Abstract
This article is based on a semiotic analysis of corporate websites in the lap dancing industry. Forming part of a larger ethnographic study of the UK lap dancing industry, it focuses on how the exchange relationship between dancers and customers is shaped by the industry’s online presence. Methodologically, it draws on Hancock’s semiotic approach to the analysis of organizational artefacts and Brewis’s writing on the importance of understanding how sex work is constructed and perceived. The article shows the importance of corporate websites as virtual spaces that landscape customer expectations of the exchange relationship emphasizing how these expectations perpetuate, on the one hand, a very prescriptive range of body images shaping the performance and consumption of lap dancing work, and on the other, an ambiguous suggestion of open-ended possibility. The article argues that, in combination, this landscaping of prescription and possibility constitutes a powerful organization of anticipation underpinning perceptions of reasonable entitlement within the lap dancing exchange relationship considering how this impacts upon the dancers’ experiences of this relationship. The analysis highlights both the importance of virtual corporate spaces in landscaping interactive service exchanges, as well as the intensification that results from the ambiguity encoded within these spaces, requiring service providers to reconcile anticipation and experience, prescription and possibility, within the exchange relationship.
Keywords
Introduction
In The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983) examined the significance of customer perceptions of reasonable entitlement to the intensification of interactive service work, highlighting the implications of this for the performance of emotional labour. Subsequent research has shown that customer expectations of service encounters have become more intensive, that is, performance-orientated and demanding for service providers, following the aestheticization of work (Belfrage, 2011; Böhme, 2003; Chugh and Hancock, 2009; Hancock and Tyler, 2007). The increasing significance of digital, visual media has arguably added to this intensification, bringing with it a distilled expectation of what customers might feel they are reasonably entitled to expect from a service encounter (Bell and Davison, 2013; Gustavsson and Czarniawska, 2004; Meyer et al., 2013). Thinking about what this means for the commercial sex industry, Hearn (2014) has emphasized how the growing speed and ease of information and communications technology (ICTs) creates many new possibilities for sexual consumption, bringing with it an expectation of increasingly intensive experiences of sexual pleasure. As he puts it, this ‘virtualization’ presents multiple sites for both the reinforcement and contestation of gendered, sexual hegemonies through, for instance, recurring imagery on corporate websites.
In this article we consider: What role do virtual organizational spaces such as corporate websites play in shaping customer expectations of the exchange relationship within interactive service work? What implications might this have for perceptions of reasonable entitlement within exchange relationships, and for the performance of interactive service work? To respond to these questions, we present a semiotic analysis of the landscaping of reasonable entitlement, and of the organization of anticipation, within the lap dancing industry. 1
Gagliardi (1990) uses the term ‘landscaping’ to describe the processes through which material organizational artefacts (such as websites) shape the values and beliefs surrounding a particular organizational setting or industry. As he puts it, ‘artefacts evince and reflect social and cultural dynamics’ (Gagliardi, 1990: 26); in other words, they provide reference points for cultural perceptions and associations including, we might argue, anticipatory encounters. Throughout the article, we draw on this way of thinking about landscaping as an analytical lens through which to consider the ways in which cultural artefacts, such as websites and the bodies and settings they depict, come to shape meanings and expectations associated with lap dancing encounters. As an example of intensively interactive service work, we consider the virtual landscaping of perceptions of entitlement within the industry, examining how customer expectations of the service encounter are shaped through a semiotic analysis of the ways in which corporate websites constitute the symbolic landscape of lap dancing.
In developing our analysis of these websites, we also draw on Campbell’s (2005 [1987]) account of how contemporary consumerism rests on the construction of perpetual anticipation. Campbell (2005 [1987], emphasis added) emphasizes how the anticipatory, ‘imaginative enjoyment of products and services is a crucial part of contemporary consumerism’ (p. 92). In other words, it is a desire for the anticipated pleasure that experience ‘promises to yield’ (Campbell, 2005 [1987]: 77) that drives consumption whereby, as he puts it, ‘the illusion is always better than the reality: the promise more interesting than actuality’ (Campbell, 2005 [1987]: 90).
We consider what this anticipatory ‘promise’ might mean for those who work in the lap dancing industry, taking the term promise to denote both an open-ended, enticing potential, as might be expressed in the phrase ‘full of promise’ or simply the term ‘promising’ and, at the same time, an agreement or commitment based on mutual understanding of perceived entitlement (as in ‘we made a promise’, ‘you promised’). Wider connotations of implied sexual innocence, waiting to be ‘taken’, connect these two sets of meanings, as suggested by the phrase ‘on a promise’, used colloquially to refer to the possibility of sexual intimacy. We explore how these entwined meanings are encoded into the semiotic landscape of the industry through the images and textual references that constitute ‘constellations of meaning’ (Hancock, 2005) on lap dancing club websites.
Campbell’s analysis stresses the importance of understanding and engaging with the signifying role of imagery. For him, images that do not conform to what experience and/or understanding leads an individual to believe will actually occur require consumers to undertake what he calls ‘an “imaginative construction” or anticipation’ (Campbell, 2005 [1987]: 83). He calls the pleasure derived from this imaginative anticipation a ‘double desire’ (Campbell, 2005 [1987]: 85), referring to the desire to experience desire. ‘The generation of longing’ is therefore a key component of what Campbell (2005 [1987]: 85) describes as modern hedonism: the inducement or enticement to experience the pleasure to be derived from anticipation itself. It is arguably this enticement that lap dancing, as part of the wider ‘seduction industry’ (O’Neill, 2018), is premised upon with this ‘double desire’ or imaginative anticipation being encoded into what the industry is and means. To put it simply, the generation of longing that Campbell describes is what the industry trades on. We consider how this is encoded into the industry’s visual imagery and online presence, into its cultural ‘landscape’ (Gagliardi, 1990), exploring what this means for the nature of the exchange relationship involved.
The lap dancing industry sits in an ambiguous area between sexualized labour and sex work (Bott, 2006), an ambiguity that the industry thrives on. While the term ‘sexualized labour’ has been used to refer to work in which sexual desire is commodified as part of a broader exchange of goods or services (Elmer, 2010; Pettinger, 2005; Riach and Wilson, 2014; Smith Maguire, 2008; Warhurst and Nickson, 2009), ‘sex work’ is generally taken to describe the exchange of sexual interaction as the sole or main focus of a transactional relationship (Bindman and Doezema, 1997; Grandy and Mavin, 2012; Mavin and Grandy, 2013; Sanders, 2005). Yet, these two forms of work are not distinctive but operate along a continuum with much of what Sanders (2008) calls the ‘shadow’ sex economy, including lap dancing, occupying the ambiguous and fluid middle ground.
The ambiguity of the industry and of the work undertaken by a lap dancer means that interactions with customers tend to be particularly open-ended (Barton, 2007; Wesely, 2003), yet research suggests that customers have clear expectations of what they are reasonably entitled to within the exchange relationship (Brewis and Linstead, 2000a, 2000b, 2003; Pettinger, 2011; Sanders, 2005). To consider where these expectations come from, we examine the social and cultural context of the exchange relationship focusing specifically on how this context contributes to the ambiguity and anticipation shaping the expectations and sense of ‘promise’ referred to above.
As Riach and Wilson (2014) have argued, ‘organizational spaces afford or mitigate possibilities for particular bodies, which simultaneously shape expectations and experiences of sexuality at work’ (p. 329). As visual and virtual spaces become increasingly significant in shaping these expectations and experiences (Grandy and Mavin, 2012; Gustavsson and Czarniawska, 2004; Hearn, 2014; Sullivan, 2014), more research is needed in order to understand the ways in which virtual organizational spaces such as corporate websites impact upon perceptions of the exchange relationship and the performance of work. This is particularly the case in terms of understanding the shaping, or landscaping, of customers’ perceptions of reasonable entitlement, and the impact of these perceptions on what service workers might be reasonably expected to provide.
With this in mind, and with the questions posed above as our starting point, our focus in this article is threefold. First, our empirical concern is with understanding how the exchange relationship within intensively interactive service environments such as lap dancing clubs is landscaped, framing particular expectations of reasonable entitlement in a relatively under-researched but important sector of work. Hardy and Sanders (2015) estimate that around 20,000 women currently work in the lap dancing industry in the United Kingdom. Although it is difficult to be certain about the commercial ‘value’ of the industry, the Office of National Statistics conservatively estimates the sex industry in the United Kingdom to be worth at least £5 billion, with lap dancing, pornography and chat lines accounting for a large proportion of that figure. 2 Yet to date, we know relatively little about how the lap dancing exchange relationship comes to be perceived and understood by those who work and consume within it. Second, our analysis highlights the significance of virtual organizational spaces such as corporate websites to shaping expectations of the exchange relationship, focusing on how these spaces are encoded with images that are, on the one hand, highly prescriptive and on the other, deliberately suggestive of open-ended possibility. Third, we emphasize the value of a critical, semiotic approach to understanding how the exchange relationship might be anticipated within an intensively interactive service environment, adding to the development of semiotic approaches to research within work and organization studies. In this third aspect of the article, we draw largely on Hancock’s (2005) semiotic analysis of the landscaping of corporate artefacts, in order to understand how particular regimes of meaning frame, or ‘landscape’ (Gagliardi, 1990), expectations of the lap dancing industry and of the organization of anticipation in particular. We use the latter term to describe the combination of on the one hand, a relatively narrow set of prescriptive images of lap dancers’ bodies and other cultural artefacts that serve to shape customer expectations of the exchange relationship, and on the other, the ambiguity and perpetual possibility that is also encoded into these expectations; in combination, these shape a customer’s anticipatory sense of ‘promise’ as outlined above. Our analysis shows the significance of virtual spaces such as websites for processes of organizational meaning making, and we explore what this implies for lap dancers as sexualized interactive labourers given, on the one hand, the prescribed expectations customers are likely to bring to the encounter, and on the other, its apparently open-ended possibilities.
The article begins by positioning its contribution to relevant work and organization studies literature on symbolism, sexuality and landscaping, identifying important and emerging threads on which the article draws. Then, the contemporary lap dancing industry in the United Kingdom is introduced, in order to describe the context of the research. The methodological approach taken to the study, including details of how the websites were analysed is explained and evaluated, before presenting the findings of the analysis. The discussion focuses on two key themes that emerged from the study – prescription and possibility. We consider how these two themes are interrelated in the organization of anticipation in the lap dancing industry, an interrelation that, we argue, intensifies the demands made upon those working within the industry. In conclusion, the article emphasizes that more research is needed into the semiotic context of the sex industry, and interactive service encounters more generally, in order to understand more about how customer expectations are framed. We also argue that within work and organization studies, more critical, analytical attention needs to be given to corporate websites, in order to consider the impact they are likely to have on lived experiences of organizational exchange relationships, especially within highly aestheticized service encounters that thrive on ambiguity and anticipation.
Symbolism, sexuality and organizational semiotics
A wealth of literature exists within the fields of marketing and communication studies focusing on the impact of advertising on customer expectations of reasonable entitlement (see Keller, 2016; Lamberton and Stephen, 2016; Ryan, 2017). By comparison, relatively limited consideration has been given within work and organization studies to the implications of the semiotics of advertising and marketing for the experiences and perceptions of those working in front-line, interactive service roles. This is not to suggest, however, that the significance of symbolism for the meanings attributed to organizational encounters has been neglected. Indeed, a considerable wealth of literature has evolved in recent years focusing on the contribution of organizational symbolism to processes of meaning making (Acord, 2010; Ahn and Jacobs, 2018; Cutcher et al., 2017; Davison, 2010; Hancock, 2005; Hancock and Tyler, 2007; Mack, 2007). Picking up on these threads, this article seeks to bring together insights from a concern with the role of symbolism in shaping expectations of organizational exchange relationships. It also aims to bring the significance of virtual organizational spaces to the fore by highlighting how these spaces constitute arenas for meaning making.
Much of the recent literature on sexuality within organizational life has emphasized the significance of organizational symbolism in shaping perceptions and expectations of sexual interactions. Green et al’s. (2010) focus on the ‘symbolic backdrops’ associated with sado-masochistic settings, highlights the importance of the virtual spaces ‘against which actors build and negotiate erotic meanings and practices’ (p. 8). Similarly, Mills (2006: 4) describes the symbolic context of changing perceptions of idealized feminine sexuality in his longitudinal analysis of British Airways, emphasizing the significant role played by corporate symbolism in shaping ‘the cultural dynamic that generates ways of being in an organization’ (see also Mills, 1995). Riach and Wilson (2014) similarly emphasize how sexuality is ‘not only an undercurrent of service environments, but is integral to the way that these workspaces are experienced and negotiated’ (p. 329). Recent research has also highlighted the role played by corporate symbolism in shaping the performance of sexualized labour within the context of commercial exchanges (Warhurst and Nickson, 2009). An interesting example is Murray’s (2015) study of a Manhattan bar, which examines how the embodied experiences of women working there, and in particular their performance of sexualized labour, are shaped by gendered customer expectations. Brents and Sanders (2010) have similarly emphasized how the ‘mainstreaming’ of the commercial sex industry is shaped by twin processes of economic and social integration, fuelled by wider patterns in leisure consumption and the ‘hedonistic search for relaxation and pleasure’ (p. 45). Taken together, this research highlights the significance of a critical understanding of the role of symbolism in shaping perceptions and experiences of the commercial sex industry, and of customer expectations of the exchange relationship involved, as well as the possible implications of these expectations for the performance of sexualized labour and service work. To focus specifically on how these expectations are encoded into perceptions of what the lap dancing exchange relationship ‘promises’, we turn to the inroads that semiotics has made thus far into work and organization studies.
In his discussion of semiotics within organizational analysis, Hancock (2005: 32, emphasis added) highlights the importance of giving critical consideration to the ways in which organizational imagery and artefacts are imbued with aesthetic meaning. Through his critical analysis of a particular corporate artefact – namely a graduate recruitment advertisement, he introduces ‘an alternative way of analysing organizational artefacts that sets out to understand the ways in which such artefacts are made to mean’. He draws on earlier writing within the fields of semiotic linguistics and aesthetics, emphasizing how a critical analysis of organizational sign systems provides valuable insight into the ways in which particular sets of meanings come to shape perceptions of workplace identities and relationships, effectively setting out an ‘organizational semiotics’. Of particular relevance to our discussion here, is the acknowledgement of simultaneous ambiguity and specificity within organizational symbolism, as Hancock shows how specific meanings come to be generated when encountered in particular contexts. Brought to the fore is an appreciation of how the aesthetic functions as an organizing medium of meaning making ‘whereby certain constellations of signifiers can communicate a class or regime of aestheticized experience’ (Hancock, 2005: 41, emphasis added). This leads us to understand ‘not only what organizationally located artefacts mean aesthetically, but also how they mean what they mean’ (Hancock, 2005: 41, emphasis added). To examine this process of meaning making, we now turn to a consideration of the landscaping of customer expectations, or the organization of anticipation, in the lap dancing industry.
The lap dancing industry: Staging desire and imagining intimacy
Lap dancing is a commission-based sales role that involves the buying and selling of topless and nude dances within a club setting. In addition to selling dances, lap dancers may also sell so-called ‘sit-downs’ to customers. These involve the customer paying for a period of time with a particular dancer during which the dancer will drink, socialize with and dance for them. While not with customers, dancers are expected to perform on stage and interact for short periods of time with customers to entice them into paying for dances or sit-downs.
The semiotic analysis of lap dancing club websites on which this article is based is part of a wider ethnographic study of the industry, a setting in which ‘work and leisure, production and consumption, naturally intersect’ (Brewis and Linstead, 2000a: 84). Previous research has suggested that dancers’ bodily boundaries become fluid so that the way lap-dancing work is constituted requires a continual negotiation of bodily boundaries (Wesely, 2003). Yet, the embodied practices that previous studies have focused on, such as ‘strategic flirting’ (Deshotels and Forsyth, 2006) have consequences for the on-going creation of the organizational setting that stretch beyond the immediacy of individual experience. This highlights the importance of understanding the situated context of the industry, particularly of appreciating the semiotic framing or landscaping of lap dancing work, and its implications for those working in the industry, with wider relevance for the study of other intensively interactive and highly aestheticized service environments.
At the risk of over-simplifying a rich and sophisticated body of literature, much of the research on the industry has focused on the stigma associated with working in it (Bindel, 2004; Grandy and Mavin, 2014; Mavin and Grandy, 2013; Wahab et al., 2011; Wesely, 2003). Lap dancers’ performance of aesthetic labour has also been highlighted (Mavin and Grandy, 2013), as has the demand for ‘strategic flirting’ (Deshotels and Forsyth, 2006), and the presentation of a reified feminine sexuality (Jackson, 2011). The embodiment of fantasy (Wood, 2000) and the ability to convincingly perform ‘counterfeit intimacy’ (Barton, 2007) has also been emphasized. Recent research has also provided insight into the techniques used by lap dancers to negotiate the ambiguous and often fluid boundaries characterizing the lap dancing transaction (Wesely, 2003). Relatively neglected within research on lap dancing is a sustained, critical consideration of where customer expectations come from, how they are shaped, and what impact they might have on customer anticipation of the exchange relationship. Also relatively under-researched are the processes through which the demand for aesthetic labour, for strategic flirting and the negotiation of ambiguity and fluidity on the part of those working within the industry come to be organized aesthetically, that is, ‘made to mean’ what they do in Hancock’s (2005) terms.
Focusing on lived experiences of ambiguity and the negotiation of boundaries, Barton (2007) emphasizes that the adoption of a ‘persona’ within lap dancing interactions provides an important coping device to protect workers’ own (out of work) identities, as they take on a different name and often also personality as part of their performances as what Wood (2000) calls ‘fantastical actors’. Barton (2007) shows how this adoption of a lap-dancing persona allows dancers to perform a fantasy for customers in accordance with the latter’s pre-conceived expectations about what the encounter is likely to involve. This is crucial to the performance of ‘counterfeit intimacy’ (Wood, 2000; cited in Barton, 2007), and being skilled in this performance requires dancers to be able to feign sexual desire and attraction to the customer. Sanders’ (2005) emphasizes something similar in her study of sex workers who, she argues, produce a manufactured identity that allows them to construct a sexualized version of themselves that meets customer expectations. Through a similar process in the lap dancing industry, this enables the club to capitalize on the dancer’s sexuality through the performance of aesthetically specific forms of archetypically feminine embodiment.
In their study of the lap dancing industry, Mavin and Grandy (2013: 11) pay particular attention to physical appearance as a key element of selling lap dances, considering the significance of these aesthetic forms. Through interviews with lap dancers, they found that dancers increased their earnings by becoming skilled in performing a ‘narrow depiction of femininity’. In particular, they found that dancers sought to embody the physical attributes that they had come to associate with an idealized feminine sexuality within the industry. Their analysis focuses on the implications of this for dancers’ preoccupations with body management techniques such as changing outfits throughout the night, with monitoring their weight and physical fitness, and with managing aesthetic associations of the ageing process. In this sense, Mavin and Grandy (2013) take the analysis of lap dancing work in an important and interesting direction, emphasizing the embodied performativity of lap dancers by illustrating the ways in which their work brings particular subjectivities into being as an active process. In doing so, they open up significant questions about how dancers become aware of these expectations, and interpolate them into their workplace personas, coming to embody them through their workplace interactions. They argue that the media plays an influential role in shaping idealized perceptions of the lap dancing industry (Grandy and Mavin, 2012), yet this theme remains relatively under-developed in the wider literature to date. Relatively little is therefore currently known about how, and indeed why, particular performances of sexualized personas come to be valued and deemed desirable within the industry. Grandy and Mavin (2012) suggest that occupational image is partly informed by the industry’s media presence, emphasizing the importance of considering the broader social, symbolic context of lap dancing work, in order to understand how perceptions of the industry, and performances within it, come to take the form they do.
Research that has explored the interaction between customers and dancers has begun to highlight the ambiguity of the expected role of a lap dancer, particularly through discussions of boundaries within the industry (Barton, 2007; Wesely, 2003). So far, research has focused largely on physical boundaries. In particular, attention has been paid to the presumed fluidity of bodily boundaries (Wesely, 2003) as well as to the performance of intimacy during the transactional process (Barton, 2007; Deshotels and Forsyth, 2006). Implied in this research, but also yet to be explored in any sustained way, are how negotiations over bodily boundaries and displays of intimacy are shaped by expectations encoded into the industry’s advertising and marketing, into its virtual spaces, and into popular perceptions of what lap dancing work and the exchange relationship involves.
Pettinger’s (2013) analysis of Punternet, a discussion forum documenting commercial sex encounters, highlights the importance of a critical, contextualized consideration of customer expectations and their implications for commercial sex encounters. Pettinger (2013) suggests that customers of sex workers expect or feel entitled to a ‘good service’, and that perceptions of what constitutes a quality service are framed very much by social and semiotic expectations of sex work as an aesthetic and emotional encounter. Perhaps not surprisingly, customers feel they have received a good service when workers are professional and committed to pleasing them. While this provides important insight, Punternet is a very specific subscription forum; lap dancing club websites are arguably more widely accessible and ambiguous, more ‘mainstream’ (Brents and Sanders, 2010; Hardy and Sanders, 2015), so that customer expectations are shaped more by implication and connotation than is the case in a setting such as Punternet. Developing an appreciation of how these connotations are communicated, and what impact they have, is therefore important to building a more critical understanding of the organization of the lap dancing industry specifically, and of sexualized labour more generally. With this in mind, we now turn to outlining the semiotic approach we took to analysing lap dancing club websites.
Methodology: ‘Uncovering the semiotic’ in the lap dancing industry
As noted above, this article draws from a wider ethnographic study of the lap dancing industry based in the South East of England. Data were collected and analysed from a total of nine lap dancing clubs that were selected on the basis of their geographical location (for practical reasons associated with the larger study). The research involved three dimensions of data collection: website analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Our discussion here draws specifically on the data collected during the website analysis in order to explore how encoding a particular perception of ‘reasonable entitlement’ into the symbolic landscape (Gagliardi, 1990) of the lap dancing industry frames the organization of anticipation, or ‘generation of longing’ in Campbell’s terms, on which the industry depends. Specifically we consider what this means for those who work in the industry.
In studying the meaning making processes through which anticipation is encoded into perceptions of reasonable entitlement, we took our methodological starting point from Hancock’s (2005) semiotic analysis of corporate artefacts. Following Hancock, we considered the relationship between signifiers (sensory artefacts such as pictures or words) and signifieds (the concepts denoted, and their wider connotations). We undertook this analysis within the context of the broader ‘critical hermeneutic framework’ (Morrow and Brown, 1994) cited in Hancock (2005) because, as he puts it, without the culturally specific relationship between sign systems and their wider social settings ‘the sign would in effect be meaningless’ (p. 40). However, in order to look beyond simple iconic, indexical or symbolic associations, and to move into the realm of aesthetic meaning making, Hancock also emphasizes the importance of considering how certain constellations of signifiers work in association, through wider, rhetorical connotations, and we consider these in our analysis as well, in order to explore the wider social, symbolic context of lap dancing work (Grandy and Mavin, 2012).
To consider the way in which websites contribute to the semiotic landscaping of anticipation in the lap dancing industry, we drew from Gagliardi’s (1990) suggestion that landscaping can be understood through the examination of cultural artefacts, and from Hancock’s (2005) emphasis on the analytical value of analysing constellations of signifiers using semiotic methods. To this end, we considered recurring signifiers, and their range of possible signifying effects by reflecting on their immediate denotations and broader cultural connotations in a total of nine corporate websites for lap dancing clubs. Our focus included themes such as colour, pattern and texture in visual imagery. Tactile fabrics and rich colours were widely used to connote intimacy and passion, as discussed below. As Beyes and De Cock (2017) have noted, colour is an affective force that is ‘often simply taken for granted in organizational life’ (p. 59). Focusing on colour and other aesthetic signifiers, we treated each of the nine individual websites we examined as an artefact, subjecting it to semiotic analysis before considering recurring semiotic themes that seemed to be present across the websites so that it was possible to build an understanding of the broader landscaping of the industry. In this sense, it was important to our approach not to isolate the websites from their wider cultural context. Lap dancing clubs do not exist or operate in a semiotic vacuum but against the broader cultural backdrop of the social meanings and associations of commercial sex, of masculinity and of heteronormativity. Of course as researchers, we ourselves are immersed in these wider meanings.
Although we endeavoured to take a critical, reflexive approach to analysing the websites, inevitably semiotics involves an element of situated, hermeneutic interpretation. This means that the analysis we present largely reflects our own assumptions about the meanings denoted or connoted by particular images or textual references. We tried to counter any limiting effects of this by making the analysis as dialogical as possible, between ourselves and with academic colleagues, as well as lap dancers interviewed in the wider study. Another issue arising from our approach is that although we are suggesting that lap dancing club websites are part of a wider cultural landscaping of the industry through which expectations are produced and circulated in a broad set of discursive practices and effects, we limit our analysis here (as noted above) only to the websites. However, as noted above, a specific aim of the research was to explore how the websites construct and shape the expectations of the dancer-customer interaction. This means that within our analysis, particular emphasis was placed on how the exchange relationship is ‘made to mean’ on the websites, for instance through textual, visual (and in some instances) sonic references to the clubs and the services they offer, as well as to the lap dancers themselves. While the websites are by no means the only contributor to the landscaping of the industry, we would therefore maintain that they are an important one, namely as a cultural reference point connecting anticipation, entitlement and experience. This latter point draws on Campbell’s (2005 [1987]) idea that combined ‘fragments’ derived from media sources are often cited in the construction of consumer fantasies and anticipatory pleasures (p. 93). His account pre-dates the development of the virtual sex industry (Hearn, 2014; Pettinger, 2013) and of the ubiquity of corporate websites as reference points for consumer choice, and so in this sense, we hope to update aspects of his analysis with this in mind.
All of the nine websites we analysed included a permanent recruitment section for lap dancers, a theme to which we return below. But for now, it is important to note that the presence of these sections, combined with the general advertising of the clubs themselves, suggests that the websites were intended to be ‘read’ and engaged with by actual and potential customers, as well as by dancers.
Our analysis of the websites consisted of identifying broad themes that emerged from the website as a written and visual (and in some examples, audible) text. These were discerned both through reading ‘with’ the text and sceptically, in order to draw out underlying sets of denotations and broader connotations. The latter refer to the wider but socially situated cultural associations of the constellations of signifiers such as colour, texture, phrasing and so on. Semiotic analysis was used to decode signifiers and their associated meaning (Barthes, 1977). Following Barthes (1977) and Hancock (2005), this involved a first stage of ‘translating’ the visual or textual symbols on individual websites into thematic concepts that we used to convey their meanings. For example, we took leopard skin printed fabric to denote a reference to animalistic sexuality, taking the wider connotations of a woman wearing leopard print underwear or a mini dress to be suggestive of women’s sexual agency and availability. This was followed by cross-website comparisons of the themes in order to identify those that recurred across websites and hence, we would suggest, contribute to a wider landscaping of the industry more generally. Examples of the latter include a recurrence of the colour red or textual references to ‘VIP experiences’, both of which are themes we return to below. By connecting semiotic themes discerned on individual websites as well as those recurring across websites, this ‘first order’ analysis of thematic concepts evolved into a ‘second order’ analysis through which the theoretical concepts discussed below were discerned. We give examples of the latter in our discussion below, and show how they enabled us to connect and begin to make sense of the themes identified.
As suggested above, the analysis was undertaken dialogically, between the three researchers working on the project, to make the analysis as interactive and reflexive as we could. Emergent interpretations were discussed with lap dancers during interviews (which formed part of the wider study), and with other academics in seminars and at conferences. This wider discussion also helped to contribute to making the analysis as inter-subjective as possible, taking account of different viewpoints and cultural associations.
Findings: Encoding ‘prescription’ and ‘possibility’ in lap dancing
Our semiotic analysis of the club websites shows how the industry is underpinned by connotations of both prescription and possibility. On the one hand, websites are dominated by prescriptive images of idealized sexual desire, and of dancers that embody these prescriptions. Simultaneously, websites cultivate a landscape of possibility through the use of deliberate ambiguity surrounding the nature of the exchange relationship. Customers are seemingly enticed with the open-ended promise that, within the clubs, anything is possible, particularly for those customers who pay extra for what are ubiquitously referred to as ‘VIP experiences’. Drawing on examples from our analysis, it is this blend of prescription and possibility that we turn to next.
Prescription
The lap dancing club websites that we considered (which we refer to below using pseudonyms) contribute to a landscaping of expectations through the semiotic staging of very particular sexualized imagery. Through this imagery, dancers and customers might come to understand what they could ‘reasonably expect’, in Hochschild’s (1983) terms, and what may be anticipated by customers, within the context of the exchange relationship. Most obviously perhaps, lap dancing club websites are replete with images of toned, youthful and slim bodies. Dancers are often depicted in ‘lounging’ or reclining poses in their underwear. For example, an image on the ‘Elegance’ website shows a young, topless woman with blond hair, wearing fishnet stockings lying on a cream lace covered bed, holding the receiver of a ‘candlestick’ style gold-plated telephone in one hand, and a casually extended, gold cigarette holder in the other. Taken together, these signs work to emphasize the woman’s toned skin, her apparently young, fit body and her sexual availability (signified by the reclining open pose, and the positioning of the woman on the bed), at the same time as connoting opulence (through, for instance, the rich, sensual fabrics and colours, including the gold telephone and cigarette holder). The woman’s sexual allure is suggested by her stockings, her innocence by the lace textured, cream fabric; taken together and combined with her setting and pose, both connote her sexual availability, imbuing her with the sense of ‘promise’ referred to above. Adding to these connotations of implied sexual innocence on her part is that her relaxed pose seems to suggest that she is unaware that she is being watched, adding a voyeuristic dimension to the imagery. In combination with the implicitly phallic signifiers of the telephone mouthpiece and the elongated cigarette holder, this ‘constellation of signifiers’ (Hancock, 2005) suggests sexual availability and voyeuristic desire as the basis of any potential exchange.
While the aesthetic on ‘Spirit’s website is quite different, the whole constellation of signifiers has a similar promissory effect. Unlike the sensual lighting on the ‘Elegance’ website, one of the pages on the ‘Spirit’ website shows a woman against a backdrop that appears to be lit by means of dimmed, fluorescent or specialist lighting that gives the whole picture a clinical, shadow-like tone. The image depicts a topless woman wearing over the knee, stiletto-heeled boots. She is kneeling down but elongating her upper body by holding her arms above her head and posing with her legs slightly apart. Interestingly, this image crops the dancer’s head out of the picture; in combination with the cold hue, this serves to dehumanize her while simultaneously emphasizing her sexual availability through the wide legged pose. Through quite different aesthetic signifiers, the broader connotations of both images convey idealized prescriptions of very particular body types (‘this is what a lap dancer looks like’), at the same time as emphasizing the dancers’ sexual availability that directly addresses the potential customer (‘this is what a lap dancer might do for/with/to you’).
Taken together, websites such as these portray a relatively narrow range of body types and of gendered sexuality that serve to reproduce prescriptive images of sexual encounters in the industry and simultaneously landscape customer expectations of the exchange relationship in terms of both what a dancer might be expected to look like, and what kind of interaction might be anticipated.
As well as these general images, recruitment sections, which were permanent features on the websites that we analysed, also play an important role in shaping perceptions of idealized sexuality and body image in the industry. They do so by perpetuating idealized norms governing who might be perceived as suitable for lap dancing work, largely aesthetically, but also in relation to an implied capacity to embody the ‘promised’ sexual availability referred to above. To illustrate, the recruitment pages feature recurring images of highly sexualized women with particularly youthful and toned physiques often dressed in bikinis or lingerie. Applications to become a dancer tend to require a close up facial photograph and a full-length body shot of the applicant in a bikini or underwear. Some websites include examples of photographs, establishing the normative parameters around what is seemingly expected. Thus, the implication is that you need not apply unless your body looks a particular way and falls within the prescriptive expectations signified by the imagery on the recruitment pages, and websites more broadly (all of which customers and the general public have access to). Contributing to the constellations of signifiers that characterize the industry, and marginalizing those who are not consistent with its normative expectations, is the request on many websites for measurements such as bust, hips, waist and cup size. In addition to these physical parameters, certain personality traits are specified; on the ‘All Things Nice’ website, for example, the recruitment section states that potential applicants should be ‘energetic and enthusiastic’. Alongside images such as those described above, the general effect of this text is to connote an expectation that applicants must be youthful, fit and sexually available. Consequently, this closes off those who do not fit with the physical ideals perpetuated through the website imagery, as well as feeding into the aesthetic expectations that customers might form regarding the visual nature of the exchange, and the kind of interaction they might reasonably expect.
The websites signified sexual availability in three main ways that we identified. First, through a variety of poses, including facial expressions, dancers’ bodies connote sexual desire and availability, portraying the kind of ‘fantastical acting’ that Wood (2000) describes. For example, the ‘Stars’ website that we examined showed a dancer smiling suggestively while holding a lolly, surrounded by sweets. Arguably, this equates her with the lolly itself, as a ‘sweet’ treat that is pleasurable to consume (but of no ‘nutritional’ value or substance), and with an object that can be tasted and licked. The latter has wider connotations of sexual intimacy, particularly with the lolly serving as a signifier of oral sex. The lolly also connotes, perhaps more ambiguously, a child-like sexual innocence, with implications of youthful if not virginal sexuality presenting the customer with the fantasy that he might be the first and only ‘one’ she makes herself available to; both the dancer and the encounter presented as being full of ‘promise’.
Second, many of the images we examined portrayed the dancers’ bodies in powerful, yet available stances suggesting their own sexual desire, and positioning the customers as the ones who will be able to satisfy this desire. This was emphasized by the perspective or position from which photographs seem to have been taken, possibly signifying the viewpoint of the potential customer, looking up at dancers on the stage. As an example, one particular photographic image we came across, on the ‘Elegance’ website, appeared to have been shot from underneath the dancer’s body so that the perspective served to elongate her legs, making her appear physically strong and seductively powerful but also sexually available. The combined effect of the positioning of her body and the perspective from which she was viewed suggested that any possible future encounter with her might be full of the afore-mentioned ‘promise’.
Third, many of the website images showed off the pole skills of the dancers, depicting them in upside down split stances, demonstrating their athleticism. Arguably, this simultaneously exhibits their bodies as powerful but also ready for (implied) male consumption, as both desiring and receptive. One particular example on the ‘All Things Nice’ website emphasized this: the black and white image, somewhat connoting a human ‘hot dog’, depicts a highly toned woman with long blond hair, backed up against a phallic pole that is sandwiched between her naked buttocks. Her flesh appears to be enveloping the pole, soft in contrast to the hard steel, with connotations of anal sex. She appears to be wearing only a tightfitting black sports vest and thigh-high striped-top sports socks. On the woman’s right buttock is a faded, heart shaped tattoo. The latter adds an interesting dimension to this image that could perhaps be taken as a contrived symbol of the dancer’s affection for customers (with tattoos traditionally depicting names and hearts of loved ones to whom one declares a permanent, embodied commitment), or as a branding of property (in a more animalistic sense). That the tattoo is faded further suggests that perhaps the dancer has a tattoo that includes someone’s name or that it is simply a ‘personal’ marker, and concealing make-up has been used to blur this, in order to maintain the illusion that she is available (only) to the customer, adopting a persona to meet his expectation of perceived entitlement and counterfeit intimacy (Wood, 2000). Another connotation of the tattoo could be that the dancer’s body is ‘fading’ as in, she is jaded, used up, hinting at an underlying acknowledgement that the intimacy on offer is actually faked. However, these different meanings (and others that may not have occurred to us) might be understood, taken together, these various signifiers suggest that customers can expect an impressively athletic performance from the dancer they might reasonably expect to encounter, whose body again, they might reasonably expect will be young, fit and toned. At the same time, the connotations of the pole itself suggest that it would not be unreasonable for a customer to anticipate the possibility of sexual availability and intimacy through the implied associations of the phallic signification of the pole itself. The image, like those considered above, is highly prescriptive at the same time as being semiotically suggestive.
In these images and many others, dancers were positioned as products to be purchased. We found an interesting example of this on ‘Spirit’s website, which is set up almost like a computer game; the images are quite heavily modified, and there is a list of dancers’ vital statistics, matching them with their ideal man (again, conveying heteronormative assumptions). Their favourite item of clothing is also specified, contributing to their aesthetic portrayal as gaming avatars. All images of women on this particular website are faceless or silhouetted, so that the dancers are positioned as de-humanized characters. The connotation in terms of the exchange relationship is that the dancers are aesthetically configured ‘characters’ with whom customers can ‘play’ as they might in a game. The construction of lap dancing club websites in this way allows customers to view and develop preferences for particular women, or ‘types’ of dancers, who they might potentially interact with within the club setting. Yet at the same time the range and scope of these types is relatively narrow, limited to only a heteronormatively prescriptive selection of idealized physiques and characteristics. Arguably, taken together, this perpetuates both a narrow sense of what an idealized dancer looks and behaves like, as well as reinforcing a perceived sense of entitlement that customers could recreate within the club setting during the process of selecting dancers to buy dances from. This consumption expectation is shaped also by a second, related, theme that recurred in our analysis of the websites, namely the ‘promise’ of open-ended possibility attached to the service encounter.
Possibility
As discussed above, the websites entice customers by shaping perceptions of their possible encounter with a lap dancer in a number of specific ways including implied proximity and anticipatory intimacy, suggesting that dancers will discern customers’ specific desires and work out how to satisfy them within the terms of the exchange relationship.
Taking the first of these two themes – implied proximity – encoded into the websites were an apparent set of expectations shaping what customers might anticipate from their potential interactions with dancers. For example, the experience was described on ‘Spirit’s website as ‘an up close and personal experience you will never forget’, and on ‘Sinful’s website as ‘closer and more personal, up close and personal, very very personal’. The use of terms such as ‘closer’, ‘personal’, ‘up close’ and the repetition of ‘very’ for added emphasis all suggests that a sexualized, physical proximity is possible during the exchange between customers and dancers, a suggestion that plays an important role in shaping expectations surrounding interactions within the industry, and of the service encounter more specifically. This is because this type of language holds the implication that boundaries within, and the terms surrounding the exchange, are potentially fluid and open to negotiation during the encounter. As well as proffered sexual intimacy, these terms also connote a more inter-personal connection, suggesting a close bond between customer and dancer, echoing Campbell’s (2005 [1987]) observation that ‘pleasure is sought via emotional and not merely sensory stimulation’ (p. 77).
Along with the implied promise of intimacy in terms of physical proximity, ambiguity was further enhanced through the implied level of commitment the dancers would have to anticipating and satisfying their customers’ (sexual) needs. For example, the ‘All Things Nice’ website repeated the phrase ‘we will cater to all your needs’ which suggested there was no limit to the lengths that would be gone to, to please customers. The use of the term ‘catering’, derived from the Old French ‘acater’ (to buy), suggests a servile relationship within which appetites would be satisfied through the purchasing of not only the service encounter, but access to the dancer’s body as the object of consumption. Consequently, the use of language in this way provides customers with a particular set of expectations of the service that they can reasonably expect before they enter the club which combined with the kinds of images referred to above (e.g. of the dancer sucking a lollipop) to landscape customer expectations of the service encounter in a very particular way. Due to the nature of the industry, the responsibility to respond to and manage these expectations might in turn, be assumed to fall on the dancers. Dancers have to negotiate managers’ expectations that they will adhere to club regulations (and therefore keep within the terms specified by licencing agreements – Colosi, 2013; Hubbard and Colosi, 2012), but also give enough to customers to keep them spending money.
Our analysis suggested that the concept of the ‘VIP experience’ was an important semiotic mechanism, or aesthetic medium in Hancock’s (2005) terms, through which this negotiation was played out. All of the nine websites that we analysed promoted or made reference to VIP experiences, areas and/or dances. For example, on ‘The Den’s’ website the VIP lounge was advertised as providing ‘special treatment’, implying that a more exciting or intimate interaction might occur in this area. Overall, the implication of VIP experiences across the websites was similar – that paying extra for the VIP treatment meant that in some respect customers would get better service, where ‘better’ is taken to refer to more intimate and proximal. The connotations are that within these encounters, as Campbell (2005 [1987], emphasis added) describes it, the chance remains that ‘something new and exciting could happen at any time’ so that customers are enticed by this open ended possibility (p. 84).
This suggests to potential customers that, because they are paying more money, they can reasonably expect a ‘better’ experience. Crucially, the parameters of what ‘better’ might mean are not specified but are left open, leaving customers to develop their own expectations of what might be reasonably anticipated. Once again the wider implication of this is that the need to negotiate this ambiguity – the experiential ‘gap’ between the promise and its realization within the context of a commercial transaction – is likely to fall on the dancers, making it necessary for them to become highly skilled in doing so as a vital part of their work.
The overall landscaping of the exchange relationship therefore appears to be underpinned by a deliberately encoded ambiguity that, in turn, frames and maintains the exchange relationship as one of infinite possibility, in contrast to, but crucially alongside – as part of the same constellations of signifiers – highly prescriptive images of the bodies of lap dancers. Through the exclusion of specific details of the exchange relationship such as the rules of the club (for instance, ‘no touching’), the customer, or viewer of the website, is left to anticipate the terms of the exchange relationship by effectively filling in the gaps and building up their own image of what the encounter might involve, particularly that of the VIP experience. Encoding ambiguity into the implied terms of the exchange relationship means that customers can slot themselves into an open-ended series of connotations shaping what they might anticipate if/when they enter the lap dancing club. The deliberate ambiguity surrounding the exchange relationship that is present on the club websites contrasts with the stringent guidelines set out in licencing regulations (see Colosi, 2013; Hubbard and Colosi, 2012). Yet, the websites set up an enticement to touch through the presence of recurring suggestive and ambiguous signifiers combined with images of dancers’ sexual availability, despite formal no-touch rules being in place according to these licencing conditions.
This ambiguity was not portrayed simply through the language and imagery landscaping the exchange relationship, or through the depiction of dancers’ bodies, however, but also through the ways in which the settings of the lap dancing venues were depicted aesthetically, including by means of the use of sound to accompany website images and text. For example, the club décor that was portrayed on the websites added to the suggestion of infinite possibility. This possibility tended to be enhanced through portrayals of colour, texture and patterns in the décor that, when taken together, produced an atmospheric image of ambiguity and possibility. Enhancing these visual constellations (Hancock, 2005), clubs such as ‘Spirit’ also had rhythmic soundtracks on their websites, connoting pounding movements, accompanied by (seemingly pleasurable) female moans and groans.
The use of colours such as reds, golds, blacks and purples in the décor hold associations with opulence and indulgence as well as mystery and secrecy (Edwards-Wright, 2011; Morton, 2016); all of the colours, or combinations of them, were prevalent across the websites. Similarly, baroque style patterns, along with velvet drapes and images of chandeliers (in the case of ‘Champagne’, for instance) all combined to enhance a ‘boudoir’, bordello-style aesthetic, emphasizing lap dancing venues as simultaneously theatrical and glamourous spaces, but also located in the margins of society in some kind of (manufactured) bacchanalian underworld (Shteir, 2004).
Discussion: Landscaping anticipation and ‘promissory’ exchange
Gagliardi (1990) introduces the term ‘landscaping’ to describe the symbolically staged, multi-levelled backdrop compelling perceptions of, and behaviours within, a particular organizational context or setting. This concept highlights the importance of understanding the processes through which material organizational artefacts, such as bodies or in this case depictions of bodies on corporate websites, have the capacity to shape particular organizational interactions and associations. The findings discussed above show how, through a combination of prescription and possibility, specific expectations of the role of a lap dancer are encoded within the organizational landscape (Gagliardi, 1990) of the industry.
Specifically, the imagery used on the websites, as discussed above, constructs lap dancers as displaying a particularly narrow and heightened form of sexuality, one that conforms to a prescriptive body shape and size embedded in the landscape of the industry. As well as this narrow aesthetic prescription, the websites were underpinned by possibility or, rather, deliberate ambiguity, particularly surrounding the exchange relationship. The landscaping of both prescription and possibility has implications for how customers perceive the industry, and what they are reasonably entitled to within it. For example, the highly prescriptive, narrow forms of femininity portrayed on the websites provide customers with a clear picture of the types of women they can expect to interact with in the lap dancing club settings, as well as the types of interaction they might reasonably anticipate. As described above, this occurs largely through the repetition of particular images of dancers as well as the language used to describe the possible range of interactions customers might expect to have with them. In combination, these signify to customers that they might reasonably anticipate: (i) a particular aesthetic experience, (ii) an emotionally attentive connection, and (iii) a heightened level of sexual intimacy. If not an authentic experience of these phenomena, the customer might reasonably expect that, at the very least, the dancer will work to conceal the extent to which these forms of proximity – aesthetic, emotional and sexual – are perpetually elusive, as the interaction is (semiotically and simultaneously) loaded with ‘promise’ through a distinctive combination of prescription and possibility.
This means that, in contrast to this prescriptive form of perceived entitlement, exactly how dancers will accommodate customer desires or needs during the exchange relationship is left ambiguous, or with many potential possibilities. As discussed above, this creates an incomplete picture or fragmented story, to borrow from Campbell (2005 [1987]), for the customer. This is one that ‘he’ (for the range of phallic signifiers suggests that the customer is firmly positioned as male) is invited (enticed) to complete for himself in order to develop an anticipatory sense of what can be reasonably expected to take place within the terms of the exchange. In turn, this suggests that dancers have to negotiate these expectations against the organizational backdrop of licencing regulations, and in doing so, perform intensive levels of physical, emotional, sexualized and aesthetic labour. In Campbell’s (2005 [1987]) terms, this means that dancers have to ‘continually strive to close the gap between imagined and experienced pleasures’ (p. 90).
In this sense, our analysis adds to the growing body of literature concerned with symbolism and meaning making in organizations by illustrating some of the ways in which websites produce and reproduce cultural norms (Acord, 2010) and deliver symbolic messages (Ahn and Jacobs, 2018) that value particular ways of being, and consequently devalue or disavow others (Cutcher et al., 2017). It extends this research by demonstrating, using the lap dancing industry as a notable example, that the production and reproduction of such organizational values and norms has implications for how particular forms of labour come to be understood and performed. In this case, the deliberate ambiguity underpinning the lap dancing industry intensifies the work dancers are required to undertake in order to manage this organizational landscape of prescription and possibility.
The corporate landscape of the lap dancing industry produces and reproduces expectations for both the dancer, in so far as it constitutes how a dancer can/should ‘be’ within the industry, and for the customer, in terms of reasonable entitlement. These perceptions are intertwined such that the dancer is expected to meet the prescriptive demands landscaping the industry to become the ‘product’ that the potential customer is expecting. At the same time, the ambiguity of the incomplete picture set up by the websites means that the labour the dancers must engage in to negotiate this ambiguity intensifies, increasing both the demand for sexualized labour and the level of occupational risk for the dancers. The latter relates particularly to the tension between implied intimacy and ‘no touch’ rules within clubs and licencing regulations.
Conclusion
Our analysis has highlighted processes of prescription and possibility that, in combination, encode a powerful organization of anticipation into the lap dancing industry, and, in particular, the exchange relationship underpinning it. We might surmise that this organization of anticipation constitutes an important feature of the semiotic landscape shaping exchange relationships within other settings and sectors that are part of what Sanders (2008) calls the ‘shadow’ sex industry, and which, she has argued, is rapidly becoming a feature of the more ‘mainstream’ economy (see also Brents and Sanders, 2010).
On the one hand, websites (re)produce highly prescriptive images of feminine sexuality, defining a narrow range of body images that are commercially viable and available, within the industry. On the other hand, deliberate ambiguity is used to suggest endless possibility within the exchange relationships involved. Taken together, this blend of prescription and possibility contributes to the organization of anticipation underpinning the industry by framing expectations of what customers are reasonably entitled to during the transaction. This means that customers have a clear idea of the body images and personas of dancers they can expect to ‘consume’ in the club setting, but also a relatively open-ended understanding of what the exchange relationship might potentially involve. This highlights both the importance of virtual corporate spaces in landscaping interactive service exchanges, as well as the intensification resulting from connotations of ambiguity within these spaces, requiring service providers to reconcile anticipation and experience within the exchange relationship. We have considered the ways in which websites contribute to this intensification; further research is needed to understand more about how dancers and customers perceive and experience the combined – exploitative and objectifying – effects of this. As Campbell (2005 [1987]) and others have emphasized, unlimited desire and open-ended anticipation carries with it scope for a ‘practically limitless exploitation’ (Böhme, 2003: 81). As an industry premised upon what he calls ‘the generation of longing’ (Campbell, 2005 [1987]: 85), lap dancing is arguably a particularly important sector of work in which to understand, and address, this exploitative capacity.
As noted above, much of the lap dancing literature to date has emphasized the aesthetic labour and body work that dancers have to undertake in order to embody distilled forms of femininity, as well as the strategies dancers engage in order to negotiate boundaries within the industry. Our analysis contributes to this literature by emphasizing how the industry is landscaped in such a way that the terms of the exchange relationship are both prescriptive and encoded with possibility; customers are implicitly ‘on a promise’. This means that dancers must negotiate the implications of this ‘promise’ that serves to organize anticipation within the industry, and therefore their work.
This highlights the importance of corporate websites as virtual spaces that landscape expectations of exchange relationships. While our focus has been on the lap dancing industry, we have sought to contribute to the growing body of literature on semiotics and meaning making more generally, showing how more research is needed into understanding the organization of anticipation within intensively interactive and highly aestheticized service encounters premised upon ‘promissory’ terms of exchange.