Service Work: Critical Perspectives

Citation

Koskina, A. (2011), "Service Work: Critical Perspectives", Personnel Review, Vol. 40 No. 2, pp. 275-277. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483481111106129

Korczynski and Macdonald have done a wonderful job of bringing together a series of seminal contributions that provide an essential reading for all those interested in the organisation and experience of service work. This book fills an important gap in our understanding of the plurality of theoretical perspectives capturing the essence of front‐line jobs and how these fit into the everyday life of service workers. The book includes ten chapters, each one linking a different theory with contemporary real life examples.

The editors begin by conveying to the readers the important role of the customer within the employment relationship. They do this, by exemplifying the meaning and the key features of service work in chapter one, followed by Sayers and Monin's subtlety and humorous discussion of Chaplin's Modern Times in chapter two. Here, the authors use Chaplin's movie as a model for critique of the challenges service workers face, such as the provision of emotional and aesthetic labour.

In chapter three, Ritzer and Lair apply the “McDonaldisation” thesis and the concept of “nothing”/”something” to understand key trends in contemporary service work. The authors discuss the topical subject of outsourcing and off‐shoring by exploring the implications of two aspects of globalisation – “grobalisation” and “glocalisation” – on service work. A series of apt examples, most notably call centres, are used to illustrate the negative effects of globalisation in domestic/overseas labour markets and the diffusion of routine service sector jobs from developed to developing economies. This evidence is supplemented with Bryman's “Disneyisation” thesis in chapter four, which exemplifies how theming, the dedifferentiation of consumption, merchandising, and emotional labour are used to create a hyper capitalist workplace, where service workers' minds and souls are colonised.

The next two chapters provide a critical account of how service work may be examined through the lens of bureaucracy and labour process theory. Korczynski puts forward the model of “customer‐oriented bureaucracy” as a way of capturing the dual imperatives in the organisation of service work. These imperatives include the desire to be customer‐oriented so as to create the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty and the need to be cost efficient at the same time. The author highlights the contradictory demands made of front‐line workers by drawing evidence from recent research on service workers' lived experiences. Korczynski culminates with a critical conclusion discussing the uses and limitations of the customer‐oriented bureaucracy as an analytical tool. It is suggested that this model should be used as a heuristic device in conjunction with political economy theory. In a similar manner, Warhurst, Thompson and Nickson use highly up‐to‐date empirical evidence to stress the contradictions and challenges of front‐line work. These authors apply labour process theorising to service work, to explore control mechanisms over work organisation, epitomised by the extraction of emotional and aesthetic labour from workers. They criticise the concept of nothing raised in chapter three and they assert that service is still embedded in the provision and preparation for sale to customers of materiality, including the minds, souls and appearance of service workers.

Chapters seven and eight shift the focus of discussion from the process of service provision to the profile of service workers in terms of gender, ethnicity, and social class. Macdonald and Merrill demonstrate how the feminist approach to intersectionality offers insights into both discrimination in hiring and the experience of working in interactive services. The authors use a series of real life examples, such as Hooters and Hyatt, to stress the implications of customer preferences in the service triangle (customer‐worker‐management). It is suggested that the worker's identity, most notably their gender, is used as an inextricable aspect of the service itself. Parrenas takes the argument on gendered service work further in chapter eight by examining the international division of care work. Drawing upon rich qualitative evidence, the author points to the increasing flow of migrant domestic female workers from poor to rich nations, and suggests that this has created inequities of race and class hierarchies between women and nations.

Cobble and Merrill's contribution in chapter eight brings together certain aspects of the preceding chapters to indicate the prospects for service sector unionism. The authors present the story of unrelenting union decline in services by using US as a case example. The authors also examine the rise of a new service worker unionism, arguing that contract unionism by itself is not enough to reverse the fortunes of those in the lowest paying service occupations, a disproportionate number of whom are women and ethnic minorities.

In the final chapter, Gabriel takes up some of the issues discussed in the book to bring fresh light to the customer‐worker interaction by focusing on the aspect of care. Applying psychoanalytical theory, the author suggests a split between two images of a customer in the minds of workers. At one hand, there is the “deserving” customer, who is often a regular with individualised tastes and needs, and who evokes affection and sympathy. At the other hand, there is the “sovereign” customer, who is often seen as parasitical and pampered, and who provokes resentment and envy. It is argued that frequently these two images merge into one generating ambivalent emotions with disproportionate intensities. The author concludes that the customer‐worker relationship perhaps should not be seen through the dominant theory of emotional labour rather than through the prism of “fantasy” that recognises the unmanaged and unmanageable care elements in the service interaction.

All the chapters in the book dig beneath the surface of service work to reveal its realities, contradictions, and tensions from various theoretical perspectives. Depending upon the theoretical lens that is used different aspects of service work are emphasised, yet a common theme throughout the biggest part of the book is the management or society rhetoric in attempting to fashion a fragile social order in the name of the customer. To this end, this text is particularly refreshing in its treatment of the customer as part of the employment relationship. One critique I would raise here is that the volume offers only a glimpse of the pleasures associated with service work. The potential positive implications of workers' socially embedded interaction with customers are briefly considered only by Korczynski's and Gabriel's articles. Another missed opportunity in the book is the relative neglect of the potential implications of care or philanthropic emotion management for the management of service workers. Furthermore, a wider inclusion of European country examples in relation to emotion and aesthetic labour as well as the organisation of service work could perhaps add to the debate on the experiences of service workers. Finally, despite the significance of the final chapter in linking some of the aspects raised by preceding articles, a critical concluding chapter by the editors echoing the main arguments of the book and drawing out the implications of the different theoretical strands considered would be preferred.

In summary, this book provides a lucid and critical theoretical account of the rhetorics and realities of service work, which is replete with empirical research and real world examples. Scholars and students in organisation studies, human resource management, and sociology of work will all find this to be a useful and interesting reading.