suggested the title), Michelle Williams, and Ann Wood. Christy Getz, Teresa Gowan, and Lissa Soep were sharp readers and remain invaluable friends. Leslie Bell deserves special thanks for her unfailing comradeship in this and many other endeavors. The dissertation also benefited from discussions with or comments by Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Laura Dresser, Gil Eyal, Steve Lopez, Ruth Milkman, Sean O'Riain, Myra Marx Ferree, Barrie Thorne, Roger Waldinger, Dick Walker, and Erik Olin Wright. The staff of the Berkeley sociology department, especially Elsa Tranter, gave indispensable practical and emotional support.
Many people generously provided helpful feedback as the project made the transition from dissertation to book. I particularly want to thank those who read the whole manuscript, in various incarnations, for their attention and insightful comments: Jeff Alexander, Dan Clawson, Jack Katz, Steve Lopez, Leslie McCall, Alondra Nelson, Diane Vaughan, Diane Wolf, and Julia Wrigley. I kept Rachel Heiman's annotated copy by my side during much of the revision. The manuscript was also improved by suggestions from Rick Fantasia, Christy Glass, Christine Wimbauer, Caitlin Zaloom, the participants in Yale's Center for Cultural Sociology workshop, and the members of the Work and Welfare group at Yale, run by Vicki Schultz. I thank Sam Nelson, Betty Yip, and Christy Glass for research help, and Noel Silverman for legal assistance. I am also grateful to the staff of the University of California Press. Naomi Schneider has been an engaged, insightful, and patient editor. Robin Whitaker greatly improved the book with careful and comprehensive copy editing, and Jacqueline Volin expertly shepherded the manuscript through production. All errors, of course, are mine alone.
My friends and family have been unfailingly encouraging during this lengthy process. Besides those already mentioned, Tanya Agathocleous, Jennifer Bair, Aaron Belkin, Emma Bonacich, Carolyn Chen, Averil Clarke, Dave Herbstman, Sarah Laslett, Zahavah Levine, Nancy Kane, Jackie Olvera, Meredith Rose, Stephanie Ruby, Diana Selig, and Paul Van De Carr were my daily support system, always curious to hear about the project and equally willing to provide distraction. Lynnéa Stephen was an enthusiastic and generous friend and a model of courage and perseverance. Karen Strassler deserves special mention here: a dear friend and intellectual fellow traveler for almost twenty years, she has commented on countless ideas and drafts, offering essential encouragement and insight in this as in so many aspects of my life. I also want to recognize Nancy Middlebrook, Margaret Hunt, and Judy Feins, who have always been generous with their own caring labor. With all my heart, I thank Laura Amelio for her unconditional love, joyful companionship, and unwavering faith in my capacity to finish this book.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my mother, Dorothy Louise, and my father, Tom Sherman, not only for their consistent interest, encouragement, and love (and, in my mother's case, detailed copy editing), but also for shaping the values and personal history that inspired this project. I dedicate this book to them.
Introduction
LUXURY SERVICE AND THE NEW ECONOMY
When Mr. Jones, a guest at the five-star Luxury Garden hotel, began to prepare for an early business meeting, he realized he had forgotten to pack his dress shoes. Panicked, he called the concierge desk. Not to worry, said Max, the concierge. Max called a local department store, asked the security guard to help him contact the manager, and convinced the manager to open the store two hours early for the desperate guest. At the same hotel, room service workers know that when Mrs. Smith orders breakfast, they must slice her papaya along a straight line, forgoing the usual serrated edge. At the Royal Court, a small luxury hotel nearby, Mrs. Frank looks forward to the hazelnut butter on her French toast, which the chef whips up just for her. In a third upscale hotel, the gift shop does not carry the Silk Cut cigarettes Mr. White prefers. No problem, he is told; we can send someone to get them. Each time the guest returns thereafter, the cigarettes await him in his room. A legendary housekeeper in the same hotel has a habit of rifling through guests’ wastebaskets; she is trying to identify their favorite candy bars and magazines in order to enter these into a computer database that helps workers keeps track of guests’ preferences for the future.
I heard these stories from luxury hotel managers I interviewed in the late 1990s as part of my preliminary research on this book. I talked with mid- and upper-level managers in all different kinds of urban hotels—economy, midprice, convention, and so on—about the challenges of running the hotel, the service they offered, the types of guests they catered to, changes in the economic climate and the structure of the industry, and their views about unions. But managers in luxury hotels recounted especially captivating anecdotes. Like the examples above, these tales described hotel staff going to great lengths to observe guests’ preferences, recognize each guest's individuality, and meet—even anticipate—the guests’ wishes. These hotels promised, in the words of an ad for the Four Seasons, “service that cares for your every need.”1
Managers and hospitality industry literature insisted that this caring service is more important than the physical characteristics of the hotel or its amenities. Asked what differentiated the Luxury Garden from its competition, for example, the hotel's sales director told me, “The service, because we all have beds and bathrooms.” It was, managers said, the main reason guests paid daily rates as high as eight hundred dollars for rooms and three thousand dollars for suites. The staff played a crucial role in this enterprise. One manager commented, for instance, “The room helps, the views help, but it's really the people.”
Managers characterized the guests who consume luxury service as “truly wealthy.” As one manager put it, “They're not looking for discount coupons.” Another told me that guest wealth “blows my mind.” I wondered: if it blew the managers’ minds, what did the workers think about it? Workers in these hotels earned ten to fifteen dollars per hour and in some cases tips and commissions; that could add up to a substantial wage, but it was nothing compared with guest wealth. And managers talked about the services their hotels offered as providing care. But caring for guests appeared also to mean catering to them. What was it like when your job was to ensure that the guest's every desire, no matter how insignificant, was fulfilled? Did workers feel subordinated by guests’ seemingly unlimited entitlement to the workers’ personalized labor and attention? And how did guests feel about luxury service, which seemed to involve a fair amount of potentially intrusive surveillance of personal preferences and habits, and about the workers who served them? Finally, I was curious about how managers tried to guide the production of this intangible, interactive service, especially given its dependence on the workers themselves.
Customized contacts with workers are a major part of what clients are paying for in many luxury sites, including high-end hotels, restaurants, spas, resorts, retail shops, and first-class airline cabins. However, the limited sociological literature on hotels and other service industry organizations has rarely focused on luxury.2 And few sociologists since Thorstein Veblen, over a century ago, have investigated the luxury sector at all, let alone luxury service specifically.3
To understand luxury service, I decided I needed to participate in its production, which led me to conduct twelve months of ethnography in two luxury hotels. Based on the data I gathered and on interviews I conducted, this book looks at how managers, guests, and interactive workers negotiated unequal entitlement to resources, recognition, and labor as they produced and consumed luxury service. These issues matter for two reasons. First, they are important for our understanding of interactive work and its links to relationships and to selfhood. Second, they are significant for our conception of how work is connected to class. These questions are particularly important given the rise of both service work and economic inequality in the United States.
THE LUXURY MOMENT
The turn of the twenty-first century was an especially timely period in which to look at luxury production. In 1999, at the height of the high-tech boom, luxury spending in the United States was increasing at more than quadruple the rate of overall spending.4 Demand was rising for luxury goods, including clothing, accessories, cars, exclusive housing, private jets, fancy wine, and premium cigars.5 This active economic sector included many examples of extreme service as well as tangible products. New “boutique” medical practices, for example, offered services ranging from same-day appointments and house calls to heated towel racks and personally monogrammed robes in doctors’