The “Right” Person for the Job: Exploring the Aesthetics Of Labor Within the Events Industry

Abstract

The events industry is an underresearched section of the service sector and can be usefully understood as a "customer-orientated bureaucracy" (Korczynski, 2002). The dual, and often contradictory, logics of customer orientation and bureaucratization coexist and place heavy demands on employees. The concept of aesthetic labor, first conceived by Warhurst, Nickson, Witz, and Cullen (2000), has been usefully applied to recruitment processes in other parts of the service sector, notably hospitality and retail, in order to understand better the complex and embodied demands required of employees in contemporary service organizations. This article presents an exploratory study into the recruitment process in the events industry in the UK. Through an analysis of online event management job advertisements, the implicit embodied attributes required of successful candidates are explored, and the underlying gendered and class-based assumptions of these corporeal dispositions are considered.

Confident, focused and connected: the importance of mentoring for women’s career development in the events industry

“…The events industry is still affected by gender inequality, with women often struggling to make it to senior leadership positions in a sector characterised by long hours and frequent travel (Dashper, 2013). The mentoring programme discussed in this paper calls explicit attention to this, and has provoked widespread debate in industry circles and media.…”

“…Mentoring programmes may empower individual women, but more deeprooted problems associated with the nature of work in the industry remain unchallenged. Many roles in the events industry are not family-friendly, requiring long and inflexible hours and frequent travel (Dashper, 2013). Expectations about men's and women's roles within and beyond the workplace continue to limit what individuals can achieve when trying to balance work and family, or in relation to the traits and behaviours of 'good' leadership (Heilman, 2001;Friedman, 2015).…”

“…A glass ceiling persists within the industry, as it does across the economy more broadly, and this has become a popular topic of discussion in industry press, at conferences and at meetings. A variety of reasons have been put forward to try to explain this persistent gender imbalance, ranging from issues with maternity and childcare, to long and inflexible working patterns, shortage of female role models, and lack of ambition on behalf of women in the events industry (see Meetpie, 2012;Dashper, 2013;Association of Women in Events, 2015). Although some (usually men) suggest that there are no gender issues in the industry and that ' [t]here are plenty of opportunities out there for women who want them' (Clayton, 2016), there is broad recognition that there is some gender inequality in the sector and that this is undesirablefor women and for the events industry more broadly.…”

Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

“…Despite an apparent focus on feminized traits such as communication, the events industry is dominated by invisible masculine discourses that stress individualism, rationality and calculable outcomes (such as sales figures) (Benschop, ). The ideal worker is assertive, dynamic and committed to the job, involving long unpredictable hours and frequent travel; the ideal worker is based on implicit masculine norms (Dashper, ). Despite female numerical dominance, men dominate senior management and board‐level positions, illustrating the persistence of the glass ceiling within the events industry.…”

The Future of Events will be Hybrid (Tim Brown)

“…However, "until … structural, cultural, social and economic barriers are dismantled, then it is unlikely that gender discrimination will disappear completely from the events industry." (Dashper, 2018, p.148) Many of these barriers are generic but, within events, not all roles are family-friendly because of long and inflexible hours and frequent travel (Dashper, 2013).…”