Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three formal and informal service sectors in Beijing and Kunming, this book explores the ways in which the service economy in post-Mao China produces new forms of gender and class inequality. This new social inequality is expressed and materialized through the attention, care, respect and deference that the emergent class of service workers provides to new affluent consumers. Service labour, the book argues, not only is conducive to profits in the consumer economy, but also fundamentally transforms women's social status in contemporary China.
The author Eileen Otis conducted more than a year of participant observation in three field sites: an international five-star hotel in Beijing, a luxury tourist hotel in Kunming, and the informal service sector in Kunming and Beijing. The composition of service workers and clientele vary in these three sectors. While the first and second sector respectively caters to Western businessmen and affluent Chinese entrepreneurs, the third one serves local urbanites using young female migrants from rural areas.
Otis contrasts the relationship between femininity and service work in China with that in early America. As she contends, while American service workers imported and transplanted their emotional experiences in the family to the workplace, Chinese women workers do not. Rather, their service work necessitates physical and social transformations through their service employers and customers to appeal to customers' class, status expectations and gender expectations.
In the bulk of the book (from chapter two to chapter four), Otis differentiates and theorizes three different kinds of interactive labour practices in each of her field sites as “virtual personalism,” “virtuous professionalism,” and “aspirational urbanism.” In the first service sector, workers are trained to walk in a delicate way, make eye contact, smile, and be well-groomed. In the second service sector, workers embrace and cite professional protocols to fight against assumptions of backwardness and sex work by customers and managers. In the third service sector, workers engage in self-discipline and docility in an attempt to efface rural origins. Each of these practices, Otis argues, captures the modes of control specific to each service place that not only dictate workers' enactment of gender but also exerts a profound impact on workers' bodies and experiences of class and status.
Otis eschews previous researchers' emphasis on “emotional economy” as central in service work and argues that emotion is “encompassed by a set of interactive gestures and exchanges that are created and expressed on the body” (p. 8). Foregrounding the body instead of emotion, Otis argues that economic inequalities between workers and customers are materialized and inscribed in “experiential and interactive inequalities” (p. 8), anchored in the body through different modes of control by service employers in different service places.
This intersection between the body and the market is termed by Otis as “market-embodied labor” (p. 9). China's transition from industrial economy to service economy, Otis argues, has formed a new class of women service workers who embody and exhibit newfound femininity and class that they have never experienced or harboured before. In the process, the body becomes the site for “labor control, profit, and interaction in service work” (p. 11) as women workers' bodies are structured and regulated in their working interactions with customers to convey deference and femininity.
This book could be improved by more innovative arguments about, and analysis of, the rural migrant workers and client–worker dynamics in the three sectors. The chapter on rural migrant workers repeats and replicates arguments that have already been made numerous times by a wide array of researchers who work on migration and women in China. The ethnographic chapters of the book mainly delineate manager–worker relationship, leaving out stories about the clients and nuances of client–worker interactions, which is crucial in understanding the ways in which inequality is played out in lived experiences.
That reservation notwithstanding, this book should be welcomed by scholars who have an interest in gender, labour, and China studies.
