Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

chauffeured limousine pickups, customized meals, onboard massages, and “in-flight beauty therapists.”⁷ Some retail employees, such as those at the Dunhill store in Manhattan, were required to undergo butler training to improve their interactions with clients.⁸ Wealthy people were increasingly hiring servants to care for their enormous houses, and training programs for these servants were expanding.⁹

      After the bubble burst, around 2001, luxury consumption declined somewhat; but it rebounded quickly, thanks to high-end customers, who are often considered “recession proof.” (After 9/11, for example, demand for chartered jets surged 40 percent, as wealthy people tried to avoid travel hassles.)¹⁰ As of 2005, the sector has made its comeback. Spending on jewelry, private airplanes, and boats constituted 1.07 percent of consumer spending in the first quarter of 2004 versus .71 percent a decade earlier. Luxury stocks, such as those in Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom department stores, were up.¹¹ In the all-important Christmas retail season of 2004, luxury spending increased, while lower-end retailers saw a drop in revenues.¹² “Mass luxury” has been on the rise as well.¹³

      Luxury is omnipresent in the media and popular culture. Reality television places “ordinary” people in Palm Beach mansions and European chateaux to be waited on as they vie for the million-dollar prize or the spouse of their dreams.¹⁴ The media relentlessly detail luxury consumption among celebrities; a 2005 photo in People magazine, for example, shows tennis champ Serena Williams soaking in a five-thousand-dollar bath, consisting of a thousand bottles of Evian water, in the penthouse at the Hotel Victor in Miami.¹⁵ The New York Times “Styles” section regularly features luxury services and products ranging from six-thousand-dollar haircuts, seventeen-thousand-dollar diamond-encrusted flip-flops, and sixteen-hundred-dollar pink sapphire tennis bracelets for toddlers, to at-home “tuck-in services” for adults (including a facial, a massage, crystal healing, and a bath) for only a thousand dollars.¹⁶ The media also revel in stories of astronomical CEO compensation and spending; most famous, perhaps, is former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, who spent over two million dollars (half of which apparently belonged to his company) on his wife's birthday party in Sardinia, as well as six thousand dollars on a gold-threaded shower curtain. Wealthy party-givers pay millions for bigname acts to entertain at their birthday parties and their daughters’ bat mitzvahs.¹⁷ Best-selling novels of this period, such as The Nanny Diaries (the story of a young nanny's trials working for an overly entitled Upper East Side mother) and The Devil Wears Prada (the story of a young personal assistant's trials working for an overly entitled female magazine editor), satirize the entitlement of rich people and their mistreatment of assistants and servants.¹⁸

      The rise of luxury consumption and production not only feeds a public preoccupation with the lifestyles of the rich and famous but also illuminates key features of what is often called the “new” U.S. economy. First, the new economy is a global one. Sites of luxury service are frequently what Manuel Castells calls “nodes” in the global “space of flows”—local places crisscrossed by movements of people and capital.¹⁹ Luxury clients, purchasing services in London or Beijing, are often the mobile corporate executives who make the global economy run. Hotels and restaurants are located in the growing range of “producer services,” which are used by high-end professionals but create nonprofessional and often low-paying jobs in the service sector.²⁰ At the same time, workers in hotels, restaurants, and retail are frequently immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Luxury service companies are also often transnational, belonging to international chains and conglomerates that offer services worldwide.

      Second, the new economy is a service economy. Like more than 85 percent of workers in the United States, luxury service workers (and usually consumers too) are employed in the service sector.²¹ Many of these workers provide face-to-face, or “interactive,” service, in which the product consists, to varying extents, of the interaction between workers and customers.²² In contrast to “old economy” manufacturing jobs, in which the people who produced the products did not personally encounter the people who bought these products, the selfhoods of both worker and client come into play in these interactions. In luxury settings in particular, this interactive product is more than “service with a smile”; it is, rather, recognition of the customer's limitless entitlement to the worker's individualizing attention and effort.

      Finally, the new economy is a deeply unequal one. It has created the conditions for the rise of luxury consumption by fostering higher incomes among the wealthy in what has been called the “new Gilded Age.”²³ It is these astronomical incomes that allow consumers of luxury service to spend hundreds of dollars on lunch at five-star restaurants or on designer clothes at exclusive boutiques. High levels of income inequality are reflected in the relations between workers and clients in luxury sites, where workers can rarely, if ever, afford to purchase the services they produce.²⁴ Furthermore, in these sites, people who occupy increasingly distant positions in “social space” come together in “physical space.”²⁵ The “top 1 percent,” as one luxury manager often put it, stand face to face with the members of the middle and working classes.

      Luxury service is not representative of the new economy in a numerical sense, because most people neither produce nor consume it. But studying luxury service can shed light on questions of interactive work and social class, because such service brings together structural inequality and subordinating interactive work in a particularly noticeable way. Structural inequality is the context for luxury service; interactive subordination of workers and the corresponding entitlement of clients are its content. Therefore, looking at luxury in light of what we already know about service work can shed light both on the specificity of luxury and on service work more generally.

      SERVICIS, SELVES, AND CLASS

       From Industry to Interaction

      For much of the twentieth century, sociologists of work were interested primarily in productivity, efficiency, and human relations, mainly in manufacturing workplaces. They took capitalist labor relations for granted and usually assumed a congruence of interests between workers and capitalists.²⁶ In 1974, Harry Braverman inaugurated critical labor process studies with Labor and Monopoly Capital, a scathing indictment of capitalist production methods and worker deskilling. Using a Marxist approach, Braverman looked at how the separation of mental and manual labor allows managers to control workers’ labor power. Braverman's analysis spawned a generation of studies concerned with managerial control of workers within the labor process, in varying institutional and historical contexts.²⁷ Responding to what many believed to be an overly mechanistic and pessimistic view on Braverman's part, scholars in this tradition also began to look at worker subjectivity, agency, resistance, and gender.²⁸ The contemporary critical sociology of work remains indebted to the work of Braverman and his intellectual descendants.

      For labor process theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, class was key. In this view, workers and owners by definition (in terms of their relation to the means of production) belong to different classes.²⁹ The challenge for capitalists and their managerial representatives is to control and appropriate workers’ labor power in the service of securing profit (or other economic benefits). Thus, class relations are generated in the factory, through shop-floor domination. Consistent with this orientation, the vast majority of this literature has looked at manufacturing, Marx's paradigmatic site.

      The study of service work, which Marx called “unproductive labor,” was quite limited through most of the twentieth century, even as this sector grew and manufacturing declined.³⁰ But with Arlie Hochschild's groundbreaking 1983 study of flight attendants, The Managed Heart, service work—especially face-to-face service—began to garner attention. Subsequent researchers have looked at fast food workers, insurance agents, domestic servants, waitresses, temporary workers, nursing home workers, lawyers, paralegals, delivery drivers, bank tellers, supermarket checkers, business services workers, casino dealers, sales clerks, bill collectors, and hairdressers, among others.³¹

      Much of this research focuses on two principal differences between interactive service work and traditional factory labor. First, the product of service work consists at least in part of intangible interactions