Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how new policies and standards to professionalise nightclub bouncing along with customer-oriented service imperatives affect bouncers’ work practices and identities. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish bouncers and uses the concept of “emotional labour” and related ideas of “interactive service work” to explore how service imperatives play out at political/commercial and organisational levels and how such initiatives are negotiated by bouncers in their work practices. Findings Until recently, the nocturnal work of bouncers had been relatively unaffected by labour market service paradigms. This is now changing, as policy initiatives and the capitalist service economy colonise ever greater domains of the urban night and the work conducted here. We argue that trends towards professionalisation have landed bouncers in a double-bind situation, in which they are increasingly faced with competing and sometimes contradictory occupational imperatives requiring them both to “front up” effectively to unruly patrons and to project a service-oriented persona. We show how bouncers seek to cope with this precarious position by adopting a variety of strategies, such as resistance, partial acceptance and cultural re-interpretations of service roles. Originality/value While existing research on nightclub bouncers has primarily focussed on bouncers’ physical regulation of unruly guests, this paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding current policy ambitions to “domesticate” bouncers and shows how attempts to construct bouncers as civilised “service workers” is fraught with paradoxes and ambiguities.

Over the past few decades, the ambition of establishing a ‘corporate culture’ has largely vanished from corporate agendas. Instead, resources and energy are spent on creating ‘value-based’ organizations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Human Resources Department of Bang & Olufsen, a Danish producer of ‘high-end’ home electronics, I offer an explanation of this shift in managerial ideology from ‘culture’ to ‘value’ — I argue that much of the attraction of value-based management resides in the double-edged semantics of the word ‘value’ and its promise to accommodate economic bottom-line value and deep-seated moral and aesthetic values. My material suggests, however, that this ambiguity confuses more than it clarifies and leads to ironic and counter-intentional consequences. The identification of the values, which was meant to congregate the employees, came to symbolize and engender a split between staff and other parts of the company.

An increasing number of anthropology graduates find employment in business organisations, often as culture experts or consultants drawing on ethnographic methods. In this paper I will use my fieldwork experience in the Human Resource Department of Bang & Olufsen to explore the borders and crossovers between anthropological research and anthropological consultancy. Fieldwork took place among human resource consultants (some of them with an anthropological background) who worked for business, i.e. who used ethnographic methods and worked on identifying, describing and communicating the fundamental corporate values, or, as it were, the 'corporate religion' of the company. How does it affect research stratagems and methodology when the HR employees are in a clear sense both participants in and observers of their own social reality? Is it at all feasible or possible to maintain a distinction between ethnographer and consultant, participant observers and observing participants? Although the distinction between ethnographer and employee cannot be drawn easily, I want to argue that the fact that it is impossible to maintain a watertight separation does not imply that we should abandon the attempt to make the distinction. Being aware of the similarities and overlaps as well as acknowledging the differences is a crucial part of the anthropological methodology.

Donald Trump's recent election victory has been greeted with horror and disbelief by many. In particular, the glaring inconsistencies and open self‐contradictions that marked his campaign should have rendered him unelectable by the standards of conventional reasonable political practice. But rather than being a problem to be explained away, it is Trump's open embrace of contradiction that explains much of his appeal. By holding contradictory trends and opinions simultaneously, he presents himself as being capable of embodying seemingly mutually exclusive social trends, such as an intensification of economic competition on the one hand and a radical denunciation of that competition's effects on some of the losers from that process on the other. By doing so, he presents himself as a powerful figure with charismatic abilities to contain such contradictions within himself – abilities that are not available to ordinary career politicians, but that are strikingly reminiscent of the powers attributed to so‐called ‘trickster’ figures in anthropological literature.

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