Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty

Abstract

Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.

‘I put pressure on myself to keep that body’: ‘Health’-related body work, masculinities and embodied identity

“…A range of sociological work has highlighted the complex, and contradictory and problematic relationship between the idealisation of health as an 'image' and 'ideal' gendered appearances (Lupton, 1995;Featherstone, 2010;Moore, 2010;Leahy, 2014;Mears, 2014). Studies of women's beauty practices (Bartky, 1990;Gimlin, 2002;Bordo, 2003) and health and fitness practices (Duncan, 1994;Markula, 1995;Lloyd, 1996;Hargreaves and Vertinsky, 2007;Dworkin and Wachs, 2009;Allen-Collinson, 2011) are prominent in feminist sociology, sociology of the body and physical cultural studies of how the female body is implicated in practices of regulating and modifying appearance.…”

Women's self‐presentation and the transition from classroom to workplace

“…Bodily or aesthetic capital has been identified to enable the acquisition of career progression and further capital within numerous professions and workplaces including: air stewards, freelance workers, academia, service workers, law firms, banking and creative industries (Adamson & Salmenniemi, ; Anderson et al, ; Brown, ; Elias et al, ; Entwistle, ; Haynes, ; Mears, ; Ren, ). The definition of what a profession is is somewhat contested (Muzio & Tomlinson, ) but predominantly (particularly within a British context) it is used to refer to established occupations (usually holding high cultural status) that are seen as knowledge gatekeepers, requiring a specific qualification and which, through institutionalization, are able to regulate themselves and their field of practice (Adams, ; Larson, ; Muzio, Ackroyd, & Chanlat, ; Muzio & Kirkpatrick, ; Muzio & Tomlinson, ).…”

“…Attempts to fit into a ‘correct' or preferred organizational image require appearance modification, the amount significantly impacted by an individual's bodily materiality (Haynes, ). This is aesthetic labour, specifically ‘work in which individuals are compensated, indirectly or directly, for their own body's look or effect' (Mears, , p. 1332). Aesthetic labour requires the ongoing production of the self, with body maintenance enduring beyond the working day and should be understood as an embodied practice (Elias et al, ; Entwistle, ).…”

“…Appearance and the physical body have received much attention and interest in popular culture and academia alike. A portion of this scholarship considers the relationship between gender, appearance and identity in the workplace (Acker, ; Elias, Gill, & Scharff, ; Haynes, ; Hughes, ; Mears, ; Warhurst & Nickson, ). Research shows the significance of the relationship between organizations and appearance for women's experience and progression in the workplace and their self‐presentation (Haynes, ; Mavin & Grandy, ).…”

The Emotional Labor of Surveillance: Evidence from the Fast Fashion Retail Industry

“…The above studies remain the exception rather than the rule, however. Surprisingly few scholars have traced how the 'wide and deep' reach of big data surveillance-which "includes a broader swath of people and can follow any single individual across a greater range of institutional settings" (Brayne, 2017: 979 (Thompson, 2017), front-line workers are expected to engage in some form of interactive, though largely de-skilled service work, pushing sales and coupons onto customers (Gruys, 2012;Ikeler, 2016a;Mears, 2014;Pettinger, 2004;Williams, 2006;Williams and Connell, 2010). Yet as I found, the primary duty sales associates in fast fashion is not to heavily interact with customers, but to instead focus on receiving, organizing and re-organizing a constant and ever-changing flow of stuff.…”