Focusing on an unresearched group of women brewers, and drawing conceptually on embodiment and identity work, this article explores worker corporealities within the gendered landscape of microbreweries and deepens understanding of the body/work/gender nexus in the context of brewer's work. In doing so, it challenges the marginalisation of female worker bodies in scholarly work on male-dominated occupations. Drawing on interview and observation data collected in the UK in 2015, verbal narratives of women brewers' experiences of their working lives are utilised to provide insights into how their gendered bodily practices constitute resources for constructing a distinctive 'brewster' identity. Women brewers engage in identity work, on both individual and collective levels, through the material and symbolic framing of their embodied and gendered working selves; navigating their physical working environments; downplaying gender to emphasise physical competence; and foregrounding gender in relation to non-physical aspects to accentuate difference and collective contribution.
This article examines migrant women tourism workers’ understandings of, and diverse responses to, exploitative working conditions by taking account of the constraints posed by oppressive contexts and ideologies. It analyses how their location at the intersection of multiple axes of disadvantage and discrimination on account of gender, ethno-nationality, immigration status and migration history as well as their low-status employment and educational level, shapes both their understandings of particular experiences of exploitation and possible responses to these, and examines the effects of their practices upon the power structures at work. Based on the experiences of eleven women from Central and Eastern European countries working in the UK tourism industry, this article theorises workers’ responses to hyperexploitative employment relations by utilising a differentiated conceptualisation of agency as practices of resilience, reworking and resistance. In doing so, it rejects binary categories of victimhood and agency, as well as romanticised accounts of unmitigated resistance.
This article reports the findings of an arts-based participatory action research project on the experiences of Central and Eastern European female migrants working in the hospitality sector in the United Kingdom. It critically explores the participants’ negotiations of their multiple,
intersecting mobilities and immobilities,and reveals how their employment in hospitality both encourages and restricts these mobilities. The article is situated within the unfolding hopeful tourism scholarship perspective, and argues that its inclusive and participatory approach provides considerable
insight into these migrant workers’ complex and often under-appreciated trajectories. The article concludes that the arts-based participatory methodology deployed in this research uniquely allows these highly mobile and at the same time immobilized hospitality workers to self-represent
themselves and to maintain ownership of their stories.
Technology is shifting not only how the tourism industry is run but also the nature of work, working conditions and management control. This article examines the potential implications of technologydriven transformations on lower-paid lower-skilled tourism workers. With tourism expected to be the sector most affected by intelligent automation, greater attention needs to be given to the variegated impact on the workforce. Drawing on the concepts of surveillance capitalism, disruptive innovation and techno-solutionism, the article problematises these transformations and unpacks the rhetoric used by tourism and technology companies. Situating the discussion within UN Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG8), the article explores how -without proactive regulatory measures and worker-centric approaches -the expansion of intelligent automation in tourism workplaces risks exacerbating inequalities and precarisation of lower-skilled workers, exposing them to job losses and dislocation, dehumanising their role and gradually automating them out. Additionally, digital surveillance may shift power further towards employers, reducing worker agency and impacting on worker wellbeing. Overall, despite clear benefits, unfettered intelligent automation and digital surveillance risk disrupting established worker rights and protections and inadvertently moving the tourism sector away from the ideals of decent work for all.
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