scholarly journals Situating service work in action: A review and a pragmatist agenda for analysing interactive service work

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Schneider ◽  
Dilip Subramanian ◽  
Jean‐Baptiste Suquet ◽  
Pascal Ughetto
Keyword(s):  
Service Work ◽  
Interactive Service

The Changing Meaning of Skill

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Payne
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Service Work ◽  
Job Complexity ◽  
Articulation Work ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Worker Autonomy ◽  
Service Jobs ◽  
Interactive Service ◽  
Unrealistic Expectations

‘Skill’ has long been a contested concept within the social sciences. In recent decades, the use of the term by policy makers, employers and academics has broadened considerably, fuelling debate about what skill is and what constitutes skilled work. With ‘skill’ purportedly encompassing behaviours such as discipline and conformity, the concept is said to be in danger of losing its meaning or significance. The growth of interactive service work has also seen the emergence of new and controversial skill concepts such as emotional, aesthetic and articulation work. Are so-called ‘low skilled’ service jobs really low skilled and might recognition of these hidden skills help to achieve better pay, or is there a risk of exaggerating their skill content and raising unrealistic expectations? This chapter charts these controversies, and argues for placing skill in its societal and workplace context and taking seriously issues of power, job complexity and worker autonomy.

The order problem: Inference and interaction in interactive service work

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (11) ◽  
pp. 1401-1426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Llewellyn ◽  
Jon Hindmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Service Work ◽  
Order Problem ◽  
Interactive Service

Bouncer service work: emotional labour and flexible masculinity

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Thomas Friis Søgaard ◽  
Jakob Krause-Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Service Work ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Service Economy ◽  
Work Practices ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Service Oriented ◽  
New Policies ◽  
Interactive Service

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how new policies and standards to professionalise nightclub bouncing along with customer-oriented service imperatives affect bouncers’ work practices and identities. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish bouncers and uses the concept of “emotional labour” and related ideas of “interactive service work” to explore how service imperatives play out at political/commercial and organisational levels and how such initiatives are negotiated by bouncers in their work practices. Findings Until recently, the nocturnal work of bouncers had been relatively unaffected by labour market service paradigms. This is now changing, as policy initiatives and the capitalist service economy colonise ever greater domains of the urban night and the work conducted here. We argue that trends towards professionalisation have landed bouncers in a double-bind situation, in which they are increasingly faced with competing and sometimes contradictory occupational imperatives requiring them both to “front up” effectively to unruly patrons and to project a service-oriented persona. We show how bouncers seek to cope with this precarious position by adopting a variety of strategies, such as resistance, partial acceptance and cultural re-interpretations of service roles. Originality/value While existing research on nightclub bouncers has primarily focussed on bouncers’ physical regulation of unruly guests, this paper provides a theoretical framework for understanding current policy ambitions to “domesticate” bouncers and shows how attempts to construct bouncers as civilised “service workers” is fraught with paradoxes and ambiguities.

Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres

2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Belt ◽  
Ranald Richardson ◽  
Juliet Webster
Keyword(s):  
Social Skill ◽  
Telephone Call ◽  
Service Work ◽  
Call Centres ◽  
Interactive Service
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