Distinctions of public and private aesthetic labour : a case study of luxury retail workers and their acquisition and use of employee-discounts

MSc Thesis

Graduate School of Social Sciences

Sociology – General Track

Distinctions of Public and Private Aesthetic

Labour: A Case Study of Luxury Retail Workers

and their Acquisition and Use of

Employee-Discounts

Bryan Boyle

11235098

Supervisor: Kobe De Keere

Second Reader: Marguerite van den Berg

3

This thesis is dedicated to Uncle Jim.

Your warmth, wit and liveliness will be sadly missed

by family and friends.

5

Abstract

By deploying a theoretical framework that conceives aesthetic labour as cultural capital in

a qualitative study of middle-class women working in the luxury retail industry, this

research stands at the intersection between concerns within the sociology of

interactive-service work, namely the issue of blurring boundaries between work and non-work life,

and class distinction. More specifically, based on the conceptual assumption that retail

employers desire their workers to possess the tastes that their store sells but that, by way

of class background, workers may not possess such prior to entry into employment, it

explores how workers publicly and privately adopt and activate these tastes. It does so by

focussing analysis on, although not restricting it to, the workers’ acquisition and use of

the products they are paid to sell which are purchasable through employee-discounts. It

concludes by suggesting that when being a worker is intertwined with being a consumer,

the judgement of taste informs employer coercion and employer coercion informs the

judgement of taste. As it also entails a close homology between the occupational field and

the field of consumption, this modus operandi operates in both the public and private

spheres of workers’ lives.

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Contents

Introduction ... 9

Theoretical Framework ... 12

Emotional to Aesthetic Labour ... 12

The First and Second Face of Aesthetic Labour ... 14

Class Inequality and Retail ... 15

Aesthetic Labour as Cultural Capital ... 17

Allodoxia Tendencies amongst Women and Fashion ... 21

Theoretical Summary and Research Question Delineation ... 22

Methodology ... 24

Research Population ... 24

Recruitment ... 26

Data-Collection ... 27

Ethics ... 28

Analysis ... 28

Findings and Analysis ... 32

Distinction Classifications of the Products’ Cultural Capital ... 32

Distinction Classifications of Labour ... 36

Formal Aesthetic Labour Policies and Formal Discount Policies ... 39

Walking-Advertisements ... 43

Personal Use of the Discounted Clothes ... 45

Friends and Family ... 51

Conclusions ... 54

Conclusion ... 54

Future Research ... 57

Limitations ... 57

Bibliography ... 59

Appendix ... 62

Codebook ... 62

Interview Guides ... 75

Tables and Figures ... 81

Transcripts ... 87

Fiona Transcript ... 87

Elia Transcript ... 101

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Mary Transcript ... 113

RawData Abby Transcript ... 121

Anastasia Transcript ... 130

Joanna Transcript ... 141

Eda Transcript ... 148

Claire Transcript ... 154

Marina Transcript ... 164

Wu Transcript ... 177

Penny Transcript ... 184

Shae Transcript ... 192

Meg Transcript ... 201

Colette Transcript ... 210

9

Introduction

When being a worker is intertwined with being a consumer, the judgement of taste

informs employer coercion and employer coercion informs the judgement of taste. As it

also entails a close homology between the occupational field and the field of

consumption, this modus operandi operates in both the public and private spheres of

workers’ lives. By deploying a theoretical framework that conceives aesthetic labour as

cultural capital in a qualitative study of middle-class women working in the luxury retail

industry, this research stands at the intersection between concerns within the sociology of

interactive-service work, namely the issue of blurring boundaries between work and

non-work life, and class distinction. More specifically, based on the conceptual assumption

that retail employers desire their workers to possess the tastes that their store sells but

that, largely on the grounds of class background, workers may not possess such prior to

entry into employment, it explores how workers publicly and privately adopt and activate

these tastes. It does so by focussing analysis on, although not restricting it to, the

workers’ acquisition and use of the products they are paid to sell which are purchasable

through employee-discounts. Not only is this particular practice relatively novel to

research within the sociology of work in itself but, likewise, explorations into how

distinction processes inform worker assimilation across the public and private offers a

fresh perspective to those concerned with class inequality within inter-service work.

The issue of the blurring of the boundary between work and non-work life has largely

been attributed to labour market flexibilisation (Sennett, 1998) and desecuritisation

(Standing, 2016). But the issue of the blurring boundary stretches beyond the nature of

the decline of the standard employment relationship. The rise of the service sector has

brought with it sociological debates surrounding how to define the type of labour

performed which appears somewhat distinct from the manual labour performed by the

traditional working class. The most widely recognised amongst these is Hochschild’s

‘emotional labour’, which seeks to address how workers are expected to convey emotions

as part of their labour performance and how such is dictated by feeling rules configured

by the employer (Hochschild, 1983). However, those concerned with workers in the retail

industry have metamorphosed Hochschild’s notion to better encompass the capacities

essential to this type of work. Their concept, ‘aesthetic labour’, refers to ‘embodied

capacities’, including ‘styles of deportment, body shape and size, dress, demeanour [and]

manner’, that are judged as aesthetically pleasing in the context of customer service

provision (Witz et al, 2003: 41; Warhurst et al 2007). In both instances, on the grounds

that emotions and body-work play a fundamental role in private practices, both exhort

that issuing a boundary becomes infinitely complex as the private enters the public and

the public enters the private.

But there are also two other aspects that are of concern to scholars of aesthetic labour:

whether the ‘desirable embodied attributes’ are socialised or socialisable before or after

point of entry into employment; and the relationship between such attributes and social

class. In what is conceptualised here as the ‘first face’ of aesthetic labour, the majority of

existing research has focussed upon employers recruiting individuals already in

possession of the attributes they desire (Warhurst et al, 2007; Williams and Connell,

2010). What is termed here the ‘second face’ of aesthetic labour, which refers to

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employers shaping the worker disposition after entry into employment typically in the

form of training, although given conceptual space in the concept’s formulations (Witz et

al, 2004; Warhurst et al, 2009), has been somewhat neglected, especially empirically. It is

within the first face that the relationship between class and aesthetic labour has mostly

been explored, as most famously done by Williams and Connell who contest that when

employers seek to recruit the ‘right’ employee, this is often synonymous with the search

for the right habitus: they possess the stores attributes by way of class background.

To some extent this research turns these arguments on their head by situating itself within

the second face of aesthetic labour to inquire as to how employees might acquire the

tastes of their store that were previously less accessible by way of class background. But

it does so via a more thorough engagement with Bourdieu’s conceptions of ‘cultural

capital’ and ‘distinction’ than the aforementioned authors have been inclined in their own

applications (Bourdieu, 1984). By conceptualising aesthetic labour as cultural capital it

explores how certain modalities of tastes, knowledges and clothes are legitimised within

the occupational field workers occupy as well as in class society at large. Following this,

by restricting the sample to the luxury retail industry, it invites an inquiry into how

workers move between a potential misrecognition of the cultural capital they possess

(prior to entry) and the cultural capital most recognised – recognised as 1) essential to the

fulfilment of their role as sellers of distinct taste and 2) recognised as symbolic capital in

pre-existing and ongoing classifications of taste in the field of consumption – in both the

public and private spheres. By paying special attention to discounted products

_{, this}

inquiry is aided by being able to trace what is an objectified form of the stores’ cultural

capital, thus offering potential concrete instances of assimilation and activation. Research

seeks to address the above problematisation by answering the following research

question:

RQ: How do middle-class women employed in the luxury retail industry adopt and

activate the cultural capital (discounted products being an objectified case) of their

aesthetic labour?

The paper starts by reviewing existing literature and formulating the theoretical

framework alluded to above. This review begins by exploring the concept of emotional

labour, with special attention to its tendencies to incorporate the private into the public,

and how some of its conceptual elements were and were not carried through in the

development of the aesthetic typology. Thereafter the first and second face of aesthetic

labour will be thoroughly formulated and explored in relation to existing research and

other theories that emphasise the labour process. Once the first face has then been

problematised in relation to class, where other scholars who emphasise class inequality

within interactive-service work will be consulted, conceptualising aesthetic labour as

cultural capital will begin proper. Here it will be seen how the three forms of cultural

1

_{Especially in the commercial service sector, it is relatively common practice for employees to be}

given the option (and are encouraged) by their employers to receive the products of which it is

their job to sell or promote: beauticians are given company make-up, phone salespersons are given

company phones, and, in what is the object of this study, fashion floor-workers are given company

clothes, either for free or at a discount. By the term “discounted products”, this research refers to

products that are acquired by either purchasing them through an employee-discount in the form of

a percentage savings – e.g. 50% off – but also products that are purchased by spending a budget

given by the employer to spend in the store. The details of the different employee-discount policies

(in addition to the dress policies) that applied to the participants of this research have been granted

a special section within the findings.

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capital – the embodied, the objectified, and the institutional – go beyond the physical

capital that the proponents of aesthetic labour deploy in that it accounts for properties

such as the tastes workers must convey in their dispositions, the knowledge about the

products they must communicate, and the clothes that must be worn, in addition to how

the workplaces themselves bare status institutional status. Furthermore, it will be seen

how such are sanctioned in certain fields, including the workplace and consumption, how

they may be acquired and transposed via an elastic conception of the habitus within and

across fields, and how they exist within classifications contributive to social position via

distinction mechanisms. After exploring how it is by distinction that luxury tastes may be

sought by those who lack it with a certain ‘avidity and anxiety’, and how such a

precarious state is unequally distributed by gender, the research question and

subquestions will be more thoroughly delineated and situated.

Once it has been explained how the research methodology was chosen and executed, the

findings and analysis will be presented in the structure of the five major themes that

emerged from the interview data. Firstly, it will be seen how the participants constructed

the products they are paid to sell within distinction classifications which, although

nuanced, were mainly characterised by their differentiation to the products of popular

stores. Second, it will be seen how the workers constructed distinction classifications of

the labour itself by, for example, claiming their work was more personal or artisan than

the labour conducted by workers in the same stores associated with their product

devaluations. Prior to moving on to how the workers used the discounted products,

analysis will be interrupted by a short section that details the discount policies and dress

codes that applied to the participants in order to provide context. Thereafter, the third

major theme will explore how workers utilised the discounted products in the workplace

as they become (in their own words) ‘walking advertisements’, in that the practice of

wearing the products bares peculiar selling capacities. Fourthly, it will be seen how the

workers make personal use of the clothes. As the largest section this includes how the

workers sport the products in their private lives where they deploy its symbolic value in

strategies of distinction, but also how their purchases have made them more inclined to

higher tastes as their preference for personal ownership of luxury products coincides with

their trajectory within the industry. Finally, the fifth theme includes the relationship

between the products of the store and the workers’ friends and family, by seeing the

manners in which they were discussed with close ones in addition to how the workers

become viewed as mediators of access to high-status goods.

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Theoretical Framework

Emotional to Aesthetic Labour

It was Hochschild’s notion of ‘emotional labour’ which most famously provided the

sociology of work with a notion to conceive of labour performed in the service sector as

distinct in certain ways from the manual labour typically undertaken in working class

jobs. Many of the multiple typologies formulated since which seek to conceptualise

interactive service work are theoretically indebted to Hochschild’s original concept and it

remains fruitful for much empirical research in the world of work. Within her classic

study of airline workers, Hochschild defines emotional labour as: ‘the management of

feeling to create publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold

for a wage and therefore has exchange value’ (Hochschild, 1983: 7). At its core, the

formulation can be seen as a synthesis of Goffman’s dramaturgy and Marx’s positioning

of the worker within unequal relations of production. When at work, workers must utilise

emotional capacities in accordance with ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1979), an emotional

variant of the ‘cultural script’ (Goffman, 1959), that are largely configured by employers

looking to orchestrate the said frontstage ‘display’ in such a manner that its composition

be marketable in some form or another (Hochschild, 1983), as typically found in the role

of emotional expression in “customer service” provision: the welcoming voice, the

friendly smile, the enthusiastic aura, to list some contingent examples. As there is often

disparity between what the employer wants the employee to feel and what the employee

actually feels, the latter, Hochschild argues, may undertake ‘surface’ or ‘deep’ acting to

uphold commercial performances, resulting in various ‘costs’, namely the ‘false self’,

akin to the Marxist notion of alienation (Marx, 2000).

One of the key factors that afforded the concept of emotional labour to bare novel

insights at the time of coining, a factor also paramount to the case of emotional labour’s

distinguishability from that considered “manual”, was its elucidation of a new

relationship between the public and private spheres. The issue is implicitly propagated in

the first pages of The Managed Heart when Hochschild compares her airline worker

research subjects to a 19

_{-century child labourer in a wallpaper factory: ‘the emotional}

style of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way that loving or hating

wallpaper is not a part of producing wallpaper’ (Hochschild, 1983: 5-6 [original

emphasis]). Later, she offers the notion of ‘transmutation of an emotional system’ to

conceptualise this process, by which capacities assumed as sentimental to the self and

somewhat dear in private life are called forth, assetised and commodified, in labour

performances (Hochschild, 1983: 21) – the similarities between one’s interactions in the

public and private spheres are further conceptually exasperated through her notion of the

‘second shift’, highlighting the strains, disproportionally burdening women, caused by

undertaking emotional labour both professionally and domestically (Hochschild, 1989) –

yet, as such are subject to commercial-ideological feeling rules, they ‘fall under the sway

of large organisations’ (Hochschild, 1983: 21), stressing the ability for employers to

shape emotions to their desirable forms and towards the profit motif generally.

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However, whilst emotional labour no doubt remains a key instrument in the analytical

toolbox for researchers concerned with interactive service work, and no less for those

concerned with labour in retail, those especially concerned with the latter have preferred

to adopt the notion of ‘aesthetic labour’ largely on the grounds that it better encompasses

the various properties, of which emotions are important but not central, entailed in the

work on the shop floor (Witz et al, 2003: 37; Pettenger, 2004: 172; Williams and Connell,

2010: 352). Warhurst and colleagues, the coiners of the term, define aesthetic labour as:

“a supply of 'embodied capacities and attributes' possessed by workers at the point of

entry into employment. Employers then mobilise, develop and commodify these

capacities and attributes through processes of recruitment, selection and training,

transforming them into 'competencies' or 'skills' which are then aesthetically geared

towards producing a 'style' of service encounter.” (2000: 4).

As explored later, this definition can be broken down into two parts, but in focussing on

its departure from the emotional, the concept invites one to focus on the embodiment of

the worker more wholly than emotion alone. Whilst Hochschild points out that employers

and customers expect smiles and enthusiasm, Warhurst et al stress the need for employees

to maintain a particular demeanor, possess and hold a certain bodily comportment, dress

stylishly and “use” their body’s figure in a manner that is deemed as aesthetically

pleasing (Warhurst et al, 2000; Witz et al, 2003).

Importantly, Hochschild and the proponents of aesthetic labour largely differ in terms of

the conceptual framework they operate on. Whilst, as discussed, Hochschild draws

heavily from dramaturgy, with its emphasis upon ‘acting’, Warhurst and colleagues

privilege the Bourdieusian notion of ‘disposition’ as well as ‘physical capital’ (Witz et al,

2003: 38-39). Somewhat paradoxically, Warhurst et al suggest, by focussing upon the

emotional management entailed in producing display, Hochschild reduces the bodily

surface to ‘false surface’, thus paying mind to the ‘feelingful self’ to the detriment of the

‘embodied’ self – i.e. the soul over the flesh (Witz et al, 2003: 36-37). In a move to

conceptually accommodate the latter, and the corporately valorised aestheticisms of its

style, they utilise the concept of disposition. By way of the habitus, ‘a system of cognitive

and motivating structures’ that itself structures practice within fields (Bourdieu, 1986:

53), the notion of disposition, itself embodied, affords one to understand how individuals

relate to and configure their own bodies (Witz et al, 2003: 40-41). Vandebroeck

elucidates this well when he speaks of the ‘taste of necessity’ and the ‘taste of luxury’

shaping practices, such as dieting, which directly shape bodily morphology, by way of the

former’s primacy for substance and the latter’s for refinement contributing to corpulent

and lean body types respectively (Vandebroeck, 2015: 230). As it is body-shape, but also

body-deportment and body-style, that Warhurst et al recognise as properties paramount to

the retail industry axiology – in that the legitimisation and delegitimisation of their

various modalities equates to a meso-organisational valorisation of physical capital that

workers and employers exchange for economic capital, via wages for the former and

appropriation for profit for the latter – the concept of disposition is then appealing for

explanatory purposes (Witz et al, 2003: 40-41).

It is here that we offer our first critique of the concept of aesthetic labour as it stands

above and in turn introduce a broader formulation of it to incorporate cultural capital. Put

simply, it can be said that Warhurst and colleagues take a fruitful step in utilising the

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concept of disposition to account for the ‘capacities and attributes’ (Warhurst et al, 2000:

4) entailed in aesthetic labour, yet restrict themselves by focussing on physical capital

alone. Of course the latter is apt in accounting for ‘deportment’ and ‘size’ (Witz et al,

2003: 41), but perhaps this cannot be said for matters such as ‘dress’, and ‘what to wear

and how to wear it and even what to say and how to say it’ (Warhurst et al, 2009: 106

[emphasis added]). As other theorists of interactive service work have highlighted,

namely Hardt and Negri’s formulation of ‘immaterial labour’ that incorporates

‘intellectual’ as much as ‘affectionate’ abilities (Hardt and Negri, 2004), service work

often entails the utilisation of certain knowledge on the worker’s part. Retail workers are

no exception to this, especially when they need to communicate information such as the

material and aesthetic properties of the clothes they wear and sell – knowledge which,

following Warhurst and colleagues’ primary concerns, contribute to exhorting the ‘style’

of the organisation. Notwithstanding knowledge’s embodiment and the fine line between

clothing’s status as quasi-embodied when worn and disembodied when not, ‘physical

capital’ eludes these phenomena. Instead, it is argued here, the broader concept of cultural

capital, with special attention to both its ‘embodied’ and ‘objectified’ forms (Bourdieu,

1986), fill these gaps without losing conceptual grip upon the corporeal properties

physical capital highlights. But prior to exploring cultural capital proper, we will first

examine what can be called the ‘two faces’ of aesthetic labour.

The First and Second Face of Aesthetic Labour

It could be said that aesthetic labour, as Warhurst et al define it, consists of what can be

conceptualised here as “two faces”: capacities and attributes socialised before and after

the point of entry. On the one hand, aesthetic labour, as ‘supply’ (Warhurst et al, 2000:

4), can be seen as a pool of a priori desirable attributes to be appropriated. To some

extent, this face has dominated research since the concept’s coining. In their own later

empirical research, Warhurst and Nickson concede that the recruitment of the “right”

employees appears most prominent in the respect that recruitment techniques are a more

prolific practice than, for example, training employees in how to dress or speak (Warhurst

and Nickson, 2007: 116). Likewise in the highly sighted study from Williams and

Connell, they insist that not only do employers seek individuals who already embody the

aesthetic of the store, but that one reason why for example worker resistance is scarce in

the retail industry, and somewhat echoing the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and

Chiapello, 2005), is because the stores fulfil their consumer interests (Williams and

Connell, 2010: 351). Williams and Connell’s study also qualifies as one of the rare

instances of research that allude to the role of employee discounts. They clearly situate

the discounts within this first face by identifying them as recruitment strategies as they

portray them as non-financial incentives stores use to attract potential workers who

already possess a familiarity and an appreciation towards the products (Williams and

Connell, 2010: 357).

On the other hand, aesthetic labour, as ‘develop[ed]’ and to some degree ‘mobilise[d]’

(Warhurst et al 2000: 4), can be seen as modifiable a posteriori, to paraphrase from

Hochschild, ‘under the sway of large organisations’ (1983: 33). Arguably, it is the second

face that has received most neglect in aesthetic labour research or, rather, been deemed

15

the least important in assimilating worker dispositions towards the store’s aesthetic.

However, despite conceding to the prominence of the first face, Warhurst et al consist in

maintaining the significance of the second, best described as how employees ‘can be

corporately moulded to portray the organizational aesthetic’ (Warhurst et al, 2000: 35; see

also Warhurst and Nickson, 2007; Warhurst et al, 2009). Pettenger’s research on ‘branded

workers’ is complimentary to this notion, as she highlights how brands that gear towards

the marketing of a lifestyle extends from the store to the workers as the latter come to

embody the lifestyle they are paid to culturally convey through their labour (Pettenger,

2004). To some extent, the second face retreats back to the rudimentary Marxian notion

that workers are stripped of autonomy as the nature of production is determined by

capitalist orchestration (Marx, 2000). Perhaps the most prominent theorist who focusses

on this aspect is Burawoy, who writes:

‘[I]nterests are not given primordially, nor are they necessarily brought to the shop

floor from socialization experiences outside work. Rather, they are organised by the

specific form of relation in production […] the day-to-day emerges out of the

organisation of work and defines the interests of the various agents of production’

(Burawoy, 1979: 85)

Although Burawoy’s theory of the labour process was restricted to manual labour, the

tenet of his argument is applicable to interactive service work where, to some degree, the

stakes are higher in the respect that worker’s values themselves somewhat define the

appropriateness of the labour or, rather, they are the labour.

If the first and second face can be conceived as a debate it is not necessarily the intention

of this research to side exclusively with one or the other. However, whilst appreciation is

given to the notion that workers are bringing certain (class) dispositions to the shop floor,

most conceptual attention will be given to the second by exploring how workers learn and

acquire the fashion taste of their store and the role staff discounts play in doing so.

Regarding the latter, in contrast to Williams and Connell (2010), we follow the cue of

Misra and Waters who highlight in their own research that many workers only purchased

from their respective stores after they began employment when the discount was available

(Misra and Waters, 2016: 310), implying a pressure to consider a style otherwise

indifferent towards. As will be discussed, conceptualising aesthetic labour as cultural

capital assists this exploration of the second face by conceiving how, as workers move

through fields that valorise modalities of taste, knowledge and dress, they come to

internalise such capital – within which the discounted products may be viewed as an

objectified case.

Class Inequality and Retail

By conceiving aesthetic labour as cultural capital this research will be contributing to the

recent development in the sociology of interactive service work to bring class closer to

the centre of analysis. As argued by Hanser, this development is somewhat novel:

‘[Because] scholars carrying out early studies of service work were at pains to

distinguish it from the manufacturing workplaces that had previously dominated both

the research and theoretical agendas within the sociology of work […] studies of

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service work have largely neglected questions about class formation or class

identities; even when class dynamics are treated as relevant, theoretical focus is not

placed on the classed nature of service work interactions.’ (Hanser, 2012: 293-94).

An apt example of this preceding neglect is how Hochschild, keen to emphasise the

emotional importance and costs of service work, pays only brief attention to how

different classes may hold different emotional capabilities in what can be described as

the unequal distribution of emotional capital (Hochschild, 1983: 154-156; Cottingham,

2016). However, a more recent plethora of research has more thoroughly dissected the

intersection (Hanser, 2012).

Amongst such is the research of Hanser herself and that of Sherman. Both these

authors, whose research focusses upon luxury hotels and retail stores in China,

essentially seek to explore how service-sector workplaces, primarily via the interactions

between customers and workers, become sites where class inequality is lived out and

reproduced (Sherman, 2007; Hanser, 2007). Because working in these spheres often

involves a dispositional emphatic servitudeness, when workers cater for the needs of

wealthy guests, unequal entitlements become ‘accomplished’ in a manner that reflects a

“doing” of class (Sherman, 2007: 259). As workers perform unequal material and

emotional entitlements through their labour, inequality becomes normalised through its

very practice (Sherman, 2007: 260). This is an important consideration within our own

research given the institutional affinity in respect to luxury: the retail workers may be

coming into contact with customers from disparate social positions to themselves and

the manner of service they provide could be unequal in the kind of intrinsic way

portrayed above. However, what Sherman (in this instance; see below) and Hanser

possibly overlook is how service work, especially in fashion, may require a certain

symmetry between the class tastes of the customers and the workers for the latter to

perform their commercial roles.

This point is made clearer in Sherman’s later work when she formulates the notion of

‘distinction production’ to conceptualise how concierges need to communicate the

higher class tastes to their clientele (Sherman, 2011). Likewise, the aforementioned

work of Williams and Connell too addresses the issue. Not only do they highlight how

employers actively search for workers with the right taste as discussed, but identify the

endeavour as a search for the right (middle-)class habitus (Williams and Connell,

2010). Succinctly put, in order for the employees to know the cultural meaning and

embody the lifestyle of the store that targets the middle-classes, employers are ‘mining

and exploiting the product of social hierarchies’ by targeting individuals whose

privileged upbringing has pre-socialised these desirable attributes (Williams and

Connell, 2010: 352). When they speak of a hybrid ‘worker-consumer’ as an agent

whose consumption interests align with those of their workplace (Williams and

Connell, 2010: 351), this is presupposed by the worker’s social position bearing a

particular relation to the class-laden field of consumption. In other words, whilst

Sherman (in her earlier work) and Hanser see the class inequality entailed in

servitudeness as a state of commercial utility, Williams and Connell view a certain class

affinity between workers and customers as an employer-sought condition.

However, as mentioned before, Williams and Connell situate their analysis within the

first face of aesthetic labour, thus falling short of conceiving the possibility of workers

17

acquiring novel dispositions – a shortfall this research intends to rectify. In a class

context this means understanding how workers might come to adopt tastes, knowledges

and clothes that their class habitus might be hitherto unfamiliar with. This bares

resemblance to the convictions of Otis who argues that Chinese luxury hotels seek to

expunge the mannerisms of their working-class recruits to produce ‘a virtuous

professionalism’ (Otis, 2008). However, Otis frames this within the same assumption

adopted by Hanser and Sherman by way that working-classness, and its perceived

‘unruly’ properties (Otis, 2008: 356), is deemed inappropriate to the servitude

disposition employers seek, as opposed to inappropriate by way of disparity with

customer taste. To be succinct, this research follows the assumption that the

‘worker-consumer’ is a disposition luxury retail stores seek, yet, open to the possibility that the

worker’s social position and their relation to the field of consumption prior to entry may

discord such, it explores how workers come to adopt and activate the class tastes of

their stores. For this, we now turn to a more thorough review of cultural capital in its

Bourdieusian formulation.

Aesthetic Labour as Cultural Capital

For Bourdieu, one’s degree of accumulated capital determines one’s social position in

class society. But furthermore, capital is not restricted to its economic monetary form as

conventionally understood but also exists as such as social capital, typically in terms of

acquired networks, and cultural capital, in terms of education, taste and cultural

knowledge, all of which may act as resources in one’s social mobility betterment

depending upon their degree of legitimacy within fields and the field of power as a whole

(Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu, 1990). Cultural capital, argues Bourdieu, can be broken down

into three forms: the embodied, referring to dispositional ‘tastes, skills, [and] knowledge’

(Holt, 1998: 3), objectified, which refers to how the former is manifested and

‘transmissible in its materiality’ in objects such as books, artwork, and clothes, and

institutionalised, which primarily refers to how education acts as a guarantor for cultural

capital possession (Bourdieu, 1986). It is these facets that allow aesthetic labour to go

beyond physical capital: in the first instance it provides conceptual space to account for

how communicable knowledge and taste for the clothes the fashion workers sell are

salient to their role, in the second instance it accounts for the (discounted) clothes

themselves as resources, and in the third instance it opens inquiry into how working for a

luxury brand might bare social status. But by also situating the labour in a market-place

of capital exchange, in addition to its relation to field, i.e. the workplace or luxury fashion

industry more generally, contextualises how aesthetic labour is converted into economic

capital in the wage relation yet how only certain modalities are activate-able by way of

the field’s legitimisation.

Bourdieu was keen to highlight how it is cultural capital’s unequal distribution that

structures one’s chances for social mobility and how this is facilitated by the habitus and

its role in reproduction. Habitus is a product of past experiences which, for Bourdieu, are

mostly defined by the conditions of the class one enters at birth (Bourdieu, 1990). It is

composed of ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’ that give one the practical

proficiencies to operate in certain social spaces (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). Yet, whilst it

generates appropriate behaviours, these ‘are likely to be positively sanctioned because

18

they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field’ (Bourdieu,

1990: 56). It is in this respect that as habituses come into contact with fields, practice is

characterised by a kind of equilibrium or disequilibrium between the two, essentially

resulting in certain classes holding more recognition than others in social space: a

condition less rectifiable when durability is assumed. It is this durable conception that

plays into the first face of aesthetic labour. When employers recruit middle-class workers

over working-class workers (Williams and Connell, 2010), it could be said that not only

are the former’s tastes already aligned with the store’s – whereby, it must be stressed, the

cultural capital they activate in the field of consumption is transposed by way of the

habitus to the field of work – but achieving the same result in the case of the latter, by

training for instance, may be structurally improbable due to historical weighting.

However, whilst this durable conception is somewhat fruitful in understanding how the

class background of the luxury fashion workers of this study may (or may not) be

incompatible with the requisite cultural capital of the luxury stores, proper exploration of

the second face of aesthetic labour demands more malleable notions. Such is provided by

Mahmood, who, taking habitus back to its Aristotelian roots, stresses how pedagogical

processes, namely repetitive religious practices that seek to build a virtuous formation of

the person, allow new dispositions to be acquired (Mahmood, 2003: 851). This offers a

certain break with Bourdieu’s historical weighting conception, thus affording insight into

the fashion workers’ acquisition over a trajectory rather than viewing their trajectory as

determined. However, whilst Mahmood is somewhat fruitful in loosening the concept she

provides no account of its relationship to fields or at least capital. Silva on the other hand

offers elastic accounts without losing these elements. One of her most interesting notions

is what she terms the ‘labour of integration’, which alludes to how individuals may

acquire new dispositions yet, unlike Mahmood, contextualises this in the respect that this

is often presupposed by the need to move through fields that are hitherto unfamiliar and

the habitus ill-equipped (Silva, 2016: 167). This labour of integration can be viewed as a

process inherent within the second face and, for the context of this study, elucidates how

the necessity to sell the taste of luxury items may exhort the fashion workers to adopt

cultural capital that was previously inaccessible or indifferent within their prior locations

in social space. If we slack the notion of ‘durable’ in this way but fiercely maintain the

notion of ‘transposable’, we are then invited to conceive how the store tastes (the

discounted clothes being an objectified case) can be carried to fields that configure the

workers’ private lives, where here too they may be activated on the condition of

legitimacy – i.e. within the field of consumption.

Moreover, it is also important to situate cultural capital within the logic of distinction. As

successful recognition is paramount to a cultural capital modality’s symbolic value, a

process of misrecognition will essentially accompany this in a somewhat dialectical

fashion which can be summarised as the dual process of differentiation and appreciation

(Bourdieu, 1984: 466). ‘Principles of division […] function within and for the purposes

of the struggle between social groups’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 479 [emphasis added]), meaning

that agents undergo classification struggles to defend the legitimacy of their cultural

capital that defines their social position over that of others. Also significant here is the

notion of “scarcity” by way that cultural capital that is simultaneously recognised and rare

– ‘being able to read in a world of illiterates’ – bears significant social value (Bourdieu,

1986). Thus when we conceive aesthetic labour as cultural capital, be it the knowledge

and tastes of the selling process in the form of the embodied, the clothes themselves in

19

the form of the objectified, or the status of the store/industry in the form of the

institutionalised, the logic of distinction suggests that such exist within pre-existing and

ongoing classifications corresponding and contributive to certain social positions in a

manner that, at least it is assumed in the case of luxury, condescends their counter

modalities – other tastes, other clothes, other stores – with constructions of the former as

scarce informing these classifications.

The relational and dynamic nature of said classification struggles is most famously

alluded to in Bourdieu’s discussion regarding ‘diploma inflation’ whereby, after the

scarcity of bourgeois educational capital becomes undermined by the democratisation of

university degrees, actors of the dominating class ‘step up their investments’ to

re-distinguish themselves (Bourdieu, 1984: 143-144). Tellingly, Bourdieu also applies this

process to occupation. In moments when middle-class/upper-class actors concede to a

career trajectory perceived as inferior to one they originally aspired to, in order to bypass

a potential ‘down-classing’ they undertake a strategy of ‘creative redefinition’: the

technician becomes the engineer; the masseuse the physiotherapist (Bourdieu, 1984:

150-151, 481). Yet, most interestingly for the context of interactive-service work, the jobs

most susceptible to this process, Bourdieu argues, are ones that require ‘good manners,

good taste or physical charm […] jobs involving presentation and representation’ which,

indeed, includes ‘fashion boutique’s […] in which success depends at least as much on

the subtly casual distinction of the salesman as on the nature and quality of his wares’

(Bourdieu, 1984: 141-152 [emphasis added]). Not only does this concur with the

previously discussed employer-ideal affinity between the embodied cultural capital of the

worker and the objectified cultural capital of the store’s products, but that this is coupled

with a tendency to classify the labour itself as distinct. Indeed, reports that workers in

luxury fashion stores refer to themselves as “wardrobe consultants” or “stylists”, as

opposed to “sales assistants” for instance – in addition to the portrayal of their role as

‘expert or artisan’ (Godwyn, 2006: 503-504; 487)

_{– strikes chords with Bourdieu’s}

remarks and implies that similar strategies are likely inferable from the practices of the

workers of this study.

From his own analysis of empirical data collected in France between 1963 and 1973

(Bourdieu, 1984; Prieur and Savage, 2013), Bourdieu provides examples for exactly how

class actors distinguish themselves that may translate into the strategies of the luxury

fashion workers concerned here. In diverse yet everyday-prolific areas such as food,

sports, and clothing, the distinction of taste was together most fundamentally

characterised by ‘tastes of necessity’ (lowbrow) and ‘tastes of luxury’ (highbrow)

(Bourdieu, 1984: 177). The working classes, by their closer proximity to material

constraint, give primacy to the practical and functional, properties of substance, for

example by preferring durable clothes that give them more for the less (Bourdieu, 1984:

177; 200). The tastes of the higher classes, conversely, are defined via their distance from

this constraint, keen to exercise a certain an art to living where primacy is given to form,

aesthetic quality preferred over quantity, and refinement in the form of ‘elective austerity’

that signifies an aptitude to resist what are conceived as primal, easy, and vulgar urges

(Bourdieu, 1984). What mirrors this highbrow disposition par excellence, Bourdieu

highlights, is l’art pour l’art ideology: the orientation that truth be sought only when free

2

_{It should be noted that Godwyn focusses on the emotional benefits of working with prestige}

(Godwyn, 2006), rather than framing portrayals of expert and artisan as distinction strategies

(although her analysis certainly informs ours in this respect).

20

from material constraint; the definition of which bares connotations of a purity restricted

for those only in a position to pursue it which justifies their dominance (Bourdieu, 1984;

Grenfall and Hardy, 2007: 41). Thus the tastes of the luxury stores and their products may

well be constructed in a similar manner to Bourdieu’s analysis here. In terms of the

products themselves, for instance, such may be differentiated from practical functions,

such as ‘all-purpose’ garments (Bourdieu, 1984: 201), as bearers of aesthetic and artistic

quality, properties which would need to be communicated in the selling process, with the

possibility of transposing to the private sphere. But further still, following the notion of

‘creative redefinition’, workers may portray the labour process itself as encompassing an

aura of elegance and highbrow pursuit that may be differentiated to the labour of others in

the field of retail.

However, these highbrow and lowbrow contours has been met with critical reception,

most notably in the respect that mass consumption has degraded class markers within the

postmodern condition and that the ‘omnivore’, which can be described as the inclination

to consume over class boundaries, has become a significant consumer orientation

(Peterson and Kern, 1996; Holt, 1998). In response to this, Prieur and Savage have argued

that even though the type of consumption has changed – such as the decline in high art

amongst the dominant classes, for instance – strategies of distinction can still be dissected

upon closer inspection (Prieur and Savage, 2013). For example they highlight how young

professionals would watch ‘crap’ TV whilst ironically pointing to its derogative taste,

thus still signalling an aptitude to classify hierarchically (Prieur and Savage, 2013: 257;

Bennett et al 2008). Such phenomena, they suggest, marks the importance of embodied

cultural capital (how to appreciate) over objectified cultural capital (what to appreciate)

as elite objects lose their potency under mass-consumerism (Prieur and Savage, 2013:

257; see also Holt, 1998). Carfigna et al argue towards ‘reconfigurations’ of highbrow

tastes, and point to the paradox of ethical consumption when it may be strategically

utilised as a manifestation of higher cosmopolitan taste yet, due to its general higher cost,

is innacessible to those who can least afford it (Carfagna et al, 2014). Jarness and

Friedman also suggest the need to look for more subtle processes. Although, here, they

take this further by arguing that higher class actors will deploy a ‘downplay of difference’

strategy as the public flaunting of distinction in a world that values cultural egalitarianism

may be negatively sanctioned; such actors undergo an effortful frontstage, an

‘honourable’ self performance yet, at moments in a manner synonymous to showing their

true colours, viscerally display signs of class judgement (Jarness and Friedman, 2017). In

all, this suggests that the distinction classifications luxury fashion workers adopt may

take more nuanced forms than the aforementioned highbrow and lowbrow tastes, and,

further, just because they might not display overt snobbishness towards other styles or

stores for instance, does not necessitate an absence of distinction given its increasingly

conspicuous emerging forms.

Whatever form legitimate culture takes, its uneven distribution across society and its

function as symbolic capital means that those who lack it often aspire towards it, keen to

appropriate it for their own habitus, whilst also feeling unsettled with their existing

cultural capital in a way that reflects a kind of self-misrecognition (Bourdieu, 1984).

Given that luxury retail workers may be in a position where they lack the cultural capital

of the store, yet may aspire towards it by way of 1) its legitimacy in class society at large,

and 2) its immediate legitimacy in the field of work they occupy, the effect described

above may be especially relevant. For Bourdieu, this effect was particularly prevalent

21

amongst the middle-classes or the petit-bourgeois. In what he terms the gap between

‘acknowledgement’ (an awareness of legitimate culture) and ‘knowledge’ (a full

understanding of such), he recalls how, for instance, the middle-classes might watch film

adaptations of classical literature or view more easily accessible avant-garde art in

attempts to imitate highbrow culture (Bourdieu, 1984: 323). This particular effect he calls

‘allodoxia’, where ‘avidity combines with anxiety’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 323) in the sense

that aspirationals will often view highbrow culture with an overt eagerness to improbably

distinguish themselves yet also feel a sense of unworthiness with the tastes that they

might be more easily inclined to enjoy. In the instance of luxury retail workers, this then

might mean that the aforementioned ‘labour of integration’ is coupled with allodoxia, as

the latter elucidates how they might be both reverent and anxious towards attaining the

cultural capital of store, including in their approach towards discount purchases.

Allodoxia Tendencies amongst Women and Fashion

Many scholars argue that this type of allodoxia or (more simply put) status anxiety has a

greater tendency amongst women than men. Most notable amongst these is Skeggs who,

unlike Bourdieu, sheds light on how working-class women are subject to similar

processes and, in her view, more substantially (Skeggs, 1997). Within a historical tracing

of the discourse of ‘respectability’ as a middle-class domestic ideal symbolically imposed

onto working-class women, she identifies how the latter, whether it was through their

bodies, clothes, or homes, are at pains to ‘pass’ and not be recognised as working class –

a pressure that working-class men are relatively more emancipated from given the higher

legitimisation of their class masculinity and its intertwinement with

(traditional-industrial) labour power (Skeggs, 1997). Consequently, she infers, the women she

researched lived in a kind of omnipresent state of ‘doubt, insecurity and unease’ (Skeggs,

1997: 75). Likewise, in survey research on physical capital, Vandebroeck found that

working-class women more than men are likely to experience a disparity between the

body-type they claim to have and what they perceive as the ‘ideal’ body-type, with the

latter more realised amongst middle and upper class women, evoking the image of ‘the

body as haunted by the objectifying gaze of others’ as an experience that women more

than men are likely to be subject to the lower the social position that they occupy

(Vandebroeck, 2015: 243). What both Vandebroeck and Skeggs suggest then, is that not

only might the anxieties within the ‘labour of integration’ be induced by distinction and

workplace pressures, but that such would be more susceptible for women given

allodoxia’s unequal distribution according to gender.

This is further reinforced by allodoxia’s prevalence within the realm of fashion as

clothes-shopping becomes a targeted site for cultural capital investments, with scholars

suggesting that this is particularly prone for women. Skeggs reveals how working-class

women apprehensively dress under the eye of respectability by, for example,

differentiating themselves from a perceived ‘tarty’ attire (Skeggs, 1997: 84-85). The work

of Rafferty who brings the experience of shopping per se, and the emotional investment

and stakes entailed in the appropriation and defence of cultural capital through shopping,

closer to the centre of analysis. She demonstrates how, whilst upper-middle class women

are much more confident and comfortable in their shopping behaviour, for lower-middle

22

class women there is a much higher degree of avidity and anxiety (Rafferty, 2011). For

example, in rare moments of relative financial abundance lower-middle class women

would take the opportunity to buy expensive clothes with a felt elevation, which was

enflamed by their peers who would complement their newly acquired ‘classy’ outfits

(Rafferty, 2011: 255-256). However, this was then met by an anxious ‘chase’ to uphold

this aspired habitus, which, when unsuccessful due its financial unsustainability,

ultimately led to serious emotional deflation (Rafferty, 2011: 255-256). These insights

give clues to the emotional investment and stakes potentially entailed in the use of

discount by retail workers. Given that the discounted products are likely to be beyond the

workers otherwise objective means, they too may experience feelings of elevation and be

especially inclined to wear the products in their private lives where they might receive

novel recognition in this way (Rafferty, 2011). But Rafferty also alludes to the other side

of the same coin in the respect that the clothes may be purchased out of anxiety, not just

to maintain status in the classed world of consumption but to uphold a trajectory in a field

of work where labour competency is largely based on such capital.

Theoretical Summary and Research Question Delineation

In order to better conceptualise the labour entailed in the retail industry, inter-active

service work scholars have metamorphosed Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour to

develop the aesthetic labour typology whilst maintaining the former’s concern to

elucidate the tendency for typically private capacities to be exercised in public work life.

However, it has been argued here that: 1) aesthetic labour’s emphasis upon physical

capital loses grip on some of the properties, namely knowledge, tastes and dress, that are

key to retail workers roles; and 2) that there has a been a certain neglect of uncovering

how workers become assimilated to the tastes of their stores after the point of entry

(conceptualised here as the ‘second face’) by those who operationalise the concept.

Furthermore, when the latter problematisation is understood in a class context, it can be

said that most emphasis has been placed upon retail stores recruiting the right habitus, as

opposed to how workers might acquire tastes indifferent or inaccessible to their class

socialisation. By conceptualising aesthetic labour as cultural capital, with the discounted

products conceived as an objectified case, situated within distinction processes, this

research hopes to address these concerns and thus poses the following question:

RQ: How do middle-class women employed in the luxury retail industry adopt and

activate the cultural capital (discounted products being an objectified case) of their

aesthetic labour?

In working towards this inquiry, the research subjects are then conceived to be possessing

an elastic habitus that is capable of integrating the luxury modalities of tastes, knowledge

and dress that are both legitimised within the occupational field they occupy, and that the

extent of this integration is largely necessary for them to undertake their aesthetic labour

successfully, in addition to being legitimised within the classed field of consumption. By

way of the latter’s presence in the worker’s private lives, in addition to the habitus’s

transposability, said cultural capital may be activated within the private sphere.

Moreover, following the logic of distinction, these tastes, knowledges and clothes are

assumed to exist within pre-existing and ongoing classification struggles, in addition to

the occupation’s status itself, and, further still, those dispossessed of cultural capital’s

23

legitimate forms – potentially including those who work in luxury retail, to a greater or

lesser extent – may seek such with avidity and anxiety: a tendency especially prevalent

amongst women, hence the decision to restrict the sample in this way by gender. With all

these aspects considered, the research question above is thus accompanied by the

following subquestions:

RSQ: How do workers valorise the cultural capital of their aesthetic labour?

RSQ: How do workers activate this cultural capital in the workplace?

RSQ: How do workers activate this cultural capital outside the workplace?

24

Methodology

On the grounds that answering the research question primarily depended upon uncovering

not only discourse, such as meanings and values, but also praxis and processes, the

research undertaken followed a qualitative methodology and chose to adopt the

semi-structured interview data-collection method. Whilst of course the subjects of social

position and cultural capital in their broader context are situated at the macro-level of

analysis, it is their presence and influence at the micro-level that are here of concern in

respect to the individual’s ownership, embodiment, and activation of specific objects,

knowledges and tastes, as well as their own constructions of trajectories in relation to this.

This follows the tradition of most aesthetic labour researchers who agree that important

factors such as ‘meaning and experience’ (Warhurst et al, 2000: 9) and ‘the mechanisms

that legitimise […] labour practices’ (Williams and Connell, 2010: 355) are best

accessible via the thick description that only qualitative methods can afford.

Research Population

Female floor-workers in the luxury-fashion retail industry with middle-class backgrounds

were targeted. Focussing on this segment of the service sector was envisioned as fruitful

for a number of reasons. Despite arguments that suggest mass consumption has

attenuated the potency of objectified cultural capital (Holt, 1997: 103-104), luxury goods

by their nature are likely to be prone to high-brow classifications. Likewise, as discussed

in the literature review, the continuation of class strategy in the sphere of clothes

shopping has been recently reported and proved to be insightful regarding the emotional

investments made in acquiring high cultural capital (Rafferty, 2011), which may translate

into workers experience of the discounted products. But what is more is that because

understanding how workers might come to adopt the class tastes of their respective

workplace was fundamental to the research objectives, focussing on the luxury sector

meant that it was likely that the middle-class workers, by way of their class background,

would be working with products that they had little access to prior their employment.

Thus, by targeting luxury retail it was anticipated that exploring the details of the ‘labour

of integration’ and the discounted products role within such as a possible modus operandi

would be more accessible; whilst products from more popular stores still bear cultural

capital, the clearer situattedness of luxury products within distinction mechanisms, in

addition to the cultural capital of the store baring a historical novelty to the research

subjects’ habitus, would, it was expected, offer more conscious interview verbalisations

in this regard.

Floor-workers were targeted for the obvious reason that customer interaction is a

paramount factor within their aesthetic labour. When originally envisioned, research

aimed to restrict the sample to sales associates or similar job roles. However, this was

later dropped, allowing assistant-managers and supervisors to participate. This alteration

was made as it became clear, as research progressed, that due to the small-boutique style

shops in luxury, the assistant-manager to sales associate ratio was relatively small,

meaning that, firstly, exclusive recruitment of the latter was more difficult and, secondly,

25

customer interaction was somewhat no less important in the former’s role than in the

latter’s.

Assessing whether a store fitted the luxury category could be a complex affair, especially

considering that this could vary according to one’s own habitus and that company

self-descriptions may be tied to hyperbolic marketing strategies. Ultimately, this judgement

was informed by ‘validation tools’. Chief amongst these was whether the company was

active on P.C Hoofstraat, a shopping street in Amsterdam widely considered as the most

exclusive in the city (IAmsterdam, 2017). 50% of the participants worked on this street.

The other 50% worked for companies who were open for business on the P.C Hoofstraat

albeit in stores exterior to this location, thus still qualifying as luxury brands according to

the criteria devised above. The names of the said companies remain undisclosed in order

to preserve participant anonymity and confidentiality and have thus been provided with

aliases. Additionally, in many cases, the participants would make reference to stores that

were not present within the sample and so, because of this, these stores have also been

provided with aliases. Furthermore, as it was found amongst participants that a common

distinction strategy entailed the naming of stores perceived as non-luxury or simply

popular, i.e. less exclusive, each store (including those not present in the sample that were

referenced to by participants) has been categorised as either luxury or non-luxury – a

process informed by the aforementioned validation tools. A list of the aliases according to

their category can be found below. For easier reading purposes, aliases within the

findings may be accompanied by their appropriate category in squared parenthesis –

[LX], Luxury; [NLX], non-luxury – if the categorisation is deemed significant to the

context during analysis.

Figure 1 – Company Aliases and Category

Luxury

Companies

[LX]

(present in sample)

Luxury Companies [LX] (not

present in sample)

Non-Luxury Companies

[NLX] (not present in

sample)

Brenham's

Gotham

Clo

Polperra

Casterly

Patches

Raymund's

Belini

Sowch

Marq

Crakehall

Misty

Lyanna

Jack Lo

Henry’s

Elexis

Vaes

Felix

Jaqen

Chivel

Devan

Galee

Brenham's

Miri

Polperra

Freecity

Ghis

Daario

Marq

Harys

Marrillion

Criston

Timmett's

Thomas Harlaw

Marq

American Val

Raymund's

Harry Brown

Marq

Sandu

Marrillion

The decision to focus on workers with a middle-class background very much follows

Rafferty’s rationale when she argues that the middle-classes often ‘find themselves at the

epicentre of competitive social living’, in that their position as neither soundly privileged