Service Labor and Symbolic Power

Abstract

The subfield that is the sociology of service labor continues to generate vibrant internal dialogue. It was the author’s original intent to push forward the frontier of theory within this field, by performing an ethnography of service work in a non-American context (that of post-apartheid South Africa). Once in the field, however, he found himself moving backward as he was forced to problematize basic assumptions concerning the very category of service. In brief, the author discovered that managers in a competitive tourism industry refused to label their employees’ interactive labor as “service,” whereas workers themselves actively advocated for such a designation. To document the interplay between material and symbolic politics of production, the author turned to the work of Pierre Bourdieu—especially his theory of political representation and the accompanying concept of nomination struggles.