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.     

Labour is not a commodity: The content and meaning of work in the twenty‐first century

In his valedictory lecture before the Collège de France, Alain Supiot reviews his work on the transformation of labour in the twenty‐first century, highlighting the role of law and institutions in addressing the consequences of the digital revolution and environmental crisis. In his view, the moral, social and environmental bankruptcy of neoliberalism calls for us to reconsider the legal fiction of labour as a commodity and to re‐establish the truly “humane labour regime” envisaged by the preamble to the ILO Constitution, recognizing both the meaning and content of work. He uses the case of scientific research to illustrate his argument.     

‘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.     

The Care–tech Link: An Examination of Gender,Care and Technical Work in Healthcare Labour

Despite the dramatic increase of technology in the healthcare field, little is known of how care work and technical work are related. Examining substitute healthcare providers offers a useful illustration of the care–tech link because nursing (care) and medical (technical) models often merge. Forty‐two interviews with men and women (nurse practitioners, nurse anaesthetists and physician assistants) were conducted in the USA. The results showed that the gendered nature of care–tech boundaries has shifted in small but important ways and that the gendering of work influenced the shape of these boundaries. Men often encountered barriers when moving too far into the care realm and attempted to overcome this by ‘caring cautiously’ and emphasizing problem‐solving care. Women faced similar barriers from the ‘old boys network’ when they entered highly technical areas. There is also evidence that men and women challenged existing care–tech boundaries and moved beyond their traditional roles.     

Precarious belonging: blindness,masculinity, and work in Polish young adult literature of the 1970s and 1980s

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between disability, identity, and productivity in two Polish young adult novels published under state socialism: Jak trudno kocha? (How difficult it is to love) and Spotkania (The meetings). How Difficult it is to Love by Jerzy Szczygie? (1976) tells the story of a young blind man who, after living many years “unproductively” with his mother, decides to study and work. Published in 1986, Klementyna So?onowicz-Olbrychska’s novel The Meetings also focuses on a blind male teenager who leaves his hometown to live with other blind students at a residential school where he plans a future profession. The two works are concerned with the processes of becoming disabled and becoming a part of the blind community. Crucially, it is productivity – the main value in a socialist state – that participates in the formation of disability identity and enables disabled men to form separate communities and workshops for disabled people.     

‘The Women Can Be Moved to Fill in the Gaps’: New Production Concepts,Gender and Suppliers

This article wishes to extend our understanding of New Production Concepts (hereafter NPC) induced restructuring in two areas. Firstly, it wishes to further explore the gender distinctions to be made when considering the impact of NPC on the labour process. In turn, this calls for a consideration of the extent to which NPC restructuring perpetuates, recasts and fortifies gendered divisions of labour within organizations. It will indicate how the introduction of NPC within a buyer and two supply organizations intensified prevailing gendered divisions of labour and disproportionately impacted upon women workers. It will also stress that women workers appeared to be more exposed to the implementation of policies designed to secure responsiveness to the satisfaction of customer requirements. However, while the evidence will reveal the importance of exploring distinctions within labour as part of a process of restructuring, it also highlights the linkages between these organizations. Secondly, therefore it aims to extend the territory of existing debates by highlighting a gender distinction across and between organizations. It will conclude by highlighting the importance of constructing an analysis of NPC‐induced restructuring which not only embraces a gendered analysis of change but simultaneously does not privilege research attention to particular ‘hermetically sealed’ workplaces, dislocated from a wider process of inter‐firm restructuring.     

Innovative approaches to regulating decent work for domestic workers in Côte d'Ivoire: Labour administration and the judiciary under a general labour code

The authors offer a contextualized analysis of judicial decisions rendered during 1971–2013 in Côte d'Ivoire, where domestic work is regulated by a general labour code. Assessments of those decisions, alongside qualitative interviews of institutional actors, elucidate how innovative practices were mainly derived from the code by attentive inspectors and by jurisprudence evolving to treat domestic work like any other. Yet limitations emanating from the inability to grapple with the specificity of domestic work are also identified. Reaffirming that the regulation of domestic work must embrace its duality (work like any other and work like no other), the authors conclude with a call for an international community of learning on decent work for domestic workers.     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.     

Man Up,Man Down: Race–Ethnicity and the Hierarchy of Men in Female‐Dominated Work

Scholars have largely overlooked the significance of race and socioeconomic status in determining which men traverse gender boundaries into female‐dominated, typically devalued, work. Examining the gender composition of the jobs that racial minority men occupy provides critical insights into mechanisms of broader racial disparities in the labor market—in addition to stalled occupational desegregation trends between men and women. Using nationally representative data from the three‐year American Community Survey (2010–2012), we examine racial/ethnic and educational differences in which men occupy gender‐typed jobs. We find that racial minority men are more likely than white men to occupy female‐dominated jobs at all levels of education—except highly educated Asian/Pacific Islander men—and that these patterns are more pronounced at lower levels of education. These findings have implications for broader occupational inequality patterns among men as well as between men and women.     

Political Economy,Ecological Modernization,and Energy Use: A Panel Analysis of State‐Level Energy Use in the United States, 1960–1990

The present study will examine energy consumption from two competing perspectives within environmental social science: political economy and ecological modernization. These frameworks will be evaluated with a fixed‐effects panel analysis of state‐level energy use between the years 1960 and 1990, based on data for 50 states plus Washington, DC, from the Energy Information Administration’s State Energy Data System. The results from the panel analysis show that the increase in total energy use between 1960 and 1990 depended on both increasing economic growth and urbanization, even after controlling for population size, industrialization, and inflation‐adjusted energy prices. The results challenge the claims of ecological modernization theory and support a political economic approach to the study of changes in energy use. In the conclusion, the study’s findings will be framed within the context of the early twenty‐first‐century economic and ecological crises. In light of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this study can also further advance the renewable energy debate by reminding us of the social drivers of energy use.     

Innovation and Diversity Redux: Analyzing Musical Form and Content in the American Recording Industry, 1990–2009

Using the American recording industry as a case study, this article analyzes innovation and diversity concurrently and outlines the analytical purchase gained from doing so; examines the effects of performer incumbency and combinatorial role patterns, thereby offering an empirical application of the “role as resource” perspective (Baker and Faulkner 1991 ); and provides data on an underexplored era in which the emergence of digital technology has had wide‐ranging repercussions. Regressing measures of innovation (form) and diversity (content) on incumbency status and combinatorial role patterns reveals that innovation and diversity operate through distinct collaborative patterns. New artists are found to be carriers of musical innovation, and while performing artists with autonomy over the roles of songwriter and producer are more likely to be progenitors of musical diversity, innovation emerges from role specialization. Artistic roles and performer attributes, moreover, come together in particular ways to influence diversity and innovation depending on the environmental context. Post compact disc (CD) format era, innovation wrought by producer specialization is predominant, but the music is devoid of diversity. I conclude by arguing that the manner in which configurations of diversity and innovation interact has implications both for cultural production and reception.