in the hotel especially difficult to routinize. Hotel workers must often respond to highly specific and unpredictable situations. Furthermore, to anticipate and fulfill guests’ needs, workers must discern clients’ immediate desires on the basis of their self-presentation as well as their explicit requests. Because guests value authentic interactions with workers, these must not appear scripted or routine. Thus the challenge for managers in the front of the house is to elicit nonroutine behavior from workers on a routine basis.64
Recognition of guests may be what I call “engineered,” meaning that it is supported by technology that allows workers to call guests by name and acknowledge their VIP or repeat visitor status and their preferences even when workers do not know them personally. In my sites, these mechanisms included the phone display, computer databases, credit cards, and luggage tags. Nonetheless, most interactive work must be personalized in the moment, not scripted in advance. Mechanisms that help to engineer this recognition must be employed at the worker's discretion, in terms of both using the guest's name and collecting information useful for future standardization. Thus, the customization imperative means workers enjoy a high level of discretion in their work.
Front of house workers in my sites were subject to less surveillance, especially in terms of the content of their interactions with guests. Video cameras in public areas of the hotel (the loading dock, elevator, and so on) recorded workers’ movements, although this was not their only purpose. Also, workers often had to initial their job tasks and use their names to log onto computers; thus, mistakes they made could return in the future to haunt them. These mechanisms of surveillance, however, did not facilitate supervisors’ evaluation of the extra effort and genuine interaction workers were expected to offer. And supervisors did not have time to oversee the worker's interaction with guests. They witnessed these interactions only if they happened to be present at the time, which was rare.
Of course, clients also monitor interactive workers, as other researchers have pointed out.65 They make their views known through conversations with managers, comment cards, and letters to upper management. Both my sites also employed “mystery shoppers,” who knew the standards of the hotel and reported on workers’ behavior, but these visits were rare. As we will see, comment cards in my sites were overwhelmingly positive. The potential surveillance inherent in any customer interaction certainly prevented workers from being rude to guests, but it did not force them to make the special efforts that luxury service is supposed to entail, because these efforts by definition go beyond the guest's expectations. Interactive workers, unlike the more vulnerable housekeepers, rarely articulated fear of guest wrath.
Interactive workers also had more choices on the labor market than their back of house counterparts. They spoke good (if not always native) English, were usually white, and often had some higher education. They were also harder to replace, especially when workers were scarce. Thus, both their personal characteristics and the differences in their work meant these workers could not be subjected to routinization and close monitoring, as back of house workers were. Eliciting the consent of interactive workers to care about and serve guests was further complicated by the self-subordination required in this work and the higher visibility of stratification for these workers.
OBSCURING AND NORMALIZING INEQUALITY
As I have suggested, inequality takes two forms in the hotel: the structural asymmetry between workers and guests and the interactive self-subordination of workers to guests. Interactive workers in my sites were more aware of the structural asymmetry than their invisible counterparts and much more responsible for the self-subordination.
Back of house workers, most of whom were immigrants from developing countries, were more disadvantaged structurally in relation to guests than their front of house counterparts, who earned more money, enjoyed greater job opportunities, and usually did not face racial discrimination. But these back of house workers had less direct contact with either structural or interactive inequality in the course of their work. They knew that the guests were wealthy, of course, but they were not constantly confronted with evidence of that wealth. In both hotels, housekeepers I worked with were unaware of the room rates or believed them to be lower than they actually were. It is unlikely that these workers were cognizant of the expense of the belongings they found in the rooms, if they even had time to notice them, which in my experience they did not.66 They rarely commented on guests’ wealth. Also, because they had little contact with guests, these workers did not have to enact the self-subordination characteristic of luxury interactions. For back of house workers, then, inequality was obscured.
Some semivisible workers, such as telephone operators and runners, were likewise rarely confronted with either structural or interactive inequality. Others, however, did know about guest spending. Room service workers knew how much the meals cost, and they occasionally commented on the exorbitant prices of the food or wine that guests ordered. Reservationists were well aware of the hotel's high room rates. But because they performed little interactive recognition work, most semi-visible workers were insulated from the subordination characteristic of visible work. The scope of guest requests was usually quite narrow. Furthermore, routines protected these workers from having to manifest extreme deference, giving them some power in the interaction. They rarely had to legitimate outrageous behavior or demands. Reservationists also tended to interact with travel agents or guests’ assistants at least as often as with the guests themselves and thus could withhold deferential treatment.
In the front of the house, in contrast, interaction required workers to face disparities in wealth between themselves and the guests more directly. Front desk workers, who handled guests’ accounts, knew how much the guests often spent on their rooms, their food, and other services in the hotel. Concierges procured extremely expensive products and services outside the hotel; guests in my sites spent hundreds of dollars on tickets to the theater, symphony, or sporting events, as well as on meals, flowers, massages, and travel. Concierges knew where guests ate, shopped, and pursued expensive recreational pastimes such as golfing. They sent cars to pick up guests from their private planes or directed them to restaurants where they could buy three-hundred-dollar bottles of Cristal. Doormen and bellmen also saw the guests’ expensive cars and luggage and were familiar with the high price of the car-and-driver services guests often used. Thus, guest wealth was by no means obscured to front of house workers and some semivisible ones.
Front of house workers also enacted interactive self-subordination to a much greater degree than other workers, deferring to guests, anticipating and responding to their every need, customizing interactions, and transgressing limits for them. Workers in these jobs must subordinate their own selves to those of the guests and restrain impulses to say what they really think.
But despite this increased knowledge and experience of unequal entitlements, inequality was normalized for most of these workers. In their conversations about guests and their desires, demands, and behaviors, workers constantly invoked guests’ wealth. They bandied about numbers in the hundreds and thousands of dollars without batting an eye. However, they rarely critiqued or voiced discomfort with either the material inequalities between themselves and guests or the subordinating imperatives of their jobs (although workers sometimes judged individual guests for behaviors related to their wealth, as we will see in chapter 4). Indeed, in coding my field notes I became frustrated with the lack of explicit mentions of the guests’ wealth in a critical vein.
Interactive workers discussed disparity and subordination only because I mentioned it in answering their questions about my research. Joel, a Royal Court doorman in his early forties, asked about my project, and I mentioned that I was interested in the disparity between workers and guests. He seemed confused, so I asked, “Do you ever think about that black Jag parked at the curb and wonder why you don't have one?” He responded, “That has never crossed my mind.” He told me, “Sometimes people can be rich and think they're entitled to anything they want, and I know that's not true.” But otherwise, he said, he did not think about it.
Contrast that experience to a conversation I had in the Royal Court locker room with Millie, a young woman who had just been hired as a hostess in the restaurant. I asked how she liked it. She responded that, in comparison to her last restaurant job, “here, you have to kiss a lot of ass.” I was