Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China

Abstract

Despite the international growth of the service sector, an industrial paradigm defines the study of global labor. This is because analyses of service work typically focus on firms in the United States, while studies of global labor concentrate on manufacturing. I develop a framework for analysis of global service work by comparing ethnographic cases of labor in two global, luxury hotels in China. Each hotel is linked to the same U.S.-based global corporation, and both employ the same organizational template and recruit sameaged female workers. At the first hotel, workers silently cater to the preferences of guests, using recorded customer preference data and enacting imported feminized practices, a labor regime I call virtual personalism. At the second hotel, workers promote hotel products, displaying expertise to distinguish themselves from sex workers who frequent the hotel, a labor regime I call virtuous professionalism. Why do distinctly gendered labor practices emerge in the two settings? To explain the divergent regimes of labor, I show that firms institutionalize localized consumer status struggles through the gendered organization of interactive labor. Workers' interactive strategies and local workplace legacies mediate the forms institutionalism takes. I call the entwining of consumer markets and labor practices “market-embedded labor.”