Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels

              © PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural. ISSN 1695-7121
Vol. 10 Nº 2. Special Issue. Pp. 91-93. 2012
www.pasosonline.org
duygu.salman@boun.edu.tr
Reseñas de publicaciones
Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels
Rachel Sherman, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, USA: 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-520-24782-6
Duygu Salman
“...Take the advertisement of a present day
‘millionaire’s hotel’, with the assurance it
gives ‘the very last word in sumptuousness’.
Is this not one of the features of our time
upon which we all trust that a wiser age
will look back, not only with condemna-tion,
but with a sense of nausea?” Herbert
L. Stewart (1918, as cited by Sherman,
2007, p.257)
It is true that the last crisis of the cur-rent
capitalist economic system, which has
been going on since 2008, raised more pub-lic
outcry globally (99% marches) compared
to the time Class Acts has been published.
Still, the high-end consumption that is an-alyzed
by Sherman (2007) seems nowhere
near disappearing and human race seems
nowhere closer that “wiser age” that Stew-art
mentioned. Thus, the book Class Acts:
Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels
deserves a renewed attention nowadays.
Sherman’s (2007) book, which is an ex-tended
ethnographic work that uses par-ticipant
observation and in-depth inter-views,
represents one of the best examples
of sociology of labor, occupations and orga-nizations
that focuses on the luxury hotel
industry.
Sherman uses two urban luxury hotels
as her sites to analyze the nature of luxury
service. It is well established in the ser-vice
work literature that unlike manufac-turing
jobs, all service jobs are defi ned by
their requirement of face-to-face contact
and interactive production and consump-tion.
Sherman makes an addition to those
characteristics by showing that in a luxury
service workers are also expected to en-gage
in intense emotional labor by continu-ously
recognizing “the customers’ limitless
entitlement to their attention and effort”
(p.6). Therefore, Sherman suggests that
the globally omnipresent luxury consump-tion
of the new service economy creates
“new forms of inequality” (p.259) between
the worker and the client. Thus, a new
paradigm or at least more fl exible concepts
are necessary to understand these new dy-namics.
In her own words:
“These issues matter for two reasons. First,
they are important for our understanding
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Class Acts: Service and Inequality ...
ISSN 1695-7121
of interactive work and its links to relationships to
selfhood. Second, they are signifi cant for our concep-tion
of how work is connected to class” (p.3)
Sherman uses two concepts in her book that
are central to her discussion. One of them is the
notion of “consent”, which she borrows from Buro-way’s
(1979) study. Briefl y, she describes consent as
“workers’ use of their agency to participate in work”
(p. 16). The notion of consent also allows the worker
to withdraw their consent in various ways such as
quitting or not engaging in required emotional la-bor.
The other concept is “normalization” that refers
to “the taken-for-granted nature of both interactive
and structural inequality. Unequal entitlements and
responsibilities ... they simply became a feature of
the everyday landscape of the hotel.” (p.17).
Throughout the book Sherman builds on
how these two concepts function in workers’ strate-gies
to shape their identity and behavior on the face
of managers, coworkers and guests. The fi rst four
chapters of the book mainly focus on the strategies
that workers use to construct themselves, not as
subservient but as in control of their work.
The strategies that workers use with guests,
which are explained in great detail, include: person-alization
and recognition; anticipation and legitima-tion
of needs; pampering as display of labor; defer-ence
and sincerity; playing games of speed, service,
control (i.e. maximizing sales, room blocking, etc.);
games of money (i.e. tipping game); condescension
and criticism of guests (i.e. guests as needy); limit-ing
the entitlement of guests to stay in the hotel and
consume luxury services.
In the second chapter, the author also includes
a discussion of how organizational factors, such as
different managerial regimes, rhetoric, division of
labor, worker demographics, internal labor markets
and practical cultures of managerial authority and
worker relations, also shape the strategies devel-oped
by workers and how different managerial re-gimes
help workers to see themselves as powerful,
professional, skilled and independent.
In the third and fourth chapters, Sherman de-scribes
how workers constitute themselves as su-perior
to their peers by using: comparisons related
to competence; emphasizing perks associated with
their jobs; and using association with the status of
the hotel and its guests.
In chapter fi ve, Sherman focuses on how reci-procity
in luxury hotels is not only defi ned by an-tagonism,
instrumentality and un-authenticity as it
is usually discussed in the service work literature.
She shows how meaningful and reciprocal relations
are formed between workers and clients that helped
workers become invested in their job. While recipro-cal
relations act as the major mechanism to generate
consent, the normalization of inequality is achieved
as guests also use reciprocity to constitute work-ers
as inherently equal. Sherman explains three
ways through which this equality is established.
The fi rst is the acceptance of a mutual obligation
and exchange of both workers and clients to each
other. The second is the acceptance of worker labor
as voluntary and offered willingly. Finally, the third
is through the development of meaningful relation-ships.
The chapter also discusses what happens in
situations when this contract breaks down.
While the majority of the book is dedicated to
describe how employees construct themselves as
powerful agents, the last chapter of the book goes
into some details as to how the guests produce their
entitlement to luxury services. Through their con-tact
with hotel staff, guests learn how to behave in
the luxury environment and come to see themselves
as deserving of luxury consumption. For their part,
they work to create selves that are needy, deserving
and generous in order to overcome their fears of not
belonging to luxury sites or exploiting workers.
Overall, the author provides three important
conclusions: The fi rst one is that the entitlement
in the production-consumption of luxury service
emerges from class positions of hotel workers and
guests outside the hotel. Thus, the luxury service in
the hotels depends on unequal entitlement to mate-rial
resources outside the hotel. In addition, greater
entitlement to material resources also guarantees
unequal entitlements to recognition. The second one
is that the class is not only an important factor that
structures luxury service sites, but it is also cre-ated
interactively within these sites through work-ers’
and guests’ performances. The third one is that
luxury service sites normalize the unequal entitle-ments
in production-consumption relations through
the workers’ and guests’ various strategies of self.
In conclusion, the book Class Acts is a good case
of thick description of the relation between class and
service work. It is a highly readable book with in-teresting
anecdotes and solid sociological concepts,
offering the reader a complicated and nuanced pic-ture
of the social dynamics in the luxury hotels.
Sherman gives a detailed analysis of luxury service,
its organization and the negotiation of inequality
between workers and guests through various prac-tices,
which eventually make class inequality seem
Duygu Salman
ISSN 1695-7121
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PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 10(2). Special Issue. 2012
normal.
The book offers a detailed description and a
sound critical sociological analysis of the profession-alized
luxury service in hotels that normalize exist-ing
unequal social relations and reproduces ideas
about class, race and gender. In addition, Sherman
asks a very important question in the conclusion:
“But another critical question emerges here: What
are the possibilities for challenging unequal worker-client
entitlements and dominant ideas about income
and class inequality generally? (p. 268)...it is hard
to see how consumption entitlements could be con-tested
practically, especially in the service theatre.
In luxury hotels, workers cannot demand guests to
be less rich or less entitled to recognition, because the
hotel’s existence is predicated on these features. And,
of course, the issue goes beyond the service theatre it-self,
for class entitlements are embedded in cultures
outside the hotel. (p.269)”
It is not realistic to expect answers to such com-plicated
questions from one book and from one dis-cipline.
Therefore, Class Acts defi nitely is a must-read
for scholars and students of tourism as it of-fers
a critical perspective to the growing economic
inequality that also underlies luxury consumption
in certain forms of tourism.
References
Buroway, Michael
1979. Manufacturing Consent. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Stewart, Herbert L.
1918. “The Ethics of Luxury and Leisure”. Ameri-can
Journal of Sociology 24(3): 241-59.
Recibido: 15/02/2011
Aceptado: 31/10/2011