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.

The Start of the Day

taken with camera phone

To the left, big, bold letters and colours: the store is closing down and everything must go, “step right up, bargains galore”. Thrill at 20% off a new kettle. Take home a pottery owl, only £42.99 (down from £59.00). It’s an exciting chance, you consumer monkey. Be seduced by these prices.

taken with camera phone

The second is a different appearance of emotion in capitalism; this is not the capitalism of the romanticised commodity exchange discussed above (Illouz, 1997), nor quite the cold intimacy of managed emotion in capitalism (Illouz, 2007). It’s the organisation appealing to sentiment, to empathy, to feeling and not sensation. Fevre (2000) suggests this is rare, arguing that the triumph of ‘common sense’ as a form of reasoning means that rationality is imposed in places where it ought not be. That is, an organisation might easily fail to make the case for care, seeing the job losses that result from the store closing as merely the inevitable outcome of recession: there’s no use crying over spilled economic inevitabilities. After all, it’s common sense that unemployment rises in recession, but never mind, there’ll be a recovery eventually. Certainly, it seems that some of the customers have to be reminded to see past this, to connect the bargain to the pain. I can’t help thinking that there’s a few people making decisions about cutting the budget deficit who could do with a copy of this sign in their office.

References

1. Fevre, R. W. (2000) The Demoralization of Western Culture . Continuum, London.
2. Illouz, E. (1997) Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . Berkeley: University of California Press.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.

What’s notable about the reporting of the dispute is who is imagined to be damaged by strike action: it is you, my reader and telly watcher, you the imagined, eternal and all-important consumer. You are no longer a shadowy presence; you have had your honeymoon plans destroyed. Whilst the workforce are specified by the fact of their employment for BA, you the consumer are everyman, and you the consumer ought not be disadvantaged by those pesky strikers. There is no hint that you are also a worker.

Casablanca Airport by John Spooner

The BA dispute — and the political interventions provoked by it — has broader implications for discussions of pay and working conditions than just this case. It influences the landscape in which further discussions and decisions about labour law and labour rights are made, and relates to political sensitivity to the consumer the worker, to the power of management and the privileged status afforded to protecting the brand. The consumer is not the only universal figure in our social life. We are workers, too.

References

1. Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.
2. Taylor, S. And Tyler, M. (2000) ‘Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry’. Work, Employment and Society. 14:77–95.
3. Williams C. (2003) ‘Sky service: the demands of emotional labour in the airline industry’. Gender, Work and Organization. 10 (5) 513–550.

John Spooner photographs used under creative commons license

cash registers by Lynne Pettinger

Though they don’t half make it hard. I’ve been looking in all sorts of fancy-pants shops for door handles, one’s that don’t even have to turn: the simplest of technologies, and fundamental to the effectiveness of a door. One shopkeeper promises to call once they’ve checked stock, but never does. One looks at me in shock, “we do not DO doorhandles” he booms, forbiddingly and indeed forebodingly for the future of his empty shop. In the next shop, she’s on the phone. The one after used to sell door handles but doesn’t anymore, the next might sell them in the future as quite a few people have been asking. I end up on Ebay.

There’s a little more to this post than just a rant about bad customer service. It’s not insightful to say that to ‘survive’ the recession, a business must deliver on customer service, especially when it is selling luxury. It makes me sound like a cheap consultant. Why the failure to serve then, in a month where fear of business failure must be present in all these traders minds? Well, to some extent its about class; there’s a difficulty in delivering service when you’re the boss and when customer service is coded as low status. It is also about the greater demands for emotional labour produced by the recession: pretty pink presents for women don’t sell themselves in a recession; this makes it hard for ephemera shops to survive. And for the shopkeeper to put on a friendly face now involves forgetting creditors pressing, it demands not thinking about the newly empty shop next door, not reading newspaper advice columns telling customers how to cut back spending by not buying the very things your shop sells. It’s harder emotional labour. And if you never needed customer service skills pre-recession, you’ve a whole lot more to learn now even as you’ve a lot more to forget about. So if a small trader in a fripperies shop tries to smile at you; be nice back – it’s harder for her than you imagine.