In this article, we explore the ways in which a divided and segmented migrant labor force is assembled to serve guests in a London hotel. We draw on previous studies of hotel work, as well as on cultural analyses of the ways in which employers and managers use stereotypical assumptions about the embodied attributes of workers to name workers as suitable for particular types of labor. We argue that a dual process of interpellation operates within service‐sector workplaces that is reinforced and resisted in daily social practices and relationships between managers, workers, and guests in a hotel. The article, which draws on a case study of employment practices in a large London hotel, looks in detail at the micropolitics of everyday working lives, the representation of workers of different nationalities, and the performance of service work.

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In this paper, I build on Paul Cloke's (2002) provocative argument about the necessity of developing an ethical stance in human geography. I do this, however, through an assessment of the implications of a number of changes in the nature of the labour market in Great Britain, in the assumptions that lie behind welfare provision under New Labour and in the position of women and men in Britainrather than through an emphasis on the Christian values that infused Cloke's argument. I show how the dominance of an individualistic ethos pervades both the labour market and the welfare state, undermining notions of collective welfare and an ethic of care, within the wider context of the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology in global as well as national politics. If an ethic of care is to be (re)instituted, it will demand wide-reaching changes in the ways in which organizations and institutions operate at a range of spatial scales as well as new sets of responsibilities towards co-workers, members of households and the wider public. I conclude by considering some of the implications of such an ethic for everyday practices within the academy.

This paper raises questions — rather than providing answers — about the theorization of intersectionality: the complex inequalities that result from connections between gender, class, ethnicity and other dimensions of identity in the making of subjects. I draw on Ong's work on cultural citizenship and notions of subjectification from Foucault and Butler to think through feminist theorizations of intersectionality and the philosophical status of different approaches to complexity and difference. I also address methodological issues. While this is not primarily an empirical paper, I use the example of the labour market position of recent migrants into the UK as an examplar of intersectionality at work.

The aim of this article is to assess the connections between the continued expansion of forms of insecure work and the impact of rising numbers of economic migrants employed in UK labour markets. It shows how competition between foreign-born workers for jobs in the UK is currently being recast by changes in the jobs available, in forms of precarious labour market attachment and by new patterns of migration into the UK since EU expansion in 2004. The article documents the ways in which migrants with different sets of social characteristics (nationality, gender and skin colour) and different sets of legal entitlements (legal citizenship, EU membership and entitlement to residence) are differentially placed in their competition for some of the poorest jobs in the British economy, drawing on an empirical study of the migrant divisions of labour emerging in two significant sectors in the service industries. It concludes by arguing that new and deeper divisions are emerging between foreign-born workers in the UK. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation(c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.