‘Something to Deal With’: Customer Sexual Harassment and Women's Retail Service Work in Canada

While sexual harassment in the workplace has been extensively researched over the past two decades, the majority of studies have focused on employer–employee or co-worker relationships. In contrast, the issue of ‘customer sexual harassment’ (i.e. the sexual harassment of employees by customers) has been less explicitly explored. This paper examines customer sexual harassment in the Canadian context, drawing on a study of 63 female retail service workers and 20 security workers. It focuses on the nature, prevalence, and consequences of this form of harassment for women who work in various jobs in retail sales (e.g. flower shops, book shops). Findings from the study suggest that customer sexual harassment is a significant problem. Not only have a majority of women been sexually harassed by customers in their current job, but they appear to be highly constrained in dealing with such behaviour. To the extent that the work environment privileges the customer, through its emphasis on customer satisfaction, women are reluctant to confront harassers and may engage in behaviours (e.g. avoiding male customers, being less friendly) which potentially impact their performance on the job. The paper examines the dilemmas facing female workers and the policy issues raised.     

Sexual Harassment in Small‐Town New Zealand: A Qualitative Study of Three Contrasting Organizations

This research investigates women's experiences of sexual harassment in three different organizations in the same New Zealand town. Women working at the local meat‐processing plant, a retail store and a local bank were interviewed about their personal experiences of sexual harassment. The interviews revealed that sexual harassment took different forms and was interpreted and responded to differently in each organization. Women at the meatworks were often socially isolated from other women and had few effective strategies for combating the verbal and physical harassment collectively perpetrated by male employees. In contrast, women at the store had a range of collective coping strategies which enabled them to regard harassment from fellow‐workers and customers as an irritant rather than a serious threat. Women at the bank also had various collective coping strategies, but were more constrained by customer service norms in the organization. These findings are discussed in relation to three key themes; firstly, the influence of the local environment on organizational life; secondly, the effects of differing organizational structures and cultures on the expression and interpretation of sexual harassment and thirdly, the effectiveness of the various ‘communities of coping’ which women develop to combat sexual harassment in the workplace.     

Employer liability for third‐party sexual harassment

While most employers understand the scope of their responsibility to prevent sexual harassment between employees, the scope of an employer's responsibility to prevent sexual harassment by third parties is often less clear. Such third parties may include customers, clients, sales representatives, vendors, investors, or anyone in the workplace who is not a member of the employer's workforce. Although an employer may be unable to easily control non‐employee actions, it is legally obligated to respond to any third‐party sexual harassment of its employees that is brought to the employer's attention. With proper safeguards and remedial action, however, an employer can keep its employees safe from third‐party sexual harassment and protect itself from liability in the process. This Q&A explains employer liability for third‐party sexual harassment, describes the ramifications of an employer's failure to properly address or prevent it, and recommends strategies to reduce an employer's legal exposure.     

Customer First and Customer Sexual Harassment: Some Evidence from the Taiwan Life Insurance Industry

Empirical research suggests that customer sexual harassment is a far more common problem than employee to employee harassment for female salespeople. However, to date, there has been relatively little research conducted on the problem of customer sexual harassment. Insurance salespeople sometimes need to meet customers outside the company, and customer sexual harassment problems may occur. Hence, by using Taiwan's life insurance industry as an example, this study explores three research questions: (1) When the idea of ‘customer first’ is fully recognized by insurance salespeople, does it make the salespeople more tolerant of customer sexual harassment problems? (2) When the idea of customer first is supported by the insurance company, will insurance salespeople expose customer sexual harassment problems? (3) Will insurance salespeople tend to be more tolerant of quid pro quo sexual harassment? A total of 223 full‐time and self‐employed insurance salespeople participated in and completed this study survey. The results showed that the company's attitude may significantly affect the respondents' intention to expose the customer sexual harassment, but the personal belief in ‘customer first’ may not affect the respondents' intention to expose the customer misconduct. Since the three research questions have been less studied in the literature, and customer sexual harassment problems could have serious effects on salespeople, we think the results of this empirical study may have some implications for researchers and practitioners.     

Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power

This article argues that the key to the explanation as to why sexual harassment is a feature of organizational life lies in the issue of power. Yet there has been little attempt to link sexual harassment with theories or explanatory models of power. This article first takes Lukes's (1986) three‐dimensional model as a framework to explore how harassment may be understood as an exercise of power at different levels then shows how radical feminist and post‐structuralist analyses overlap with and are distinct from Lukes's third dimension of power.     

Virtual Servants: Stereotyping Female Front‐Office Employees on the Internet

This article focuses on the service providers of the future: virtual assistants on the Internet. Recent technological developments, supported by intensive research on artificial intelligence, have enabled corporations to construct ‘virtual employees’ who can interact with their online customers. The number of virtual assistants on the Internet continues to grow and most of these new service providers are human‐like and female. In this article I profile virtual employees on the Internet — who they are, what they do and how they present themselves. I demonstrate that the Internet suffers from the same gender stereotyping characteristic of customer services in general and that the unreflective choice of female images is, at the minimum, a symbolic reinforcement of the real circumstances of gender divisions in customer service.     

Work,Bodies and Boundaries: Talking Sexual Harassment in the New Economy

This article examines sexual harassment in the context of the new economy and highlights the manner in which the changing nature of work — and in particular the acknowledged rise of sexualized ‘body work’ — troubles conventional understandings of what constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace and the means to address it. Using data from a small‐scale qualitative study of service workers and professional employees, we explore the ways in which those definitions of sexual harassment now fail to match participants' accounts of their working lives. We examine sexual harassment in the context of the rise of service roles that require forms of increasingly sexualized ‘body work’ from employees, increased demands for workers to ‘self‐manage’, and new flexible modes of employment that blur the boundaries between being ‘on’ and ‘off’ the job. We conclude that these ‘new’ modes of work may provide the conditions for the revival of ‘old’ stories which limit the capacity of individuals to recognize and label behaviours as ‘sexual harassment’.     

Sexual Harassment in Casinos: Effects on Employee Attitudes and Behaviors

This study focuses on sexual harassment and job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee turnover among casino employees. It is the first study investigating sexual harassment in the gaming industry. Based on sex-role spillover theory it was expected that sexual harassment has less of an impact on casino employees than on employees in other industries. Six Reno, Nevada casinos participated in the study and 330 responses were generated from casino employees. The study results show that sexual harassment of and by casino employees is perceived to occur at about the same rate as in other industries. Sexually harassed employees were compared to employees who indicated that they had not been sexually harassed. Sexually harassed employees were less satisfied with their jobs and less committed to the organization. However, they were not more likely to quit their jobs. Sexually harassed employees tended to be younger, Caucasian, and in dealer positions. Hence, in addition to the well-publicized cost of sexual harassment lawsuits, the study shows that sexual harassment in casinos may well be the source of hidden costs important to human resources managers. A result of major interest was that employees who had been harassed held management responsible for not ensuring a work environment that is free of sexual harassment. Implications for casino management are discussed.     

Sexual harassment in contemporary workplaces: Contextualizing structural vulnerabilities

Recent high‐profile cases of unwanted sexual attention in the workplace and the vibrancy of the associated #MeToo movement have drawn attention to the need to continue to explore workplace sexual harassment. In this article, we review existing literature on workplace sexual harassment, with an emphasis on the roles of power and structural vulnerability—key factors underlying sexual harassment. We argue for the need to contextualize structural vulnerabilities, with an eye towards uncovering how dimensions of power and vulnerability vary across workplaces, creating different mechanisms contributing to sexual harassment in specific contexts. With this backdrop, we then use the restaurant service industry as an example to illustrate the unique structural vulnerabilities workers are exposed to in this environment. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of continuing to investigate the dynamics of sexual harassment, especially with work that takes an intersectional approach.     

Sky Service: The Demands of Emotional Labour in the Airline Industry

Following Hochschild's The Managed Heart, which emphasized the problematic features that emotional labour had for women flight attendants, a critical literature emerged which focused on the more enjoyable aspects of emotional labour in service employee experience. This article draws on this literature and analyses emotional labour as a gendered cultural performance but takes issue with the individualizing and pluralistic tenor in the post‐Hochschild discussions. Using a qualitative and quantitative study of nearly 3000 Australian flight attendants, it focuses on organizational and occupational health and safety variables, as well as sexual harass‐ment and passenger abuse — factors barely discussed by Hochschild's critics. The qualitative data indicate that emotional labour is both pleasurable and difficult at different times for the same individual. Gender is still pivotal, as Hochschild suggested, linking emotional labour with sexual harassment. At the same time, the most significant predictors from the quantitative study of whether emotional labour would be costly were organizational. Variables such as whether flight attendants felt valued by the company show that the airline management context is highly influential in the way in which emotional labour is experienced. As a means of understanding the complex relations in this important and eroticized area of service work where flight attendants, airline crews, airline management and passengers have convergent and conflicting interests, the article also deploys a new concept: ‘demanding publics’, to refer to trangressions of the legitimate boundaries of the service worker.     

‘Who's Got the Look?’ Emotional,Aesthetic and Sexualized Labour in Interactive Services

This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The article argues that the current conceptualization of interactive services and sexualized work is partial and blunt; either because it does not adequately incorporate employee corporeality or because it fails to distinguish between the different forms of sexualized work. A better conceptualization is achieved by incorporating aesthetic labour into the analysis, demonstrating how it is extended to sexualized labour employees to have a particular corporate look. From this analysis it is argued that a conceptual double shift is to be needed to understand sexualised labour, firstly, from emotional to aesthetic and sexualized labour and secondly, from an employee sexuality that is sanctioned and subscribed to by management to that which management strategically prescribes.     

Pay Dissatisfaction and Intention to Leave

This article examines the power of a particular type of employee attachment—client embeddedness—in buffering the adverse effect of pay dissatisfaction on employee intention to leave. Based on a sample of 153 personal care workers employed by a disability service organization, this article finds that client embeddedness—the attachment that employees can experience as a result of interactions with clients or customers—dampens the adverse effect of pay dissatisfaction on employee intention to leave. This finding has implications for the development of appropriate recruitment and retention practices in not‐for‐profit organizations.     

‘Doing Something Meaningful’: Gender and Public Service during Municipal Government Restructuring

Research on the gendered dimensions of workplace restructuring often focuses on management strategies and their structural consequences. Less attention is paid to employees’ gendered practices. In this article, we analyse material from in‐depth interviews with front‐line public‐sector employees following a major reorganization of their jobs and workplaces. Our study makes three contributions to theory and research on gender and organizational change. Firstly, it highlights the micro‐level dynamics at the heart of restructuring by showing how workers engaged with an ideal that was central to their understanding of public‐sector work — the public‐service ethic — which they believed was threatened. Secondly, it highlights the importance of gendered meanings and identities in shaping how workers engaged with the public service ethic. Thirdly, the study shows that front‐line employees did not passively accept management plans for change but struggled to resist or transform them in gendered strategies for dealing with organizational change.     

A Theoretical Framework Explaining Cross-Cultural Sexual Harassment: Integrating Hofstede and Schwartz

After a slow beginning, research on sexual harassment from a cross-cultural and international perspective has begun to assume more importance in the literature. Several recent studies have given weight to cultural differences in explaining cross-cultural sexual harassment behaviors across samples from various countries. Herein, we synthesize elements of Hofstede's and Schwartz's cross-cultural theories and specifically apply them to the field of sexual harassment. Our model highlights how the integrated conceptualization based on Hofstede and Schwartz's work is consistent with much of the existing empirical research on sexually harassing or exploitative behaviors, directed towards women, in many different countries and cultures. We offer testable propositions for future empirical research as well as theory development in the area of cross-cultural sexual harassment. The derived research propositions suggest that differences in the likelihood to sexually harass by men, as well as the tolerance of sexual harassment by women, vary across different countries due to the fundamental differences in cultures and values.     

Front Line or All Fronts? Women's Trade Union Activism in Retail Services

This article draws on data from a case study of a trade union campaign to organize part‐time women workers in a large supermarket chain. The data indicate that combining paid work, work in the home and increased trade union participation means that the work of women activists and the resistance they encounter in its execution is broader than the customer/employee interface, or ‘front line’, that is the current focus in literature on service‐sector work and trade unionism. The findings are used to argue that established feminist literature, in which the location and recipients of women's work are conceptualized as multiple and shifting but inter‐related, still provide a useful analytical framework for service‐sector work. Therefore an ‘all fronts’ approach may better describe the lives of part‐time women workers and trade unionists in the sector. However it is argued that, far from simply being considered as an added burden, trade union activism was a powerful catalyst for change in the home and work lives of the working‐class women in the study.     

The Production of Difference and Maintenance of Inequality: The Place of Young Goan Men in a Post‐Crisis UK Labour Market

This article examines the ways in which young migrant men are constructed as potential employees in a British town where service sector employment, often on a casual or precarious basis, dominates the bottom end of the labour market. Low‐wage jobs in many British towns are now constructed as feminized, low waged and demanding personal skills of empathy and servility. In this context, young men, and especially young men of colour, including recent in‐migrants, are at a disadvantage, constructed by employers, agencies, co‐workers and customers as less eligible workers than ‘locals’. We use the experiences of young men from Goa as a lens though which to trace the ways in which expectations and experiences when looking for employment produce a hierarchical division of labour in precarious jobs at the bottom end of the service sector.     

Introduction to the Current Commentaries

ABSTRACT

Despite federal and state laws and policies aimed at preventing sexual misconduct by school employees, one in ten American students will experience sexual abuse or misconduct at the hands of a K-12 school employee. To explore why such sexual misconduct continues to occur, this study examined the effectiveness of education policies by investigating whether and how school employees understand these policies, how they are implemented, and how loopholes may undermine their intent. This qualitative case study was conducted in three Virginia school districts and included 46 semi-structured interviews with school district employees and county, state, and federal government employees associated with cases of school employee sexual misconduct, and extensive document analysis of school policies and procedures, laws, and court records. Analyses revealed an absence of policy implementation, demonstrated most seriously by a lack of awareness and understanding of policies among school employees, underreporting, and ineffective data collection. The study also identified a number of loopholes in the implementation of policies, resulting from a mismanaged intergovernmental system. The analysis suggests that understanding and implementation of policies meant to prevent sexual misconduct by school employees are fragmented; this fragmentation may be contributing to the continued prevalence of sexual misconduct by school employees.     

POWER, STATUS, AND ABUSE AT WORK: General and Sexual Harassment Compared

Workplace harassment can be devastating for employees and damaging for organizations. In this article, we expand the literature by identifying common and distinct processes related to general workplace harassment and workplace sexual harassment . Using both structural equation modeling and in-depth case immersion, we analyze content-coded data from the full population of workplace ethnographies—ethnographies that provide in-depth information on the nature and causes of both general and sexual harassment that would otherwise be difficult to gather. Importantly, both forms of harassment emerge in settings characterized by physically demanding work and minority work groups. In such contexts, both general and sexual harassment enforce formal and informal status hierarchies and social exclusion. Grievance mechanisms and "team models" of workplace organization reduce sexual harassment but have no effect on general harassment. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical, legal, and policy implications for identifying and remedying harassment as a widespread and devastating form of inequality and social exclusion in organizations.     

Understanding the Post‐Industrial Assembly Line: A Critical Appraisal of the Call Centre

As a relatively new form of service sector employment, call centres have been an important issue in the sociology of work for two decades. This article offers a critical review and appraisal of call centre literature, drawing upon an existing typology classifying call centre research in four categories: characteristics and organisational features; choices and strategies of management; the effect of work on employees; and the response of employees to working conditions. The article also explores recent developments that utilise call centres as a tool to investigate emerging social theories and other sociological concepts.