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各位读者好！又到了我刊的论文速递专栏时间～今日的精彩论文来自美国社会学会前主席、哈佛大学教授Michele Lamont主持的文化社会学专题文章之一，该专题致力于从多角度分析中国文化现象和文化变迁。而本论文针对中国的零售业从业者，从人员素质、服务资本等方面进行了多角度分析，希望对大家有所启发～ One store, two fates: boundary work and service capital in China’s retail sector Eileen M. Otis and Tongyu Wu Abstract: How do collective identities gain salience in the workplace? How are new “capitals” created in the process? To answer these question, this study examines the confrontation of two distinctly positioned socio-economic groups that for the first time labor as co-workers in urban China, in a new type of workspace; the modern retail store. One group is the urban service proletariat, who struggle to earn a living in precarious service jobs but have legal entitlement to urban residence and urban services. The other group is migrant employees who, as part of the largest migration in human history, join a tide of workers who originally departed their rural villages in the 1980s to work in foreign-invested factories on China’s southeast coast, as well as in urban constructionl. These early migrants were largely sequestered from urbanites and excluded from permanent legal residence. Drawing on data from eleven weeks of ethnographic research in a retail work setting, we examine the process through which the spatial boundaries that once separated urbanites and rural migrants become socio-cultural boundaries. The process involves three conversion mechanisms: administratively determined division of jobs, extra-organizational collective identities that some workers draw on to valorize their labor, and third party (customer) preferences. We link these micro-level dynamics to state institutions and discourses. We show that workplace culture follows the contours of boundary formation, an organizational process in which workers collectively compete for status and material resources by converting their extramural identity to workplace recognition. These conversions produce “service capital” a resource that benefits urban workers. Through this boundary work, job tasks take on meaning beyond their bureaucratic designation, and job-based identities gain meaning in everyday life that become the cultural skin in which workers live.
Keywords: Inequality – Boundaries – Suzhi(quality) – Workplace - Migrant workers - Urban workers - Service work - Aesthetic labor
Background: Workplaces exist within wider systems of social inequality. How these contextual inequalities are reproduced, legitimized, and contested in the workplace is less certain and varies in time and space. Scholars of employment identify generic mechanisms that reproduce inequality in the workplace including recruitment, placement, and remuneration practices as well as informal relations (Acker 1990; Ely and Meyerson 2000). However, scholarship has paid less attention to the boundary-making processes shaping inequality between workers “from below” as they struggle to gain status by importing social advantages into the workplace.
In urban China, the rapid growth of inequality has forged sharp antagonisms between new classes, antagonisms that register profoundly in the workplace. An irony of China’s economic reforms is that the party state that embraced Mao’s vision of radical collectivism now presides over the one of the most stratified populations in the industrialized world. By the 1990s, the nation that was once counted among the world’s most egalitarian registered some of the world's highest levels of stratification (Cho 2013; Naughton 2006).1 This directs our attention to the impact of sudden, rapid, and extreme development of inequality on a workplace created by the same economic forces generating new social hierarchies: the retailer. With capitalist transformation, acquisition of goods and services through retailers has replaced state-centered distribution and individuals now take on the role of customer (Hanser 2008; Otis 2011). Today, the retailer brings together two groups as employees: the urban working class and migrant workers. Although researchers have examined interactions between urbanites and migrant workers when they come into contact as customers and workers (Otis 2011; Yan 2008), we know little about encounters between two groups as they interact as colleagues in the same organization. Does the spatial distance that historically kept these two groups apart resolve into socio-cultural distance now that they are colleagues? If so, what kinds of organizational and extra-organizational resources are mobilized in this reproduction? How do the workers respond to inequalities that are experienced daily and directly? More generally, how does the retail workplace affect preexisting inequalities among workers?
To answer these questions, this study examines boundary formation as an organizational process in which employees compete for symbolic and material resources by elaborating cultural frames attributed to their rural and urban origins, as they struggle for advantages within workplace, the commercial retailer. While existing studies examine workplace culture implemented from above as a “…rational instrument designed by top management to shape the behavior of employees in purposive ways” (Ouchi and Wilkins 1985: 462; see also Kunda 2006), rarer is the investigation of the effect of relationships between workers on work processes, norms, and routines (but see Vallas 2001), not to mention the effect of customers on these relationships. The present study examines organizational culture “from below” by investigating the boundaries workers draw and the resources or capitals (Bourdieu 1984) created in the process.
By focusing on boundary formation, we can cast light on the microprocesses influencing the formation of collective identities and sympathies in a country undergoing transformation unprecedented in scale and speed (Naughton 2006). Observing once taken-for-granted categories that are now contested reveals how struggles for the value of jobs—long-settled in many locales—actually unfold as workers articulate assumptions about inequality, ethics, and values (Goodman 2014; Swidler 1986; Zavoretti 2016). Moreover, at a historical juncture when worker unrest is high (Friedman 2014), how workers draw boundaries can underlie dynamics of collective protest, fracturing groups and thereby undermining the possibility of solidarity. At an organizational level, grasping boundary-forming dynamics reveals how inequalities develop in response to institutional practices—and shape these practices—in a relatively new type of organization in urban China, one that incorporates customers as agents and objects of control: the retailer. Especially in a country that outlaws independent workers’ unions, boundaries are one of the few tools available for employees to claim social worth.
We observe the emergent sense-making that creates boundaries between workers of different origins, drawing on ethnographic data gathered over an eleven week period by Wu, who worked alongside urban and rural service employees at a retail store in Beijing. We show that boundaries between workers are reproduced and elaborated through three mechanisms: (1) administratively determined division of jobs, (2) extra-organizational collective identities that workers draw on to valorize their labor, and (3) third party (customer) preferences. Throughout their workplace struggles, workers draw upon a discourse promulgated by the state that promotes individual “quality”. They implicitly and explicitly refer to this suzhi discourse in order to convert cultural capital into workplace “service” capital. Thus, the state acts as kind of symbolic broker in these struggles, while customers are real brokers, expressing preferences for urban workers and against rural workers. The formation of service floor boundaries is also conditioned by macro structural dynamics that exclude migrant workers from urban citizenship. The focus on boundaries illuminates a problematic mode of worker agency, as workers mobilize resources against each other in their contention for status and dignity in the workplace (Hodson 2001). |
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