Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (review)

What do clients expect for a $3,000-per-night stay at a luxury hotel? How do hotel workers strive to fulfill or subvert these expectations? What kind of social relations are forged and reproduced in their interactions? Through participant observation in jobs ranging from concierge, to valet, to room cleaner and turndown attendant, Rachel Sherman achieves an intimate ethnographic portrait of how class entitlement and inequality are normalized in the consumption and provision of luxury services.

Sherman argues that the late 20^th century economic shift from the "shop floor" to the "service theater" requires new approaches to studying labor processes and class relations. While engaging with scholars of emotional labor and interactive service work, Sherman challenges and expands their arguments through several important theoretical interventions. First, she aims to forge clearer linkages between everyday service interactions and larger structures of class inequality, such as extreme income disparities and cultural acceptance of ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege. Second, rather than assuming antagonism, subordination and struggle among workers, managers and clients, she examines multiple possible negotiations of hierarchical relations, including unexpected alliances and reciprocity.

Two main concepts — consent and normalization — drive Sherman's analysis. Rather than adhering to the binary tension of control vs. resistance, Class Acts draws on Michael Burowoy's concept of "consent" to emphasize multiple forms of worker agency. Consent highlights workers' investment in their skilled labor and its outcomes. At the same time, workers can withdraw their consent and refuse to perform various aspects of their work. Sherman's second concept of normalization reveals how unequal privilege is constituted and legitimated. Even though workers complain about customers' demands and customers themselves may feel ill at ease with their entitlements, these feelings are framed in individual terms and do not coalesce into collective awareness or action. The research design compares the five-star, corporately managed "Luxury Garden" and the smaller, independently-owned "Royal Garden," and draws upon an impressive number of hours logged as an employee as well as a participant observer. The Appendix includes a rich and revealing discussion of the methodological and ethical issues involved in juggling roles as worker and researcher, as well as friend and confidante.

The main critique I have of the research design is its focus on two nonunion hotels, as opposed to a comparison of unionized and nonunionized sites. This seems an unfortunate omission as unionization is certainly a key structural factor influencing class identities, mobilization and inequality in hotel work. Sherman does note that many of the benefits that workers at these two hotels enjoyed stemmed from the fact that the hotel industry in the city in which they operate is largely unionized. I would like to know why then these two sites remain non-unionized and how nonunionization shapes the labor relations and practices that she examines. Were attempts made to organize them? How would processes that Sherman documents — such as empathy, reciprocity and game playing for material and psychological rewards — support or discourage organizing?

While Sherman's study integrates scholarship of interactive service work with analyses of class inequality, it could use a more sustained analysis regarding intersections of gender, race and immigration with class, especially as immigrants and women of color comprise a significant part of the labor force in the hotel industry. The book does offer insights about customers' attitudes toward workers of different racial backgrounds, but does not fully explore other dynamics such as how managerial practices, hierarchies between workers and labor practices themselves are racialized and gendered as well as classed. For example, Sherman discusses how luxury hotels aim for a standard of service "better than your mother." Given that hotel work incorporates cleaning, caring, serving of food and other work traditionally performed by women, it would be useful to include more data and theorizing about how men and women perform this work differently and how men and women customers expect different kinds of service. Instead, Class Acts criticizes the literature...