One store, two fates: boundary work and service capital in China’s retail sector

Abstract

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.

Symbolic violence in embodying customer service work across the urban/rural divide

“…Although knowledge about the urban/rural societal divide is available elsewhere in the literature outside service work, we do not yet know how it informs the service work, specifically the customer–worker dynamics. To date, only a handful of studies by Otis and Wu have examined the role of urban/rural embodiment in customer service work (Otis, 2016; Otis & Wu, 2018a, 2018b). For example, Otis's (2016) research on saleswomen in cosmetics stores in Walmarts in China emphasizes the way young female saleswomen from a rural background reinvented their bodies as “legibly modern and urbanely feminine” (p. 161), by learning a “delicacy of touch” (p. 171) while applying products to the customers.…”

“…At the same time, this learned embodied femininity kept them in these low‐wage, low‐status jobs. Examining how norms of stratification in large society are reproduced in an organizational setting, Otis and Wu (2018a) documented how the urban/rural societal division is converted into organizational and sociocultural boundaries. They argue that service capital, which refers to “both visual appeal and familiarity with culturally dominant interactive protocols” (Otis & Wu, 2018a, p. 5), is a resource that benefits urban service workers over rural ones.…”

“…Examining how norms of stratification in large society are reproduced in an organizational setting, Otis and Wu (2018a) documented how the urban/rural societal division is converted into organizational and sociocultural boundaries. They argue that service capital, which refers to “both visual appeal and familiarity with culturally dominant interactive protocols” (Otis & Wu, 2018a, p. 5), is a resource that benefits urban service workers over rural ones. Rural migrant workers' “bodies, accent, and styles of discourse revealed their origins” (Otis & Wu, 2018a, p. 14), which they struggled to conceal.…”

“…The urban/rural divide is, however, an important dimension of embodied customer service work for both theoretical and empirical reasons. It has been argued that rural forms of embodiment are not in line with the aesthetic norms of customer‐facing service work reflecting an urban middle‐class habitus (Otis & Wu, 2018a). This implies that the habitus which individuals develop in a rural background as opposed to an urban one (Funnell, 2008; Yan, 2008) endows them with less embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) expendable in service work, thus reproducing existing class cleavages between the city and the countryside.…”

“…Despite the wealth of insights generated on service work and its relation to multiple dimensions of embodiment, the service work literature has only just begun to address the urban/rural as an axis structuring the embodiment of service work in ways that largely reproduce existing social inequalities (e.g., Otis & Wu, 2018a, 2018b). The urban/rural divide is, however, an important dimension of embodied customer service work for both theoretical and empirical reasons.…”