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.

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.

An increasing number of low-status consumer service jobs in the UK are undertaken by economic migrants, who are often recruited through the aegis of employment agencies. This article explores the use of migrant agency workers by a London hotel and a hospital, looking at the ways in which such a labour force is recruited and assembled in parts of the service sector in Greater London. It argues that even in the most locally-based of service-sector jobs, typically involving face to face interactions, new sets of transnational connections are producing a globalized labour force. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.

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The Economic and Social Research Council, the body which funds much social science in the UK, recently imposed on UK social science a system of research ethics governance already well established in other areas of research and in much of the rest of the developed world. This system requires that research involving human subjects receive prior ethical approval from a committee made up of, typically, multidisciplinary researchers and lay people. Our aim in this paper is to prompt debate about the purpose and practice of such an anticipatory ethical review. We begin by describing the rich and varied ethical and political debates ongoing in human geography. We argue that these are, at best, ignored and, at worst, threatened by this system of ethical review by committee. We describe the emergence of these formal mechanisms of research governance and important differences between the ethical contexts, history, and demands of research in the medical and social sciences. The paper draws on empirical research investigating National Health Service (NHS) research ethics committees to propose three salutary lessons geographers would do well to consider from experience elsewhere with ethical review. We argue that in review by committee deliberations extend beyond the ethical to include the methodological, that the system is a self-perpetuating and increasingly rule-bound mechanism, and that despite a rhetoric of accountability it is a system as obscure to outsiders as professional ethics.

Mechanical percussion and inversion is a safe and effective treatment option for residual lower caliceal fragments 3 months after shock wave lithotripsy. Nearly 50% of patients become stone-free, and stone burden is decreased by 50% in the remainder.

This article responds to a call from Kerfoot and Korczynski to investigate the gendering of service sector employment. As a characteristic of many post-industrial economies in the global North is the growing significance of migrant workers, this article investigates the impact of migration for work on the gendering of service work. Taking the embodied and emotional labour of workers to be fundamental to service work, it describes how these are refracted and produced through migration. The article draws on 60 interviews with workers in a west London hotel who were born abroad and the human resources staff and managers who are responsible for the recruitment and promotion of the workforce. We argue that migration is an important process in the construction of the contemporary workforce in post-industrial service economies and that migration status should be understood as intersecting with gender in the production of a gendered performance at work.