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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.”

Building on research that analyzes how social relations and networks ( guanxi) shape the Chinese market, this article asks a less-studied question: How is the market changing guanxi? The authors trace the transformation of guanxi from communal, kin-based ties to a cultural metaphor with which diverse individuals build flexible social relationships in late-socialist China. As a “generalized particularism,” this cultural metaphor provides something analogous to the culture of civility in Western societies. The authors discuss the political potential of guanxi in terms of its dual tendency toward the “publicization” and “privatization” of power. The development of guanxi civility suggests the diverse cultural origins of civility and serves as a reminder of the particularistic roots in the universalistic assumption of Western civility.

How do collective identities gain salience in the workplace? How are new "capitals" created in the process? To answer these question, this study examines the confrontation of two distinctly positioned socioeconomic groups that for the first time labor as co-workers in urban China, in a new type of workspace; the modern retail store. One group is the urban service proletariat, who struggle to earn a living in precarious service jobs but have legal entitlement to urban residence and urban services. The other group is migrant employees who, as part of the largest migration in human history, join a tide of workers who originally departed their rural villages in the 1980s to work in foreign-invested factories on China's southeast coast, as well as in urban constructionl. These early migrants were largely sequestered from urbanites and excluded from permanent legal residence. Drawing on data from eleven weeks of ethnographic research in a retail work setting, we examine the process through which the spatial boundaries that once separated urbanites and rural migrants become socio-cultural boundaries. The process involves three conversion mechanisms: administratively determined division of jobs, extra-organizational collective identities that some workers draw on to valorize their labor, and third party (customer) preferences. We link these micro-level dynamics to state institutions and discourses. We show that workplace culture follows the contours of boundary formation, an organizational process in which workers collectively compete for status and material resources by converting their extramural identity to workplace recognition. These conversions produce "service capital" a resource that benefits urban workers. Through this boundary work, job tasks take on meaning beyond their bureaucratic designation, and job-based identities gain meaning in everyday life that become the cultural skin in which workers live.

In her best-selling book, Beautiful Faces Grow Rice (Meili liandan zhang dami), author Lu Junqing articulated an emergent aesthetic and economic logic: women's pursuit of beauty is the most certain means of achieving career success. In an industry that is rapidly growing, millions of women flock to retail beauty counters where they consult with cosmetics sales agents about how to best enhance their appearance so as to ensure their place in the labor market. This research examines the workers of China's beauty economy through a case study of rural migrant cosmetics sales representatives in an outlet of a major global retailer. The author asks, how are the new “body rules” generated by the beauty economy used to organize and discipline labor in the workplace? Body rules are norms for the public presentation of different types of bodies. Retail cosmetics employers recruit bodies to become models for customer emulation, vehicles of display, and vessels of communication. Employers seek to alter and control this physical capacity. The author argues that as retail employers offer women workers opportunities to master new body rules for femininity, these women are less apt to question the low-wage and insecure conditions under which they labor.