Aesthetic Labour by Warhurst Chris;Nickson Dennis; & Dennis Nickson

Author:Warhurst, Chris;Nickson, Dennis; & Dennis Nickson [Warhurst, Chris & Nickson, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 2020-06-30T19:35:33.075868+00:00

Note

1. The same respondent noted how the circuit of the store was actually based on a drawing that was on the back of one of the doors: ‘They’ve got a big drawing. It was sent in actually by head office, the footpath they actually take’.

6 Irritable Vowel Syndrome

In Chapter 3 we noted that the most obvious manifestations of aesthetic labour centre on two of the five senses – the visual and aural; the sight and sound of employees. These two senses translate into three particular features of employees’ work and employment: dress sense or what we call ‘workwear’, comportment or body language, and speech. With the visual senses dominating Western society, and workwear and body language affecting the visual senses, it is these two features of aesthetic labour that tend to be emphasised most by employers and the focus of most research. As a consequence the aural senses and employee speech have received less attention, which is an oversight that needs to be addressed.

It is, however, an oversight that is not confined to research on aesthetic labour. Early labour process theory, with its focus on the stuff inside employees’ heads – knowledge – and employers’ attempts to extract that knowledge through scientific management, had nothing to say about workers’ speech. (Interestingly though F.W. Taylor did mimic Schmidt’s heavy Dutch accent in his account of how he tried, repeatedly, to teach and bribe Schmidt to load more pig iron into rail wagons; see Taylor, 1947 [1911]). As we noted in Chapter 3, labour process theory is, however, useful in highlighting capitalism’s need to generate surplus value, and how the means to do so in the production of goods and services necessarily changes over time because of competition. With its incorporation of emotional labour, labour process theory became aware of employers being interested in the hearts, not just the heads, of workers, seeking to mobilise, control and transmute employee feelings (Bolton, 2010). Within this shift the study of call centres, and workers’ speech (what they said and how they said it) became of interest (e.g. Taylor, 1998). However this interest was never developed empirically or conceptually within labour process theory, though there are studies of the call centre labour process that attempt to more comprehensively incorporate speech into their analyses, as this chapter highlights.

It is Bourdieu’s (1992) theory of practice that most explicitly signals the importance of speech in social interaction. Habitus generates bodily dispositions, and with those dispositions ways of speaking. Speech, in turn, is not just constituent of habitus; it reinforces and helps reproduce it. Language therefore defines and assigns value. Those individuals with positional power in a field seek to impose their style of language. In this respect Bourdieu’s analysis of language is not particularly novel. Bernstein (2003) also noted that the working and middle classes have different linguistic codes, even when speaking the same language, and that those codes are shaped by power relations. What Bourdieu adds is recognition that this power can be obscured by the normality

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