Affective labour and class distinction in the night-time economy

Abstract

This article contributes to recent debates about the relationship between affective labour and class by exploring the classed distinctions enacted through affective labour in the urban night-time economy. Bringing theories of affective labour into a dialogue with Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the article explores the affective and symbolic dynamics of hospitality labour in a gentrified inner-urban neighbourhood of Melbourne, Australia. It shows how the practice of hospitality labour enacts classed distinctions and tensions emerging from the gentrification of inner-urban areas, and how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of class contribute to the valorisation of affect in hospitality venues. The valorisation of affect are processes in which the value attributed to an atmosphere or consumption experience is based on the forms of distinction practised within the venue, enacted in aesthetics, tastes and modes of embodiment. The article also shows how practices of class distinction – both ‘punching up’ and ‘managing down’ – are connected to the gendered politics of service work in the way that workers manage the threat of violence or sexual harassment in venues. In general, the article shows how the classed dynamics of gentrification are enacted in affective economies, and therefore how Bourdieusian analysis of class can be usefully deployed in theoretical debates about affective labour.

The coloniality of labor: Migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in an Australian deindustrializing city

“…That is, it reinforces a sense of self in which his Black African identity plays a central role in how he navigates the labor market. This notion supports previous work, which has found that jobs like the one Abul is searching for are advertised informally (Threadgold et al., 2021). That is workers get these jobs through introductions and by positioning themselves as the right worker to employers.…”

COVID-19, young people and the futures of work: Rethinking global grammars of enterprise

“…Affective labour, in this sense, is ‘embodied, involving aesthetic presentations, styles of bodily comportment, and embodied interactions’. Affective labour produces ‘things’ and ‘value’, that can also be characterised in terms of ‘fun, pleasure, conviviality or “atmosphere”’ ( Farrugia et al, 2018 , p. 275; see also Threadgold et al, 2021 ).…”

“… 2. See, also, a number of other recent contributions to this journal, including Farrugia (2018) and Threadgold et al (2021) . …”

Hospitality work and the sociality of affective labour

“…Feminist critics have suggested that autonomist approaches to affective labour collapse vastly diverse subjectivities and modes of labour into the concept of the ‘multitude’ defined by precarity as a general condition of labour (Gill & Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2011). There is an emerging literature which engages with these critiques, and has begun to theorise the relationship between affective labour and class distinction (Threadgold et al, 2021), gender and sexual harassment (Coffey et al, 2018), ethnic divisions in the care industry (Batnitzky & McDowell, 2009), race and indigeneity in the hotel and beauty industries (Constable, 2016; Kikon and Karlsson, 2009; Parreñas et al, 2016), and the quality of ‘youthfulness’ as an affect that circulates to attribute value to service interactions and labouring subjectivities in the service economy and culture industries (Farrugia, 2018). This literature begins with the longstanding premise that labour forces are always shaped through hierarchies of embodied difference (Adkins, 1995), and applies this to the way that differently positioned subjects are mobilised and valorised in affective labour.…”

“…The way that this takes place reveals the significance of hierarchical and embodied divisions within the labour force that are mobilised in working practices. There is an emerging literature which studies class (Threadgold et al, 2021), gender (Coffey et al, 2018; Dowling, 2007), ethnicity (Kikon & Karlsson, 2009) and youthfulness (Farrugia, 2018) as embodied attributes that are mobilised within the disciplinary requirements of affective labour in different industries. The work of Coffey et al (2018) in Australia’s bar industry describes the gendered labour involved in maintaining an atmosphere of enjoyment within a venue, in which performing ‘luminous’ femininity is intertwined with the constant threat of sexual harassment and bodily interference for young women.…”