The Deficient Worker: Skills, Identity, and Inequality in Service Employment

Abstract

Skill is central to inequality in the workplace, as a basis of material reward and status recognition. While much research treats skill as a set of abilities possessed—or not—by a worker, scholars have yet to grasp the organizational processes whereby jobs come to be taken as rudimentary and the worker performing them unskilled and therefore deficient. To illuminate these processes, we travel to Beijing, China, where workers are loquacious about inequalities confronted in relatively new forms of labor. By juxtaposing two service workplaces where similar sets of work tasks carry contradictory value, we discover the social relations that demote workers and their jobs based on identities, femininity in one workplace, rurality in another. We argue that formulating job tasks as skilled or unskilled is itself a kind of organizational work, which recruits the efforts of managers, colleagues, and customers. Unskilled workers do not appear in the workplace already deficient, but become so through organizational processes.

Organizations as the building blocks of social inequalities

“…The categorical distinctions that are translated into status groups, which form the basis of inequality regimes, do not exist ready‐made and imbued with preexisting meaning but have to be made meaningful in concrete organizational contexts. What categories become salient and how those categories are enacted varies across organizations that on the surface should appear isomorphic (Kellogg, ; Muñoz, ; Otis & Tongyu, ; Salzinger, ). While women are everywhere understood as categorically distinct from men, how men and women are constructed as gendered beings varies across even similarly situated organizations.…”

“…Thus, the matching of external categories (gender) to internal categories (production worker) is shared across organizations, but inside the organization interactional dynamics produce unique meanings around this distinction. This then means that the capacity for groups to make legitimate claims on income, jobs, or dignity varies with the local social order that shapes the meanings of categories and the legitimacy of claims (Avent‐Holt & Tomaskovic‐Devey, ; Avent‐Holt & Tomaskovic‐Devey, ; Godechot, ; Hanley, ; Otis & Tongyu, ; Rosenfeld & Denice, ).…”

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

“…This study offers two important contributions to the literature. First, it extends the service work literature by pointing to the urban/rural divide as an important dimension of the embodied classed customer-worker interactions in the context of the Global South (Otis, 2016;Otis & Wu, 2018b). Although rural to urban migration in the Global South is a historical and cultural phenomenon, it is more prominent and rampant today than ever before (Tumbe, 2018).…”

“…Although knowledge about the urban/rural societal divide is available elsewhere in the literature outside service work, we do not yet know how it informs the service work, specifically the customer–worker dynamics. To date, only a handful of studies by Otis and Wu have examined the role of urban/rural embodiment in customer service work (Otis, 2016; Otis & Wu, 2018a, 2018b). For example, Otis's (2016) research on saleswomen in cosmetics stores in Walmarts in China emphasizes the way young female saleswomen from a rural background reinvented their bodies as “legibly modern and urbanely feminine” (p. 161), by learning a “delicacy of touch” (p. 171) while applying products to the customers.…”

“…Despite the wealth of insights generated on service work and its relation to multiple dimensions of embodiment, the service work literature has only just begun to address the urban/rural as an axis structuring the embodiment of service work in ways that largely reproduce existing social inequalities (e.g., Otis & Wu, 2018a, 2018b). The urban/rural divide is, however, an important dimension of embodied customer service work for both theoretical and empirical reasons.…”