Class Acts — Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels – By Rachel Sherman
| Author | Dennis Nickson |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00660.x |
thinking in Britain in the austere period of the late-1940s compared with that in the
so-called swinging sixties’ (p. 13). Hence, the emphasis throughout the book is not on
studying time as a continuous process but as a series of ‘junctures’, during which
various factors — rules, actors, discourses and social contexts — lead to changes in
the formation of gendered subjectivity. These junctures provide the structuring frame-
work shaping the first seven of the eight chapters.
The richness of description in these first seven chapters means that, it has to be said,
chapter 8 comes as something of an anticlimax. This final chapter relies on Calás and
Smircich’s well-known division of feminist thinking into a sixfold typology, and
adopts what is described as a multi-lens approach that examines each perspective in
turn. The analytical depth of earlier chapters suggests that a more nuanced theoretical
finale might have been anticipated, one that could have taken the final chapter as an
opportunity to reflect on the gendering of organizational subjectivity and on the
cultural landscaping of the industry and of the occupations considered throughout the
book in more depth. Similarly, the lack of a reflective return to the analytical concerns
of the opening chapter, or indeed of some anticipation of where the occupations or the
industry, or indeed the author himself, might be heading next, gives the book a
slightly unbalanced feel, particularly given that the analysis of BA, Pan Am and Air
Canada stops (for understandable methodological reasons) in 1991, yet commercial
airlines have clearly been subject to a number of important developments and pres-
sures since then.
These minor criticisms notwithstanding, Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere is a
unique contribution; it is a book that is clearly the product of a meticulous dedication
to researching the airline industry over a broad historical period, one that identifies
important junctures in the development of the industry, and which provides a vivid
illustration of the gendering of organizational culture within the sector. For academic
researchers, students, or for general readers with an interest in the airline industry, or
in the particular organizations that have been so thoroughly documented here, it is a
genuinely essential read.
Melissa Tyler
The Business School, Loughborough University
Class Acts — Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman. University
of California Press, Berkeley, 2007, ix +366 pp., ISBN 052024782 6, £13.95,
paper.
Much of the literature on service work takes as its starting point the servile and
subordinate nature of employees. However, some accounts now argue for a more
nuanced view of working in frontline jobs in areas such as hospitality and retail
(Warhurst and Nickson 2007). In particular, Warhurst and Nickson argue that within
the interactive service encounter as well as subordination there may also be parity
between employees and guests and possibly even super-ordination wherein the
employee subverts what is deemed to be the normal power relationship within inter-
active services. Warhurst and Nickson also recognize the important role of class
within this process and how both customers and employees can ‘do class’ in their
interactions. Many of these issues are thrown into sharp relief in the particular milieu
of the luxury hotel, an environment brought to life in Rachel Sherman’s excellent
ethnographic account of working in two luxury hotels.
874 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.
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