When You Care Enough to Pay Someone to Send the Very Best: The Outsourcing of Greeting Card Inscriptions

Abstract

It is now possible for individuals and businesses to hire a service to inscribe, by hand, the greeting cards they send. Based on a content analysis of Web sites that provide this service, and drawing from the ideas of Erving Goffman, I argue that beyond simply writing cards for their clients, what these providers ultimately offer them is the ability to be presented as someone who performed a particular presentation ritual (i.e., the sending of a card with a personal inscription) for another when, in fact, they did not. This can be seen in terms of how outsourced inscriptions are presented as ones that have not been outsourced and/or how many providers employ defensive practices seemingly designed to prevent recipients from discovering that an inscription was outsourced. As such, a kind of misrepresentation seems necessary if outsourced inscriptions are to have all the instrumental and symbolic benefits the providers of this service claim they offer. Some key implications and consequences of this kind of misrepresentation are explored.

Stand-in Labor and the Rising Economy of Self

“…Scholars have referred to this exchange as "outsourcing of self" (Hochschild 2012). For example, individuals can now hire people to inscribe greeting cards to plausibly appear to come from them (Lair 2017), ask personal concierges to choose for them gifts for their loved ones (Sherman 2010), and pay "love coaches" to craft online profiles (and even reply to suitors) to help them find a match (Hochschild 2012, 22-23;Bromwich 2019). Similarly, it is now easy to seek out-speechwriters, school-admission consultants, image consultants, and life coaches for assistance in developing an appropriate public self (George 2013;Liu 2011;Richardson 2017;Wellington and Bryson 2001).…”