Abstract
This article argues that service interactions can serve as key sites for the recognition and performance of class distinctions in urban China. The author develops the concept of distinction work to describe service work in which a key part of the service interaction becomes the recognition of a customer’s class position. A contrast between working-class and luxury service environments in urban China demonstrates that distinction work becomes especially important when retailers compete over customers who themselves seek social distinction from their shopping experiences. This study links the study of service work and class while providing a better understanding of the evolving culture of inequality and emerging structure of entitlement in reform era China.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Calculated from figures in the China Statistical Yearbook, 2004. The 2003 figure should be interpreted with caution, as after 1995, official data on the number of retail outlets, annual sales figures, and the ownership structure of the retail sector become increasingly difficult to interpret due to changes to data categories and reporting practices.
This and all other proper nouns used in the article are pseudonyms.
This argument contrasts with Guthrie’s (1997) findings for Shanghai’s industrial sector, where firms located at higher administrative levels – for example, under the jurisdiction of a municipal bureau – were more likely to experience the pressures of market reforms. Guthrie shows that in the 1990s, highly placed industrial firms were likely to cope with risk by investing in the service sector. There is no evidence, however, that service sector firms located high in the administrative hierarchy were under similar pressures. Nevertheless, I do not mean to suggest that Harbin No. X’s relationship with the Harbin municipal bureau is representative of China’s large, state-owned department stores and service sector firms in other cities, though the pattern was representative within Harbin. The city’s largest state retailers were the last to come under real pressure to change. The point, rather, is to explain the enduring state-socialist nature of management and work at this particular store.
In fact, pre-reform service interactions were modeled on the assembly line. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), model salesclerk Zhang Binggui was dubbed a socialist “service hero” and praised for his efficiency in dealing with shortage-induced queues, employing such skills as “yi zhua zhun” (measuring accuracy in “one grab”) and “yi kou qing” (quick tallying of purchases; Guo and Liu 1998). City almanacs list the top scorers in salesclerk speed competitions in measuring out lengths of cloth and packaging up merchandise (e.g., Harbin City Almanac 1994).
Paules (1991) similarly reports prohibitions against “physically necessary acts” in the restaurant she researched, including rules against openly drinking water (132–133).
At times, the imbalance between customer and clerk authority took shape as outright fear (on the clerk’s part) of the customer. In one instance, a salesclerk urgently whispered to another clerk to move away from the wallet that a customer had just set down on our sales counter. It was clear from this incident that salesclerks had to take great care in protecting themselves from possible customer accusations of theft or misbehavior, given that clerks had little standing with which to defend themselves against such claims. For this reason, another salesclerk warned me when I first started working at the store never to carry money in my pockets, because it could be used as evidence of stealing from a customer. According to the store’s internal hierarchy, clerks were dispensable, and customers were not.
References
Benson, S. P. (1986). Counter cultures: Saleswomen, managers, and customers in American department stores, 1890–1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Bettie, J. (2003). Women without class: Girls, race, and identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Carter, J. H. (2002). Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an international city, 1916–1932. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Donovan, F. (1930). The saleslady. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickel and dimed: On (not) getting by in America. New York: Owl Books.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.
Guo, H., & Liu, F. (1998). New China’s flagship emporium: The Beijing Wangfujing department store. In K. MacPherson (Ed.), Asian department stores (pp. 114–138). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Guthrie, D. (1997). Between markets and politics: Organizational responses to reform in China. American Journal of Sociology, 102, 1258–1304.
Halter, M. (2000). Shopping for identity: The marketing of ethnicity. New York: Schocken Books.
Hanser, A. (2005). The gendered rice bowl: The sexual politics of service work in urban China. Gender & Society, 19, 581–600.
Hanser, A. (2006). Sales floor trajectories: Distinction and service in postsocialist China. Ethnography, 7, 461–491.
Hanser, A. (2007). A tale of two sales floors: Changing service work regimes in China. In C. K. Lee (Ed), Working in China: Ethnographies of labor and workplace transformation (pp. 77–97). London: Routledge.
Harbin City Almanac (Ha’erbin shi zhi). (1996). Harbin: Heilongjiang People’s Press (Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe), vol. 15.
Holt, D. (1997). Poststructuralist lifestyle analysis: Conceptualizing the social patterning of consumption in postmodernity. Journal of Consumer Research, 23, 326–350.
Ji, Y. (2002). Entry into the WTO: The opportunities and challenges faced by large-scale retail businesses and countermeasures. (Unpublished manuscript).
Lamont, M., & Fournier, M. (1992). Introduction. In M. Lamont, & M. Fournier (Eds.), Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality (pp. 1–17). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lan, P. (2003). Working in a neon cage: Bodily labor of cosmetics saleswomen in Taiwan. Feminist Studies, 29, 21–45.
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lee, C. K. (2000). The ‘revenge of history’: Collective memories and labor protests in north-eastern China. Ethnography, 1, 217–237.
Lee, C. K. (2007). Against the law: Labor protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MacPherson, K. L. (1998) Introduction: Asia’s universal providers. In K. MacPherson (Ed.), Asian department stores (pp.1–30). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Miller, M. B. (1981). The Bon Marché: Bourgeois culture and the department store, 1869–1920. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Otis, E. M. (2007). Virtual personalism in Beijing: Learning deference and femininity at a global luxury hotel. In C. K. Lee (Ed.), Working in China: Ethnographies of labor and workplace transformation (pp. 101–123). London: Routledge.
Paules, G. F. (1991). Dishing it out: Power and resistance among waitresses in a New Jersey restaurant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Rivas, L. (2003). Invisible labors: Caring for the independent person. In B. Ehrenreich & A. Hochschild (Eds.), Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (pp. 70–84). New York: Metropolitan Books.
Rollins, J. (1985). Between women: Domestics and their employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Rollins, J. (1996). Invisibility, consciousness of the other, and resentment among black domestic workers. In C. Macdonald & C. Sirianni (Eds.), Working in the service society (pp. 223–243). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Sherman, R. E. (2005). Producing the superior self: Strategic comparison and symbolic boundaries among luxury hotel workers. Ethnography, 6, 131–158.
Sherman, R. E. (2006). Class acts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stinchcombe, A. L. (1965). Social structure and organizations. In J. G. March (Ed.), Handbook of organizational behavior management (pp.142–193). New York: Rand McNally and Co.
Solinger, D. J. (1999). Contesting citizenship in urban China: Peasant migrants, the state, and the logic of the market. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tomba, L. (2004). Creating an urban middle class: Social engineering in Beijing. The China Journal, 51, 1–26.
Tomba, L. (2005). Residential space and collective interest formation in Beijing’s housing disputes. The China Quarterly, 184, 934–951.
Veblen, T. (1899 [1934]). Theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New York: Modern Library.
Walder, A. G. (1986). Communist neo-traditionalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wang, J. (2001). Culture as leisure and culture as capital. Positions, 9, 69–104.
Wang, X. (2003). China on the brink of a “momentous era”. Positions, 11, 585–611.
Wang, S., & Jones, K. (2001). China’s retail sector in transition. Asian Geographer, 20, 25–51.
West, C., & Fenstermaker, S. (1995). Doing difference. Gender & Society, 9, 8–37.
Williams, C. (2006). Inside toyland: Working, shopping and social inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wolff, D. (1999). To the Harbin station: The liberal alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zukin, S. (2004). Point of purchase: How shopping changed American culture. New York: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hanser, A. Is the customer always right? Class, service and the production of distinction in Chinese department stores. Theor Soc 36, 415–435 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9042-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9042-0