Friday, September 23rd, 2011 Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China

Description

In the last two decades China’s urban centers have been a site of a consumer revolution that has sparked an urban occupational transformation creating a new service worker class. The creation of a service class has transformed women’s social status by segregating them into work that is low-wage, low-status, and temporary. This nascent consumer service economy is therefore an important mechanism of inequality in China. Drawing upon ethnographic data from two formal-sector international hotels, one in each of two cities, as well as service outlets in the informal sector, I examine the organizational processes through which China’s new women service workers transform economic inequalities into interactive hierarchies (asymmetries of care, deference, attention and effort) in different service workplaces. I find three patterns of labor practice, each of which distinctively draws on women’s bodies as symbols that resonate with the social class and gender aspirations of different types of clients. I explain diverse labor patterns by analyzing their links to local consumer markets, their embeddedness in institutional legacies, and the habits and dispositions workers carry into the workplace.

Eileen Otis is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. She held an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Davis and also holds an MA in East Asian Studies from UC Santa Barbara, as well as a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Before moving to the University of Oregon, she worked as an Assistant Professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook (between 2004 and 2008).