Normalization Of Class Differences In Class Acts By Rachel Sherman

How are luxury hotels, where guests with great wealth encounter staffs of service workers, sites for maintaining class differences? How do hotel workers and their customers understand class distinctions? For her book Class Acts, Rachel Sherman investigated two luxury hotels, both settings in which service employment means anticipating and responding to the demands of a clientele accustomed to personal attention. The disparities between these hotel guests and the workers who serve them make luxury hotels ideal sites for examining work relations along the socioeconomic fault lines of the service economy. Despite the potential for class antagonism, however, Sherman finds guests and workers employing elaborate strategies to normalize relations

They recognized workers’ skill, affirmed their abilities, and participated in reciprocal relationships with individual workers. These strategies, too, obscured class relations. By establishing personal relationships, guests sought an individualized equality that contributed to the normalization of class cleavages. By enacting a reciprocity that rewarded a worker’s performance, guests actively participated in a labor process that supported inequality. Guests, therefore, played significant roles in the service theater. They behaved respectfully, tipped generously, and so upheld their part of an implicit contract that codified behavior and promoted

Sherman provides ample evidence to support her findings and uses the two settings effectively to consider the effects of organizational stractures on strategies of interaction. Relying principally on participant observation, she makes only passing references to “back‐of‐the‐house” workers, those whose labor is more often invisible and whose social location is subordinate to other staff. Her project, therefore, is less an organizational ethnography than a study of class encounter, codified in organizational settings. Students of class inequality as well as work and organizations will therefore find this book useful. So might those concerned with labor relations in a service economy that has mostly resisted union organization. How, for example, might challenges to the relationship between workers and guests provide a critique of class‐based subordination? How might such a challenge inform broader political processes? Sherman can only speculate about the implications of her findings. Her microlevel focus, however, suggests some directions for analyses of class‐based entitlement in the service