned either over the other person’s right hand, or on his/her shoulder; this could be used with a customer but not on a first appointment. The professional is the most commonly used on business meetings, it reflects high levels of formality and confidence; it requires eye contact, a smile on your face, a firm handshake (not too strong) and, when this is a first appointment, you must say your name and professional position while holding the other person’s hand, this increases the attention levels.

Of course, cultural differences should be considered for an international environment. If, however, you have no intentions to become a sales representative, and already kind of knew all this information, it is always good to remember the tacit knowledge that is hidden in your mind.

May this be a proof that not only factory workers require specialised hand-skills.

As the day has gone on, I’ve been struck all the more by what a considerate, even ethical gesture this was. If the sale had been completed – the country clothing dispatched and my account debited – and I had realised this some days later, I think the bank would have taken the hit, so there was no purely economic need for the kind saleswoman to look any further. It suggests an empathy with the customer, and pride in the job, bound up with a business practice that rests on a notion of just exchange rather than profit maximisation at any cost.

As soon as the conversation with the country clothing company is over, I call my bank. They cancel my card and the fraudulent transaction. A couple of hours later, I get a security alert from them. They have blocked another payment – genuinely my expenditure this time – so I try to get it reinstated. It was to a large, corporate online photo service and I’m keen to avoid uploading my photos again. The bank refuse to sort this out, constrained by their own irrevocable decisions. The large bureaucracy deals only in absolutes and the unfortunate person on the other end of the line has no autonomy to act in this situation, even in the face of its own stupidity.

I call the photo company, explaining the sequence of events to at least two different people (there are different departments for photobooks, canvases, and prints…). Eventually, a woman says: But your order was dispatched yesterday. Oh, I reply, so what do I do about the payment that’s been blocked? We’re not able to take payments over the phone, she responds, we don’t even have a machine for it! There is a short pause: You know what, just forget it, she continues. She’s actually telling me not to settle my account. It’s for a small amount after all we both agree, and well, someone can always chase me later, if they even trace what’s happened, she laughingly comments.

The organisation that’s evoked in this last exchange is, like the bank, a rigid, bureaucratic and mindless machine. There is no identification with the company on the part of the saleswoman, and no concern for doing the right thing in line with a particular business practice. Unlike in the bank however, the worker sidesteps the bureaucratic impasse in the interests of the customer, leaving the lumbering market to figure out its own inconsistencies – as the clothing company worker does but in a very different spirit. The photo company worker may have a disregard for the company – disaffection perhaps – but this is not extended to the customer. I get the feeling that she is putting herself in my place, and making a level-headed judgment call. She might be motivated by the satisfaction of being helpful or simply know that it’s best not to try and fight the insurmountable failings of the system. Still, it’s a win-win scenario for us both.

What all this shows however is the different extremes under which workers (except for those employed by my bank it seems) exercise autonomy and demonstrate empathy – both in a small personalised business and a giant faceless corporation. Using their intuition and judgement based on the information at hand, and going beyond what that information literally tells them to make better sense of the situation, they find a resolutely human way to make a living.

BEEFEATER STEAK HOUSES — I was a barmaid, later promoted to a waitress. I was a vegetarian.
03/01/97 — The first paycheck of the new year. Those two hours of overtime counted as my New Year’s Eve bonus.
HOURLY RATE £3.2800 – not much of a living wage.
DO NOT DESTROY – I took this seriously.

There are plans afoot for a new bureaucracy, an updated computer system enabling ‘RTI’ (Real Time Information) so that deductions are reported by employers to the HM Revenue and Customs as they happen, not at the end of the year – the idea being to avoid over– and under-payment. This new computer system is a new a grey media you wont often think about, but which will re-write your payslip.

The ticket seller jokes with me. No need to worry about missing the train, he’s the driver, she says. He says he’ll go just as soon as he can be bothered to walk up to the cab, right at the other end. That’s his job: drive one way, walk back down 8 carriages, get in the other end and drive back. If only, he says, one day they’d set the points wrong and he could go all the way to Clacton.

Bell is often quoted as describing the service work that characterises post-industrial society as ‘a game between persons’, unlike industrial society which he characterises as ‘a game against fabricated nature’, centred on the relationship between man and machine (1999 [1973]: 17). Interactive service work can readily be imagined as a game between persons: between customer and waiter, there is hierarchy, deference and a complex negotiation over power (see Paules (1996) for interesting discussion of how waiters resist customers’ attempts to denigrate them).

“Michel Roux’s Service” is currently showing on BBC. Here we see another instance of reality TV showing us how to be better workers by training us in the ludic art of personality (I’d rather we learned how to be better customers). Eight unemployed young people are being trained to control body and feeling; to perform authentically;  and to empathise with the demanding customer by denying their own distance from how the customers live. They are to treat customers as their friends, though they are not the customer’s friends. Much is made of how bad the British are at giving service; we’re too uppity and resistant to subservience. So these workers learn how not to notice that they have feelings.

Fred Sirieix trains the recruits in the raw art of talking to customers, carrying plates and so on. (And you shouldn’t laugh at this unless you know how to carry three hot plates across a crowded room without disturbing the arrangement of the food: denying that service work requires skill is a form of symbolic violence). He doesn’t seem to offer much guidance in the many tiny decisions about organising your work that any waiter needs to constantly do in order to keep on top of service (see Gatta, (2002) for a nice description of the complexity of waitressing). He’s keen to point out that the challenge and pleasure of interactive service work makes it noble.

But the interpretation of Bell’s game between persons made by Sirieix is disturbing. In episode 1 he defines the good waiter as a ghost. This ghost is always looking at you — the customer — just in case you need something. It’s sensing you, anticipating you. It’s not a person (anymore), just “a felt presence – an anima, geist, or genius – that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to a place” (Michael Bell, emphasis in original, cited in Wynn, 2007). The ghost has no personhood, really; it places plates FROM THE RIGHT and clears plates FROM THE LEFT as though any deviation will materialise evil. All the attention the waiter must pay to his smile, his clothes, his body odour, work to produce him as an absent presence. Having good character here means not really existing. The game is not between persons. It’s between a person and a ghost. Bell’s characterisation of industrial society has more purchase here: the game is to fabricate a human as nature, which means turning person into a machine.

References

1. Bell, D. (1999 [1973]) The coming of post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting. New York, Basic Books.
2. Gatta, M. (2002) Juggling Food and Feelings: Emotional Balance in the Workplace. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
3. Paules, G. (1996). Resisting the symbolism of service. In C. Macdonald & C. Sirianni (Eds.), Working in the service society (pp. 264–290). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
4. Wynn, J. R. (2007) ‘Haunting Orpheus: problems of space and time in the desert.’ In Clough, P. T (ed.) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke University Press.

[1] A pleasurably cautious subtitle; academic training discourages futurology. Those who took up Bell’s work were not so restrained – see Alvin Toffler (1981) The Third Wave . New York: Bantam Books.

At work

Forty years on, Davide is running the place. He’s the third generation of his family to do so. The Old Coffee, in the Castello area of Cagliari, Sardinia, was originally set up by his great uncle more than 100 years ago. In due course, Davide’s father took over, and then after the death of his mother, Davide gave up his studies to work alongside his father. He remarks on how it was one of those decisions that you make at the time and don’t see the way it’s shaping your life.

‘So what’s it like to work here?’ I ask him repeatedly on my visits to the caffè, trying to fathom the combination of constraint and autonomy that mark his life. ‘L’amo e l’odio. I love it and hate it.’ It’s a line he uses often. It’s demanding, first, in terms of presence. Someone has to be there. It’s almost always him although occasionally he is helped by a nephew. ‘If I want to go somewhere, I can just close up,’ he says. Of course it’s true in principle but it’s difficult to follow through in practice. He always needs to be ahead of himself too, managing stock for what’s happening next week and into the future. But he also has to think of today, to be ready for the rhythms of coffee consumption, panini at lunchtime, apertivi and so on. He’s open from 9am to 9pm in the week, closing for a few hours on Saturday afternoon, then all day on Sunday. Plus he needs to be present in a different kind of way, available to listen to customers who come in for a moment of contact and perhaps some understanding. Even if he doesn’t always feel like it, he sees this as part of his role.

It’s very visible to the stranger’s eye how well he takes care of the place. Some of the original furnishings are in tact and the built-in display cabinets are especially unusual. Not only are they beautiful in themselves but Davide has filled them with an extraordinary collection of objects. ‘Will you tell me something about what’s here?’ I ask, pointing to a wall of cabinets, dark wooden doors at the bottom, and glass-panelled ones at the top. ‘They are things I like,’ he explains. ‘Look, here are some sweet jars like the ones we used to have. And this, well this was my grandmother’s.’ He opens a door and takes out a cup and saucer from a coffee service. It’s complete, he points out, including small plates, a jug and sugar bowl, and is around 130 years old. I hold a cup – carefully. It’s quirky and beautiful with an uneven decorated rim that would make it impossible to drink from!

If some of the objects in the caffè are living connections to the past, a past which is both Davide’s personal history, memories and relationships, and the history of the caffè itself, others have come to be there more directly from the former life of the caffè: old drinks signs and trays, as well as some pictures and photographs. There is a third kind of object there too: things that Davide has ‘lived’ that he likes to see in the present. There is a set of old records (vinyl), and various collections from hobbies and interests, for instance radios and cameras. This all adds up to the caffè being a repository of other lives and other dimensions of life as well as an everyday workplace and a space of consumption.

‘What of the future then?’ I ask at some point. Davide’s sons are established in their own fields of study and work and there is, at the moment at least, no one in line to take the place on when the time is right. He does not know what will happen. In the meantime though, Davide has made this place his own, whilst maintaining this family tradition through his work.

In Roma Centrale train station, there is a waitress who offers table service. Most customers buy from the bar; why not, it’s cheaper.

Table Service

People from all over the world pass through the station, and few of us understand the Italian service culture and its demarcation of space.

We sit at a table, two British, two Italian, waiting for the train to Firenze. We know how to behave (the Italians), and know the specificity of this practice (the non-Italians). We watch the waitress shoo away Danish, American, Japanese customers. In the time we’re there, she serves only us. The rest of the time her work is to deny service.

Refusal

It’s early evening and 4 bartenders (2 women, 2 men) are stood around waiting for the rush to start. They’re talking about the sorts of drinks they hate serving. The drinks, not the customers. The customers take on the attributes of their drinks, so that a pint of lime and soda signals moral failing (so fiddly, so cheap). A mean drink, not a proper drink, not sherry and a cherry. I drink Black Sheep bitter.

Injury

I think the bus driver is being rude when he doesn’t look at me. Then I see the careful way he turns to get my change. He’s in pain; his neck’s seized up. He’s still working. At least he can see the road ahead.

Demands

Silence in the British Library is often interrupted by querulous tones of someone for whom the electronic catalogue is too complex. The librarian’s voice is as loud as the questioner’s, but it is they who will later silence others for talking.

Technology

A speaker is presenting via video link, but only the sound is working. The display shows the whole audience the conferencing software and its typed exchanges to set the link up. As the speaker addresses questions from the audience about her presentation, the technician called in to get the visuals working does his job. We all see what he writes:

“hi, have you turned on your camera”

She doesn’t answer. His vision of his agenda gave no space to hers; she could only do one thing at once.

This got me thinking though about the ways in which people make work. It takes quite some courage and creativity to insert oneself into a space and try to construct a new activity from which to make some kind of living. Take the street children of Accra, Ghana, studied by Phil Mizen and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi. They are incredibly resourceful in the ways they invent new activities which can be publicly perceived as work and for which they can then expect some kind of remuneration (cash, and/or food and shelter) (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010; and see Street Children’s Photographs). When they act as porters, for instance, they make work by placing themselves, their bodies and capacity to labour quite literally in between people and objects, and they create new spaces of work by doing so.

Image of car guard from Cape Town Daily

A particularly strong case of ‘making work’ is informal car-guarding which is something that has emerged spontaneously in the last ten years or so in cities across South Africa (McEwen and Leiman, 2008). It ‘evolved out of the plight of the unemployed’ and was made viable because of high levels of crime, notably motor theft (Blaauw and Bothma, 2003: 1). It involves a self-appointed guard operating in a free or public car parking area directing customers to available spaces, and receiving (or not) payment for this ‘service’ and on the understanding that the guards provide security while the car is parked. In an imitation of the formal world of car parking, work is made to happen in spaces where it wasn’t previously envisaged. What is central though is that the work itself is made through the deliberate insertion of an activity in a socio-economic and cultural process of which it was not previously an element.

If the development of this new form of work arose in the informal economy, the picture has become quite differentiated in recent years. In some cases, private companies have sought to formalise car-guarding, seeking to control this sort of unregulated entrepreneurial spirit, and of course to profit from the activity. Another variant is where organisations hire out equipment such as jackets, which lend credibility to the car guards’ work, but do not directly employ car guards. Or, car-guarding may be part of an organised informal economy with people unofficially renting spots to car-guards, obliging them to pay for the privilege of working in particular locations. Furthermore, it can be seen as a form of ‘non-state policing’ which is widespread in South Africa in numerous spheres (Baker, 2003: 29) and as such provide a kind of public good, albeit one that is variously celebrated, supported, tolerated, manipulated or denounced by the regulatory authorities and local communities.

Car-guarding is an activity usually undertaken by men who are formally classified as low-skilled and who have lost jobs in the formal economy — and whose chances of re-entering the formal economy are low. It’s rarely more than a survival strategy in this context of high unemployment and poverty (McEwen and Leiman, 2008). There’s an interesting relation to the customer in the exchange implicit in the work of car-guarding too. Payment might be made out of fear of reprisal (on the car or the person), or out of altruism, to help the worker (notably in the case of generous tippers) and as a way of recognising the person and the quality service they are offering (McEwen and Leiman, 2008; Saunders and M Lynn, 2010). Nevertheless, overall earnings are extremely low, even when compared to domestic workers or waiters (Blaauw and Bothma, 2003: 11). And, according to some sources, for example, this travel site, some people exercise a strategy of ‘determined avoidance’ and a refusal to pay.

So despite the inventiveness of the car-guards in South Africa or of the street vendors in Accra and Cagliari, making work doesn’t always mean making a living…

References
1. Baker, B (2002) ‘Living with Non-State Policing in South Africa: The Issues and Dilemmas’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 40(1): 29–53.
2. Blaauw, P F and L J Bothma (2003) ‘Informal labour markets as a solution for unemployment in South Africa – a case study of car guards in Bloemfontein’, Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Economic Society of South Africa, 17–19 September, Cape Town.
3. McEwen, H and A Leiman (2008) ‘The Car Guards of Cape Town: A Public Good Analysis’, A Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper Number 25. Cape Town: SALDRU, University of Cape Town.
4. Mizen, P and Y Ofosu-Kusi (2010) ‘‘Doing Work’ in the Informal Sector: The Work and Labour of Children of Accra’s Urban Poor’, Paper presented at the International Visual Sociology Association conference, Bologna, July 20–22.
5. Saunders, S G and M Lynn (2010) ‘Why tip? An empirical test of motivations for tipping car guards’, Journal of Economic Psychology 31: 106–113.

The space at San Benedetto is clearly structured, with solid marble counters and displays arranged in aisles and around the edges of the hall. The floor is very clean and dry, unusually so for a fish market. (For a contrasting account of London’s fish market, see A Day’s Work at Billingsgate.) There is a large variety of Mediterranean fish but to my surprise, some Atlantic fish too, such as sole or salmon. There was local sole too, if a little smaller. It was quite literally still flapping around on the counter. No need to check the eyes to assess the freshness of that! There’s a distinction between sellers of shellfish, wet fish, smoked, and frozen which I assume is part of the regulatory structure (and is common in other places too). There’s quite a range from large to small fish, from what’s considered to be prestigious to the ordinary: swordfish, tuna, bream, bass, gurnard, mullet, mackerel and much more. The shellfish includes local prawns, arselle (a type of clam found locally), small green crabs, the occasional lobster, mussels, and a kind of snail. Plus bottarga of course, the dried roe of mullet (or tuna), something Sardinia is famous for, ground to add to spaghetti, or bought whole then cut into small pieces and dressed with oil and lemon as an antipasto.

When I asked where specific fish came from, I was not only told that something was ‘Sarda’ but that it was caught off a particular stretch of coast at Villasimius or Cagliari for example. There’s a code that’s used uniformly in the displays that explains not only the country of provenance of the fish, but also whether it was caught at sea or farmed. Last week at a smaller market in Cagliari, I bought a local octopus and a squid from the Atlantic, probably near South Africa the fishmonger said, but brought in by air and on ice (but not frozen). (I didn’t ask the ‘where did it come from’ question until afterwards and hadn’t yet worked out the code…) I’m interested in the ‘length’ of the socio-economic process that brings fish from sea to table but hadn’t expected to see the produce of both such a short and a long one literally alongside one another in my local market…

Instead of taking pictures on my first visit to the main market at San Benedetto (it would have felt intrusive and I wanted to just look first), I decided to do a short (one minute) recording while walking around which you can listen to here: san benedetto 1 oct 2010. The recording highlights the presence of three distinct layers of sound that it’s hard to distinguish between when hearing them in real time (Makagon and Neumann, 2008). There is a low murmur of people talking, a collective sound in which it’s not possible to identify specific exchanges. There are knives being sharpened, a high-pitched screech that conjures up the image of a large blade. And there are the fishmongers making their sales pitches, playfully at times, and as much for the amusement of their peers as in an attempt to gain custom it seems. Indeed, humour is an integral part of the life of the market (Porcu, 2005). ‘Venga che imbroglio anche a lei!’ one exclaims provocatively. Come on so I can rip you off too!

There’s already a great selection of photographs of the fish market, the fishmongers and customers here (most of the first half are of the fish section, the rest of other parts of the market). And for close-ups of the fish, click here. And I expect I’ll be writing more about all this after my next visit…

References
1. Makagon, D and M Neumann (2008) Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. London: Sage.
2. Porcu, L (2005) ‘Fishy business: Humour in a Sardinian fish Market’, Humour 18(1): 69–102.