Hourly beauty

Abstract

Beauty’s association with leisure and ease is at odds with notions of work, which requires effort and toil. This chapter explores these tensions as they unfold in service work in China. It uses commodity chain analysis to analyze the linkages between the beauty valued in labor markets and the labor generating beauty. These linkages can be understood as market-embodied labor, in which workers’ bodies are aligned with customer. This kind of labor is guided by body rules, aesthetic norms used in the workplace to guide the presentation of workers’ bodies. These norms become explicit when expectations for presentation are novel to workers. In contrast with the US service workplace, where workers tend to originate from the same class background as customers, in China it is common for the working-class and rural workers to serve middle- and upper-class customers. In this case, it becomes incumbent upon workers to conform to the body rules prevalent among customers. The chapter examines the labor processes involved in learning and deploying new body rules in the cosmetics department of Walmart retail store in China.