Producing the superior self

Abstract

In the luxury hotel, unequal entitlements between workers and guests - both to human attention and labor and to social and material resources generally - are prominent. Participant observation in two hotels shows that one of the myriad ways interactive workers respond to their subordinate position is to establish themselves as superior to others. They use comparative strategies of self to situate themselves as privileged on a range of symbolic hierarchies, including those of competence, authority, status, need, morality, intelligence, and cultural capital. Comparative ethnographic data on these judgments shows that they are not fixed categories in people’s heads but rather contradictory, context-dependent orientations. The article further argues that even as they establish workers as symbolically superior, these strategies also constitute some people as legitimately entitled to workers’ labor, thereby normalizing inequality between workers and guests.