Embodied intersectionality and the intersectional management of hotel labour: The everyday experiences of social differentiation in customer‐oriented work

Abstract

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.

Contextualising intersectionality: A qualitative study of East Asian female migrant workers in the UK

“…First, the study advances a theoretical understanding of intersectionality by highlighting context-specific and fluid experiences among East Asian female migrant workers in the UK. We show that the boundary between what constitutes privilege and disadvantage may not always be rigid, making it difficult to define ethnic minority women's specific positions in organisational hierarchies (Alberti and Iannuzzi, 2020;Tatli and Özbilgin, 2012). In demonstrating this, our study goes beyond suggesting that East Asian women can sometimes also be privileged or listing resources as well as challenges that are relevant to these women (e.g.…”

“…Adopting the latter approach, several studies have indeed examined the contextual and fluid aspects of privilege and disadvantage in intersectionality (Alberti and Iannuzzi, 2020;Ang, 1996). These studies suggest that ethnic minority employees' (multiple) subordinate identities do not unilaterally work to their disadvantage but can also offer privileged positions in some contexts.…”

Symbolic violence in embodying customer service work across the urban/rural divide

“…Many employees working in these urban retail spaces are rural migrants (Rao, 2015). Unlike the hotel workers in Alberti and Iannuzzi's (2020) study, who were “allocated” based on customers' taste, shopping malls in urban India employ rural migrant workers because the salary offered is so low, and the status and working conditions are such that only those who do not have better options in the labor market accept this kind of work. Rao (2015) called the shopping malls in urban India a “glittering façade,” as the workers have poorer prospects and are paid less than what farmhands in rural Indian can earn in a month.…”

“…A rich organizational literature has foregrounded embodiment to explain power inequalities and domination in service work. Alberti and Iannuzzi (2020) in their recent study on hotel service work found that workers are “segmented” based on their embodied social differences and stereotypical perceptions of customer preference. By conforming to the protocols imposed on workers (Witz, Warhurst, & Nickson, 2003), they modify their embodiment to carry out service work (McDowell, 2009) in line with middle‐class customers' expectations (Korczynski, 2013).…”

Intersecting marginalities: International students' struggles for “survival” in COVID‐19

“…We draw on an embodied approach to intersectionality in work and organization studies set out by Alberti and Iannuzzi (2020) to explore the ways intersecting categories of marginality and inequality are emphasized and intensified by COVID‐19 for three young migrant women from The Philippines, India, and Spain. We draw on conceptualizations of intersectionality first introduced by Crenshaw (1991) and developed by Brah and Phoenix (2004) as not reducible to discrete identities or subject positions which can be added or layered in a hierarchical way.…”