Retail, the service worker and the polity: attaching labour and consumption

Abstract

This article argues for viewing debates about consumption – here specifically focused on retail spaces – as attachments to fantasies about participation. It uses the figure of the service worker as index, tracking how she appears and disappears at different historical moments in South African public discussions on consumption. Discussing four moments of debate where the service worker is represented in relation to commitments to consumption, the article argues that the figure stands in (variously) for what is at stake in claims to service and retail spaces. Paying attention to the shifting and sometimes shadowy figure of this worker in public debate, we can begin to comment on the longer history of ambivalence toward consumption, linked to labour, as well as recent triumphant claims to access to the market as sphere of democracy, for instance, in Wal-Mart's entry to South Africa.