ABSTRACT
In 2007 the service sector became the largest employer worldwide (International Labour Organization 2007). Services are now an employment mainstay not only in advanced economies but also in many developing countries around the globe. Despite the regional and international proliferation of services, cultural diversity has thus far largely been neglected in the analysis of interactive service labor. The expansion of services across regions and cultural domains, as well as the export of services from Western nations, reveals a seemingly obvious yet frequently overlooked fact: service labor requires workers to be culturally competent. A central component of most service labor is interaction between a worker and a client or customer. This interaction requires that workers recognize and manipulate culturally dominant forms of civility and etiquette. In common parlance, we often restrict our use of “culture workers” to the cultural elite-artists, musicians, actors, and writers. Yet service workers are also culture workers. The inattention to cultural processes in service has led to a blind spot in scholarship,
which overlooks culturally variegated norms of interaction and expectations for social exchange that are the basic substance of service interactions. By assuming these norms to be universal, scholarship not only misses variation in the substance of service interactions but also inadequately grasps processes of cultural diffusion. For example, scant attention is paid to ways in which Western transnational service retailers serve as conduits of cultural globalization by introducing new standards of interaction based upon culturally specific norms of civility to new domains. And as locally operated services proliferate, employers adopt repertories from international firms because they are proxies for reliability, credibility, and trust. These repertories necessarily become absorbed into existing organizational and interactive practices. Such cultural transactions are rarely addressed in the service work literature. In this essay I explain why culture is left out of studies of service and why culture matters for service labor. I show how we can bring culture into our understanding of service work without abandoning the search for patterns and explanations, even as a cultural analysis unveils a bewildering array of practices, norms, and beliefs. The essay proceeds as follows. I first assess the utility and limits of existing frameworks
for the study of interactive service work across diverse cultural settings, reviewing central
concepts in the study of interactive service. These concepts tend to illuminate generic organizational dynamics without regard to cultural variation across space and time. In particular, I explore three bedrock assumptions in the sociology of service that present limitations to extending our analytic reach to new domains of culture. The notions of separate spheres, method acting, and metaphors of performance that inform prevailing theories of service work limit the applicability of these concepts across cultural arenas. Finally, I address the problem of cultural diversity. Once we open the Pandora’s box of culture and find endless cultural variety, are we left to merely inventory the myriad cultural practices observed in service labor? How are we to appreciate patterns and explain differences in service labor practices? I suggest two heuristic concepts that can help make comparative sense of cultural heterogeneity within interactive service laborembeddedness and consumer markets. These concepts promise to bring order to an otherwise bewildering array of cultural norms practices, meanings, and beliefs that unfold in the service labor. Data on service work in China illustrates these ideas.
