More‐than‐human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives. Organizations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of non‐humans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, I argue that some non‐human animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service to commercial organizations. More‐than‐human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organizational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalized others, human and non‐human.     

‘It's People's Whole Lives’: Gender,Class and the Emotion Work of User Involvement in Mental Health Services

The concept of emotion work has been widely applied to the study of service work. Yet its use in understanding the social dynamics of user involvement in public services remains under explored. Drawing on a study of user involvement in mental health service development, I show its utility for understanding this social and political realm. The article discusses findings from a critical discursive and contextual emotional labour perspective, taking into account organizational and institutional factors as well as social structural dimensions of gender and social class. It shows how discourses on emotion, constructed through articulation of personal experiences of service usage both reflected and constructed the ideological and structural positionings of women service users, while emotional discourse — displays of anger in user involvement forums — worked to constitute traditionally male and ideologically masculine elements of the field, as well as the working‐class identities of some participants. These forms of emotion work, and the ways in which they elicited further emotion management from service users and workers alike, are located in relation to the rules of engagement of user involvement and the bureaucratic institutional forms within which this took place. The article concludes that the emotion work of user involvement ultimately helped to reproduce the dominant institutional and social order, including its gender and class dimensions. Implications for policies and practices of user involvement in mental health services are provided.     

What It Feels Like for a Whore: The Body Politics of Women Performing Erotic Labour in Hong Kong

This article seeks to investigate the complexity of the working experiences of female prostitutes in Hong Kong, using an oral history approach. Based on 13 in‐depth interviews, I depict my respondents as performing the skilled emotional labour of sex in exchange for their clients’ money. Looking at the ways in which the women manage the job, the self and the business, I argue that their major problem is not with the commercial transaction (that is, the content of the work itself), nor with the ‘conflict’ between their personal and work selves, but with the social stigma, surveillance and dangers at their workplaces. Inspired by a post‐structuralist conception of power and identity formation, I propose a women‐centred lived‐experience feminist approach in the hope of filling the gap between the bipolar imageries of ‘sexual slavery’ or ‘sex radical’ that have been thrown up in the feminist debate over the meaning of prostitution. This approach emphasizes the inter‐relationships among women’s lived experiences, the micro‐sites of social surveillance and the macro‐condition of wider society. Although Hong Kong female prostitutes are not ‘political’ in fighting for their rights and benefits, they have tended to take the path of micro‐resistance in combating societal domination. They negotiate an identity of the ‘prostitute’ that is sensitive and flexible to different institutional areas that seems to jeopardize the neat binaries of madonna/whore, good girl/bad girl, victim/warrior, conformist/radical. This allows them to create their own space to work and survive.     

Risking safety and rights: online sex work,crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

It has been well established that those working in the sex industry are at various risks of violence and crime depending on where they sell sex and the environments in which they work. What sociological research has failed to address is how crime and safety have been affected by the dynamic changing nature of sex work given the dominance of the internet and digital technologies, including the development of new markets such as webcamming. This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet‐based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet‐based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt, building on our article in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007. We present the concept of ‘blended safety repertoires’ to explain how sex workers, particularly independent escorts, are using a range of traditional techniques alongside digitally enabled strategies to keep themselves safe. We contribute a deeper understanding of why sex workers who work indoors rarely report crimes to the police, reflecting the dilemmas experienced. Our findings highlight how legal and policy changes which seek to ban online adult services advertising and sex work related content within online spaces would have direct impact on the safety strategies online sex workers employ and would further undermine their safety. These findings occur in a context where aspects of sex work are quasi‐criminalized through the brothel keeping legislation. We conclude that the legal and policy failure to recognize sex work as a form of employment, contributes to the stigmatization of sex work and prevents individuals working together. Current UK policy disallows a framework for employment laws and health and safety standards to regulate sex work, leaving sex workers in the shadow economy, their safety at risk in a quasi‐legal system. In light of the strong evidence that the internet makes sex work safer, we argue that decriminalisation as a rights based model of regulation is most appropriate.     

‘I Can't Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity,Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy’

The growth of the ‘service economy’ has coincided with the large‐scale detachment from the labour market of low‐skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low‐skilled men, this article explores the men's attitudes to entry‐level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working‐class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low‐skilled service work as a future source of employment.     

Designing out vulnerability, building in respect: violence, safety and sex work policy

One recent finding about the prostitution market is the differences in the extent and nature of violence experienced between women who work on the street and those who work from indoor sex work venues. This paper brings together extensive qualitative fieldwork from two cities in the UK to unpack the intricacies in relation to violence and safety for indoor workers. Firstly, we document the types of violence women experience in indoor venues noting how the vulnerabilities surrounding work-based hazards are dependent on the environment in which sex is sold. Secondly, we highlight the protection strategies that indoor workers and management develop to maintain safety and order in the establishment. Thirdly, we use these empirical findings to suggest that violence should be a high priority on the policy agenda. Here we contend that the organizational and cultural conditions that seem to offer some protection from violence in indoor settings could be useful for informing the management of street sex work. Finally, drawing on the crime prevention literature, we argue that it is possible to go a considerable way to designing out vulnerability in sex work, but not only through physical and organizational change but building in respect for sex workers rights by developing policies that promote the employment/human rights and citizenship for sex workers. This argument is made in light of the Coordinated Prostitution Strategy.     

Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a ‘time of austerity’, care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time‐consumers and homecare workers as resource‐wasting time‐takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self‐sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low‐waged care work are required to eschew a rights‐bearing, present‐tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of ‘care’ into those of ‘time consumption’, and by emphasizing the virtue of present‐tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time‐monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers’ pay.     

Emotional Labour and Skill: A Reappraisal

The article seeks to open up a critical discussion around the idea of emotional labour as skilled work. It has been suggested by some commentators that many front‐line service jobs, traditionally thought of as low skilled in terms of their technical aspects, may actually constitute a form of skilled work, since they require their holders to perform skilled emotional labour in their dealings with customers. Such discourses hold out the possibility of progress not only in intellectual terms but also with regard to improving the status and pay of many low‐waged service workers. The article subjects these claims to critical scrutiny and argues that applying the label ‘skill’ to all forms of emotion work is extremely problematic.     

Challenging the Child/Adult Distinction in Theory and Practice on Prostitution

This article argues that contemporary concern about ending child prostitution is misdirected in its strategy. Some theorists and activists, even the ILO, are seeking to create a distinction between adult and child prostitution as if child prostitution could be ended whilst adult prostitution remains intact. The motivation for the distinction relies upon trends in the 1990s to characterize men's prostitution abuse of adult women as constituting legitimate work, choice and agency for the women themselves, and to construct a profitable prostitution industry which can create profits for governments and sex industrialists. I will argue that child and adult prostitution are inextricably interlinked, both in personnel (the women and children work together), in terms of the abusers (who make no distinctions), in the harm they cause and in that both constitute harmful traditional practices which must be ended. The acceptance of men's prostitution abuse as the basis for the industrialization of adult prostitution increases the scale and harm of child prostitution. Thus only policies to eradicate all of men's abusive prostitution behaviour will serve to mitigate child prostitution.     

Workers with disabilities and the challenges of emotional labour

This paper explores the implications of emotional labour for workers with disabilities, drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 59 respondents who had disabilities and who worked in service sector occupations. The analysis illustrates that employer demands for emotional labour may prove difficult for workers with a range of disabilities, including psychiatric diagnoses, learning difficulties and physical impairments. Analysis also points to the ways in which the non‐accommodating nature of many workplaces often forces workers with disabilities to engage in ‘extra’ emotion work in the interests of fitting in and concealing/ downplaying their impairments.     

‘Knows how to please a man’: studying customers to understand service work

This paper argues that sociologists interested in service work in consumer culture should pay attention to customers' understandings and accounts of their experience and participation in service encounters. It takes the market for sex as a case study and counters the neglect of customers within the study of service work by analysing customer service reviews of paid‐for sex published on a UK website, Punternet. It argues that male customers, familiar with the norms of consumer culture, assess the erotic, aesthetic and emotional labours performed by female workers to make judgements of service quality which suggests that the feminised ‘good worker’ is defined as professional when they disguise the market transaction.     

The Impact of Migration on the Gendering of Service Work: The Case of a West London Hotel

This article responds to a call from Kerfoot and Korczynski to investigate the gendering of service sector employment. As a characteristic of many post‐industrial economies in the global North is the growing significance of migrant workers, this article investigates the impact of migration for work on the gendering of service work. Taking the embodied and emotional labour of workers to be fundamental to service work, it describes how these are refracted and produced through migration. The article draws on 60 interviews with workers in a west London hotel who were born abroad and the human resources staff and managers who are responsible for the recruitment and promotion of the workforce. We argue that migration is an important process in the construction of the contemporary workforce in post‐industrial service economies and that migration status should be understood as intersecting with gender in the production of a gendered performance at work.     

Revanchist Masculinity: Gender Attitudes in Sex Work Management

Pimps, or male managers of female sex workers, are commonly represented in popular culture as hypermasculine and as a ubiquitous part of sex work. However, there is little empirical scholarship on pimps or the construction of their masculinity. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this article demonstrates how pimps produce a “revanchist masculinity” that seeks to reclaim power from women and establish status over other men. Pimps are suspicious of sex workers’ motives and deny them decision‐making power and profit sharing—processes that highlight how work practices can structure gender identity construction.     

Gendered,Invisible Work in Non‐profit Social Service Organizations: Implications for Worker Health and Safety

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.     

The Art of Pacifying an Aggressive Client: ‘Feminine’ Skills and Preventing Violence in Caring Work

This article explores the complex interconnection between gender and emotion in the context of client‐perpetrated violence at work, focusing on interviews with and writings by Finnish nurses and social workers to discuss the ‘feminine’ emotional skills that are supposed to prevent violence. The social formation of these skills is analysed with the concept ‘emotional habitus’: emotional skills derive from the socially acquired disposition to manage emotions according to the gendered values of caring work. Emotional habitus, based on the internalized, second‐nature sense of emotional management, is shown to both persuade and enable employees to use emotional skills as assets for negotiating violence. This article discusses the potentiality for active agency enabled by skilful emotional management in violence prevention, bearing in mind the gender inequalities and internal contradictions connected to the social formation and practice of those skills.     

Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian,China

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT‐enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white‐collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese‐speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation.     

‘Recovery work’ and ‘magic’ among long‐term mental health service‐users

Based on an extended period of qualitative research with mental health service‐users in north‐east England, this article considers the various forms of ‘magical work’ and ‘recovery work’ that emerge in the lives of people living with severe mental health problems. Given the now sizeable body of literature which seeks to problematize traditional conceptual boundaries of work, the article asks to what extent these hidden and unusual work‐forms might also be considered legitimate members of the category. Rather than argue for the expansion of the construct to accommodate these activities, the paper attempts simply to problematize the extent to which so‐called ‘mad’ forms of work are irresolvably different to more conventional forms of occupation. In challenging notions of the psychiatric patient as inevitably inactive, new vocabularies for service‐user work are explored. Concluding remarks are also directed to recent policy debates concerning ‘back‐to‐work’ welfare reform for long‐term out of work service‐users.     

Privileging work not sex: flexibility and employment in the sexual services industry

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well‐paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to women's decision‐making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.     

‘The Worst Thing is the Screwing’ (2): Context and Career in Sex Work

This article, and an earlier linked one, focus on the labour process of the modern Western female prostitute. Drawing on available qualitative research from the United Kingdom and Australia, and research undertaken by one of the authors in New South Wales, we argue here that the ways in which individual prostitutes understand themselves, the work that they do and their relationships with clients are at least partly informed by the discursive context of their labour. We seek to highlight the variety of discourses which currently give shape to prostitution in the modern West, and in so doing discuss the ways in which individual workers may engage with these discourses to make sense of their life‐world — for example, whether they understand themselves as victims of patriarchy or as feminist activists. In this second article, then, our focus moves from the encounter between the client and the prostitute to the prostitute's career, and we provide a discussion of the various ways of understanding how and why prostitutes enter the profession, how and why they stay in it, how and why they exit this occupational field and how and why they understand themselves in particular ways following such an exit.