One store, two fates: boundary work and service capital in China’s retail sector

Boundaries labor and identity

Social boundary approaches prove fruitful for scholars seeking to understand the relational formation and reproduction of inequality by attending to the meanings, symbols, practices, and schema that accompany social hierarchies (Lamont and Molnár 2002; Purser 2009). Barth (1969), for example, conceived of ethnic distinctions as growing out of contact between collectivities rather than a product of the internal manufacture of cultural styles and ways of life. Likewise, a relational sociology searches for the meanings that define collectivities in the interstices of group contact (Bourdieu 1984; Emirbayer 1997; Lamont 2009). In this perspective, class and its divisions are outcomes of both distribution of resources and subjective modes of distinction. To perceive the dynamics of inequality in everyday life, it is therefore critical to understand how actors map out differences with social others (Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu’s classic study of distinction accomplishes this by using patterns of consumption to infer dispositional characteristics of groups that shared orientations to—and strategies for—managing their social position in the world in relation to social others. A method of status distinction, styles of consumption both form and reveal configurations of class. In later work, Lamont (2009) inspected social borders as a symbolic expression voiced in the discourses of working classes of France and the USA, finding that ethical frames aligning with class, race, and ethnic affiliation underlie dynamics of membership and exclusion.

A growing scholarship ventures into the workplace, to observe firsthand the social boundaries dividing proximate groups (Purser 2009; Sherman 2007; Vallas 2001). For example, Vallas (2001) observed engineers in paper mills parlay claims of scientific authority into an extension of control over the technical knowledge of mill operators. In some cases, workers act individually to project themselves as superior to customers (Sherman 2007). Similarly, Purser observed that Latino immigrant day laborers deploy values associated with masculinity to claim status over competitors on the worksite and gain advantage in competition for jobs. Observing social boundaries in situ researchers can witness the experiential dimensions of inequality formation—and fragmentation—unfold in real time (Pun 2016).

Often implicit in studies of organizational inequality is actors' conversion of wider, generalized social advantage to specific organizational advantage. Studies find broad social inequalities are reproduced in employment organizations through formal policies and informal work norms, as well as recruitment and evaluation practices (Acker 1989; Ely and Meyerson 2000; Steinberg 1990). Less attention is paid to workplace boundaries as a mechanism for reproduction of inequality. Although he paid little attention to the workplace, Bourdieu's framework for explaining class divisions is useful. Bourdieu linked the reproduction of class domination to the dynamic movement of resources between varied species of capital including economic, social, and cultural (educational and taste) (Bourdieu 1984). Conversions between capitals are directed by durable dispositions inherited from actors’ early, embodied, social location (habitus) but translated into new fields of practice (Swartz 2008). Scholars call for greater attention to this embodied history of habitus in organizational studies but have yet to fully marshal evidence demonstrating its operations in practice (Emirbayer and Johnson 2008). They thus miss the inventive, relational, and exploitative measures taken in the process of adapting embodied dispositions to new organizational settings, as well as the relational consequences of these accommodations. By focusing on three conversion mechanisms, the administrative division of jobs, workers’ extra-organizational identities, and customer preferences, we show how dispositions are adapted to the specificity of organizational context. The adaptations, and the boundaries they create, generate claims to service capital, an aptitude for effective interaction with customers.

The attention to boundary formation as an organizational process that imports broad social beliefs and practices into organizational culture not only gives us purchase on how actors construct workplace culture but also contributes to our grasp of culture “in-the-making” at this historic moment in Chinese society. Although many studies of urban China focus on inequalities between rural and urban citizens writ large (i.e., spatial separations, unequal distribution of welfare, different access to opportunities), few examine these from the standpoint of boundary formation (Davis 2000; Yan 2008; Pun 2016; Solinger 1999; Naughton 2006). With the dramatic shifts in urban stratification and the configuration of urban space (Zhang 2010), a focus on the boundary-drawing processes can illuminate the practices and ideas actors use to reproduce and challenge emergent social hierarchies in new organizations where urban and rural people share space as colleagues, and where customers referee interaction. Scholarship has yet to examine boundaries in the retail workplace. Retailers are among the largest private employers worldwide, offering notoriously low-wage work, that is often temporary, low-skilled, and part-time (Lichtenstein 2009). Boundaries in retail are critical to understand especially because they can direct attention away from the source of workers’ low-wage and unsatisfactory work—the employer—and instead focus employees’ critical attention toward other workers closer to them on the class ladder. Boundaries also manufacture new forms of capital, that is, sources of relational value in the workplace, that also threaten solidarity among workers. Recent scholarship finds that aesthetic capital - the looks, bodies and styles of employees - distributes advantage and disadvantage in the workplace (Anderson et al. 2010). Acknowledging the importance of aesthetic capical, we use the more comprehensive term, "service capital" which refers to both visual appeal and familiarity with culturally dominant interactive protocols, linked to culture work (Otis 2010). Of particular interest is the role of the customer in structuring these kinds of inequalities (Moss and Tilly 1996) as workers interact with them in the labor process. But extant conceptions of the customers' role in the labor process require expansion. The notion of a triangle of control in which customers, workers, and managers strategically partner to wield control over the third party (Leidner 1993) must be complicated, as different types of workers attempt to appeal to customers to enhance their power vis-à-vis other workers.

Finally, existing studies of boundaries rarely link micro-level dynamics to larger institutional structures, particularly the state. Wimmer (2008a, b) is the exception, showing how certain state political dynamics create conditions for boundary development. However, Wimmer does not venture into the workplace. We show how a state promulgated discourse conditions boundary construction on the floor of the service workplace, linking this to the mechanisms for boundary formation. Data collected through immersion in a workplace allow us to examine social boundaries in situ.

The state, migration, and quality

Since the founding of the People's Repbulic of China, the state has played a pivotal role in structuring inequality (Bian 1994). In the Mao period (1949–1978), urbanites and rural farmers were spatially segregated through the hukou or household registration system, created in 1957 to bar individuals from moving from their place of birth. The policy relegated the peasantry to agricultural labor in collectives, while the urban-born worked in state-owned factories and other institutions, where they received substantial benefits not available to the peasantry (Walder 1988). With the advent of market reforms in the 1980s, rural people were allowed to travel for work in foreign-invested factories on the Southeast Coast, drawing. The policy shift promped a massive supply of rural labor to migrate these workplaces (Pun 2005). The new hukou rules allowed peasants only temporary sojourn in cities and excluded them from urban citizenship. On a practical level, this meant they were ineligible for health insurance and housing subsidies, and often exempted from labor laws, while their children were barred from urban schools (Solinger 1999).² As the country developed its mammoth export manufacturing sector, urban employers and local governments escaped these obligations to their migrant workers. This both minimized the costs of proletarianization and reproduced a sharp structural divide between urban and migrant workers. Employers sequestered migrants in factory compounds, assigning them to on-site dormitories. Thus, contact with urbanites was quite limited.

Eventually the growth of the service industry began to narrow the spatial proximity between rural and urban people (Otis 2011). Substantial increases in disposable household income laid the groundwork for a consumer service sector that has generated millions of urban jobs. As employment in China's service sector overtook manufacturing, many migrant workers also opted to work in services. By 2013 services absorbed more migrants than manufacturing (Lu and Xia 2016;22). According to Qu and Jing 2016: "Between 2012 and 2015, the total number of migrant workers in the manufacturing sector declined by nearly 7 million, compared with an increase of 5 million in the three biggest services sectors (ie wholesale and retail, residential services, transportation and logistics)" (2016; 4). Migrants and urbanites now work in the same firms, especially in large retail chains that dominate the urban commercial landscape (Otis 2011b).

Meanwhile, through the media and the Communist Party’s vast network of members, the state circulated a discourse on "suzhi" encouraging educational attainment and adherence to social norms associated with urban models of civility. Commonly translated as “quality,” suzhi refers to physical, intellectual, and moral cultivation of individuals (Anagnost 2004; Sun 2009; Yan 2008). The discourse supplanted Maoist ideologies emphasizing class conflict with a liberal-meritocratic framing of inequalities. The term is used to legitimate intense competition in the educational system and labor market and to promote national development cultivation Suzhi can be likened to human capital, but the term contains a moral valence not implied by the economistic phrase. Another candidate translation for suzhi might be cultural capital, but unlike cultural capital, suzhi is used in everyday conversation by individuals to assess themselves and others.

xSuzhi has become a cultural filter in daily interaction (Murphy 2004; Yan 2008). It is frequently used to point out the deficiencies of others. Kipnis comments, “When an urbanite points at an unfashionably dressed migrant and says to his friend ‘such low quality,’ he links the specificity of the quality of migrant’s dress with her overall physical/mental/moral quality” (2006:207). In this way class disinctions become moral imperatives. Suzhi can also be a weapon of the weak. For example, Otis has heard suzhi used to contest the status of nouveau riche who have wealth but not education, or low suzhi (Otis 2011). All told, suzhi can be understood as a discourse that helps usher nominal characteristics into status characteristics (Ridgeway 2014). That said, when suzhi claims are posed, in all likelihood, those possessing greater educational and social capital will win the day (Kipnis 2006; Sun 2009). In the data analysis ahead, we show the utility of suzhi to workplace boundary formation.

China-Mart

Organizational construction of skills and boundaries

We take the study of organizational inequality to a rapidly transforming society, where status and class asymmetries are in flux and the subject of profuse commentary as well as sharp contestation. We link the salience of collective identities to the emergent construction of boundaries between workers. Our case studies illuminate processes by which organizational status settles on those with (even meager) relative extra-organizational social advantages but not solely as an outcome of bureaucratic arrangements. We found that that urban workers engaged in status conversion by building boundaries to demote status competitors, casting rural migrants' contributions as trivial and their competencies as deficient. We argue that three mehanisms are used to define boundaries: Administrative divisions of labor (determined by the firm’s management, but aided by the state’s hukou policy), workers’ intersubjective meaning-making, and customer responses to workers. The resulting boundaries naturalize workplace inequalities, making them appear as an inevitable outcome of inherent deficiencies of the lower status group. At China-Mart, a virulent discourse deployed by urban staff members reproduced as culture the spatial boundaries once separating urban and migrant workers. The discourse drew upon and strategically adapted state-promoted conceptions of suzhi, as workers evaluated each other’s quality quite openly.

Patterns of administrative appointment may create the initial conditions for workplace inequality but the character of the boundaries that form between workers, profoundly shape the experience of inequality and conditions of participation, in terms of the dignity and social recognition laborers of different sorts receive. These boundaries can legitimize or (potentially) undermine hierarchies that form within organizations. In the case presented here, they functioned to solidify within-group relations, convert extramural status into workplace status, alienate groups from each other, and ultimately to bind workers to their respective workplace roles. In this process, workers underscored the facets of their jobs that might serve as evidence of status, while they simultaneously highlighted the undesirable elements of jobs that social others performed, not only concealing the full range of duties each group enacted but also masking common tasks. In fact, boundary work tends to demarcate absolute differences between groups and elide similarities (Vallas 2001). Through this boundary work, job tasks take on meaning beyond their bureaucratic designation, and job-based identities gain meaning in everyday life that become the cultural skin in which workers live.

Urban workers' successful encoding of extramural advantages into organizational categories explains why interactive work becomes the marker of status in a workplace divided by urban and migrant workers. In China-Mart, the labor of preparing food could very well have been construed as relatively skilled compared to cashiering or working the customer service desk. Moreover, the kitchen workers’ interactions with customers at the food bar may have been understood as interactive labor not dissimilar to the activity of urban cashiers and customer service workers. But the boundary work of urbanites obscured the rural kitchen workers’ interactive labor and demoted their food preparation skills. Indeed, urban workers elevated interactive labor as an expression of intellect superior to the “potato-chopping” labor migrant workers. They thereby generated a resource we term service capital, a claim that they possessed a relatively rare aptitude of value to the firm.

Customers were accomplices in supporting  urbanites’ claims of superiority, as some treated migrants with little respect. Scholarship has concentrated on potential two-way alliances between workers, managers, and customers (Leidner 1993) but has yet to recognize the role of customers in boundary struggles between workers. Customer arbitration of boundaries underscores the importance of dispositions shared in common with these actors who exercise power in the service workplace. Urban workers shared styles of interactions, accents, modes of bodily comportment, and knowledge about their surroundings. Migrants could not pass as urbanites; they were segregated into work with other migrants, work defined as manual labor. In the kitchen, they wore cooking jackets and hats that were easily soiled as they toiled over cauldron-size woks of food daily. The stained uniforms made them look unkempt to urban customers. Their bodies, accents, and styles of discourse also revealed their origins. Customers readily identified them as migrant workers.

Migrant workers responded to urbanites’ boundary construction by positing their own dispositions as reflecting higher moral worth and social value. Like urban workers, their re-interpretation of suzhi was also directed by a strategic conversion of their extra-organizational identity. In this case, they referred to certain codes of honor among peasants, which emphasized disciplined commitment to hard work as well as physical strength. These values are hardly unique to China’s migrant workers. Hard work is also cited by white American workers as an essential source of personal worth and used to draw boundaries with the middle class (Lamont 2009). Migrant workers' valorization of rising early, producing food, and more generally any work that required “muscles” not “mouths,” were certainly conditioned by their agricultural origins. The attempts at boundary inversion were thwarted by the state’s hukou system and its elevation of academic success encoded into the suzhi discourse. Showing how these dynamics of boundary formation draw upon, reproduce, and revise state-promulgated discourses on suzhi, we develop a linkage between macro-level structures of the state- and individual-level sense-making that has been missing in existing scholarship (Lamont et al. 2014). Such cultural processes, defined as inter-subjective conceptions that draw on, reproduce, and revise extant social narratives, are a missing link connecting individual-level schema and macro-level structures.

Finally, it should be emphasized that the immediate and often emotionally fraught boundaries between these two relatively marginalized groups help to secure the privileges of dominant classes: executive managers, owners, and state officials. In her analysis of split labor markets, (Bonacich 1972) points out that conflict within the working classes only serves to reinforce the power of owners, not to mention managers and state officials. They do so by dissolving any possibility of collective organization between the groups. To the extent that some groups will make claims to distinction by reference to their own closer social and cultural proximity to dominating groups (for instance, managers), they reinforce the legitimacy of the latter and leave what are arguably the most exploitative and gaping inequalities unquestioned. By examining closely symbolic struggles in the service workplace, we can see how the cultural capital wielded to gain dominance reinforces the ability of the upper classes to dominate, by naturalizing their superior “quality” in the form of education, demeanor, and execution of soft skills. The scope and nature of workers’ boundaries may also underlie dynamics of collective unrest, which is surging among China’s workers who seek secure livelihoods (Friedman 2014). We anticipate future research that directly investigates these linkages.