Based on qualitative data collected for broader research on the transformation of hotel labour in Venice, Italy, this study explores how workers and unions have experienced outsourcing carried out through cooperatives of convenience (COC). The authors examine the impact of outsourcing on work processes, highlighting its link with growing standardisation and increased managerial control. In contrast to studies that underscore the critical effects of outsourcing on solidarity and the employment system, this article stresses that, even in a sector characterised by union weakness, workers, especially unorganised migrants, develop resistance strategies within the workplace as well as paths of mobilisation.

This article contributes to debates on critical diversity and intersectionality by focusing on hotel labour in a global tourist destination, the city of Venice. Through a qualitative study it explores how social differences are experienced by workers and valued by hotel management. We find that while management tends to allocate workers to different jobs according to the perceived 'desirability' of their embodied attributes by customers, the gendered and racialized divisions among workers do not simply conform with traditional patterns of 'back' and 'front-of-house' occupational positions. Rather they reflect variable compositions along the gender, migration and racial stereotypes reproduced by employers' attempts to fulfill perceived changing expectations of customers. We develop the notion of 'intersectional management' to capture these fluid forms of valorization of social difference, which appear influenced by workers' practices of embodied intersectionality through the selective performance of entrenched stereotypes, and their everyday encounters with an internationalizing clientele.

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is a technological framework and policy programme that emerged in Germany in the 2010s, promising to revitalise manufacturing and revalue work by means of intelligent productive systems. The paradigm's cross‐national diffusion raises questions about its context‐dependent adaptation. This article focuses on the Italian I4.0 programme and its implementation among medium‐sized manufacturing companies in the country's Veneto region. It analyses Italian policy and company strategies through the perceptions and experiences of managers, unionists and workers. The research highlights how a system dominated by small and medium enterprises (SMEs)—one with limited technological investment and without a coordinated system of industrial relations—reshaped the I4.0 policy goals, technological developments and work outcomes. The results show how the features of the productive context are associated with a far less ambitious I4.0 plan, the limited and selective adoption of technology at the level of firms, and modest top‐down organisational changes that do not fulfil the promises of the project.

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