Is the customer always right?Class,service
and the production of distinction in Chinese
department stores
Amy Hanser
sho代表什么Published online:8August 2007#Springer Science +Business Media B.V .2007
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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.
Shopping in urban China takes place in a transformed landscape.In stark contrast to the shortages of t
he planned economy years,a surfeit of consumer goods now competes for the attention of shoppers who pulse through market spaces.Massive glass-and-chrome structures house the new shopping complexes and modern department stores of China ’s largest cities,replacing the dour shopping spaces that characterized pre-and early-reform periods.A similar “upgrading ”of the service interactions conducted within store walls has paralleled these improvements.More goods and more stores have generated more competition,and newly-acquired mantras like “The customer is never wrong,”unheard of in the days when store clerks could act as surly gatekeepers to scarce merchandise,reflect the dramatic rise in stature of that once-neglected entity in China,the consumer.
China ’s bustling stores and marketplaces are not just barometers of economic growth,however.They are also spaces where social change and new inequalities are negotiated on a daily basis.This article explores how these everyday experiences of inequality are organized and understood in urban China by focusing upon one setting in which people from differing social classes may encounter one another:the sales counter.By extending Bourdieu ’s notion of social distinction into a workplace centered on the sale of consumer goods and services,I demonstrate that service work can centrally involve the production
Theor Soc (2007)36:415–435
DOI 10.1007/s11186-007-9042-0
A.Hanser (*)
Department of Anthropology and Sociology,University of British Columbia,6303NW Marine Drive,Vancouver,BC V6T 1Z1,Canada
e-mail:hanser@interchange.ubc.ca
and consumption of social difference,as workers respond to customer claims to class position and social status.In such cases,service work becomes distinction work.
However,the recognition and performance of social difference in service interactions is not inevitable.In China,an increasingly stratified social context and the introduction of a competitive market,where the customer is a voluntary participant in the interaction,have been central to the emergence of distinction work in urban retail settings.Within depart-ment stores,a close examination of distinction work reveals the concrete social practices through which social difference is produced in the course of everyday life.This study focuses upon the micro-dynamics involved in producing,and consuming,social distinctions in the form of service.
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A comparison of two different department stores in China throws the elements of distinction work into sharp relief.Drawing upon ethnographic field research conducted in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin,I compare service interactions at a state-owned department store,which I call the“Harbin No.X”department store,with those performed at a privately owned department store,the luxury“Sunshine”department store.At Harbin No.X,service was delivered in a working-class environment relatively free(for urbanites) from class judgments and evaluations.Because service work at the state-owned department store was originally organized under the conditions of a centralized,planned economy and involved interactions between relative social equals,service work at the store was not organized to produce class distinctions.It was not,in this sense,distinction work.By contrast,at Sunshine,service work and customer–worker interactions centrally involved the recognition of customers’class positions,primarily signaled through salesclerks’deferential behavior and closely enforced by store management.The contrast between the two settings highlights the emergence of a new,class-stratified culture of entitlements in contemporary urban China and reveals the practical forms that inequality takes in the realms of work, consumption,and daily social interaction.
Service work as“distinction work”
Many scholars portray class as ,Bourdieu1998),arguing that social interactions are a key site where class operates in everyday life(Bettie2003;Lamont and Fournier1992).West and Fenstermaker(1995)characterize class as a“situated accomplishment”realized through concrete social interactions that naturalize,normalize, and legitimate structures of inequality.Interactions serve as mortar and bricks for relations of inequality,structures that“are not automatic but must be constantly reproduced in practice”(Bettie2003,p.55).Interactions also become a site for the cultivation and expression of cultural and social sensibilities that make certain groups feel more entitled to certain social goods.The sense of entitlement that people carry with them into social interactions in different institutional settings becomes a practical expression of social hierarchy and social location(Lareau2003;Williams2006).
Consumption has long been identified as a realm for performances of class(Bourdieu 1984;Holt1997;Veblen1899[1934])and shopping as an avenue through which consumers,consciously or not,enact their class(or other)identities(Halter2000;Zukin 2004).In China,recent studies of elites and relatively privileged middle-classes suggest that consumption and lifestyle have become important markers of class-affiliation and identity (Tomba2004,2005).Among retail settings,department stores have long been associated with notions of middle-and upper-class respec
tability and have acted as key sites for the production of class distinction through consumption practices in the West(Benson1986;
Miller1981).In North America,American department stores were pioneers in cultivating customer expectations of deferential service that were tied to“new standards of gentility”sought by the middle and upper classes(Benson1986,p.134).In China,the establishment of Western-style department stores in the early1900s was tied to industrialization and the emergence of new urban middle-and upper-classes(MacPherson1998).With the rise of the Chinese Communist Party to power in1949,however,stores were gradually purged of their bourgeois associations.But economic reforms initiated in1978have brought the state’s control over retailing to a gradual end.Aging state-owned department stores have been joined by sleek new private and even foreign-invested department stores that target China’s new economic elites with luxury goods and claims of solicitous service.
Recent ethnographic studies of service interactions in US and Chinese settings(Otis 2007;Sherman2006;Williams2006)illustrate how social interactions provide the stage on which performances of social class and recognition of class entitlements are enacted.Part of what service workers in high-end service settings do,Rachel Sherman(2005,2006) demonstrates,is to recognize high-class consumers as entitled to luxury service,a marker of class privilege.
Sherman suggests that a key way in which this happens is through what she dubs the “deference imperative”Sherman(2006,p.45).Erving Goffman(1967)argued that expressions of asymmetrical deference–where one side defers to the other,and deference is not reciprocated–are“status rituals”that recognize unequal social positions.Asymmetric deference can be seen as a way to convert economic and cultural capital(class position)into “a capital of recognition”(Bourdieu1998,p.102)though which dominant social groups both portray and receive recognition of their way of life as worthy of esteem(Bourdieu 1990,p.135).Service interactions that involve acts of deference,then,become practical enactments of relative social locations,a“doing”of social difference.
For Sherman,a central aspect of luxury service work is that“recognition”of guests involves the subordination of workers’own selves.As a result,Sherman’s research focuses upon issues of worker consent and normalization of inequality in contexts in which workers willingly allow the extraction of their emotional and physical labor for guests. Eileen Otis’s(2007)study of luxury hotels in China reveals similar patterns of subordination and worker strategies to reinterpret,or invert,the guest–worker hierarchy that produce worker consent.
position of the dayBut whereas Sherman focuses on the inter-subjective elements of luxury service and the work of rec
ognition as they relate to the worker’s“self,”here I concentrate on the performances of social distinctions and of social distance.In particular,I seek to pinpoint the production of difference and hierarchy by contrasting deferential,“entitlement”producing service interactions with more mutual,relatively deference-free ones.Rather than focus upon worker compliance and consent–which in my research sites was secured by more despotic means than Sherman or even Otis identify(Hanser2007)–the goal here is to examine the practical and symbolic content of service interactions themselves.
I label interactive service work that is organized to produce class distinctions distinction work,and I demonstrate that demands for deference can be acts of power that both enact and constitute relations of inequality,not simply reflecting symbolic capital and relative class positions but also reproducing structures of inequality(Rollins1985).While the production of class difference is also intricately linked to other axes of social difference in China,especially gender and generation(Hanser2005,2006),this article focuses upon customer–salesclerk interactions and the micro-politics of class,where clerk expressions of deference serve as a key means for recognizing and marking class privilege and social entitlements in urban China.
怎么用mysql创建一张表软件设计师考试内容Research methods and field sites:Retail in China
Data for this study were gathered in China between2001–2002,when I conducted participant observation in two large department stores in the northeastern city of Harbin.In each site I spent about two-and-a-half months working7-h days,6days a week.I also spent lengths of time observing in a number of other stores,markets,and service work settings elsewhere in the city.I supplemented ethnographic work with interviews of workers,store managers,merchandise suppliers,and other industry experts and conducted archival research on institutional changes to China’s retail sector since the introduction of economic reforms in1979.
Harbin represents an example of China’s large,urban settings in the throes of economic and social change.A city of roughly3million and the capital of Heilongjiang Province in China’s far northeast,Harbin over the past20or so years has witnessed innumerable changes.A center for largely Russian and Eastern Europeanémigrés in China in the early 1900s(Wolff1999),Harbin has since become an unequivocally“Chinese”city(Carter 2002)and a center of heavy industrial production and state planning in the early Mao era. With the introduction of economic reforms by the Chinese party-state in1979,Harbin like other Chinese cities witnessed the rise of private business,the decline of state industry,and an increasingly visible gap between the material circumstances of the city’s richest and poorest residents.As part of China’s northern“rust belt,”reform-era policies have resulted in high r
egional levels of unemployment(Lee2000,2007).In this context,Harbin’s increasingly stratified retail sector serves as a barometer of these broader changes.
Changes to retailing and the service sector more generally have been enormous.A sector characterized by scarcity and dominated by state enterprises has become dramatically competitive and dominated by private business.For example,between1980and1995, state-owned retailers saw their share of total retail sales drop from over50%to less than 30%(Wang and Jones2001);their sales officially stood at just13%of the total in2003.1In Harbin,between1993and1995,the city center’s four large state-run department stores were joined by at least six competitors(representing state,private,and joint-venture investments),and another three department stores had opened by1997.As in other Chinese cities,department stores saw profit margins shrink from25–30%to a scant3–5%(Wang and Jones2001,p.32).
Many new department stores target China’s newly rich by offering not only luxury merchandise but also luxury service;these stores often sit side-by-side with older,state-run operations where dramatically different patterns of service interaction unfold.My first site was one such aging retailer,a state-owned department store I call the Harbin No.“X”Department Store2and one of Harbin’s oldest and largest department stores,employing almost3,000people.Despite numerous organizational refor
ms,this store retained many aspects of the traditional work unit,providing secure employment and numerous benefits to its workers.From the time it was nationalized in the late1940s,the store symbolized the bounty of state socialism and enjoyed a privileged position in the state’s centrally controlled distribution system.Working-class salesclerks dealt with mostly blue-collar shoppers. Access to Harbin No.X was gained though social connections to a manager,who 1Calculated from figures in the China Statistical Yearbook,2004.The2003figure should be interpreted with caution,as after1995,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.
2This and all other proper nouns used in the article are pseudonyms.
communicated my research intentions to upper levels of store management.Here I sold down coats in the women’s department.
The second setting was a high-end,privately owned department store–the“Sunshine”Department Store–a glistening structure located in Harbin’s downtown where both the rich and style-conscious liked to shop.This luxury department store first opened in the early 1990s,employed a staff of over1,0
00and offered six floors of expensive merchandise to Harbin shoppers.The store was run by a private mainland Chinese business group and was generally acknowledged by shoppers and retail industry specialists alike as the city’s most exclusive,and probably most successful,department store.Entry into Sunshine was arranged through a cashmere sweater company that supplied merchandise to both stores. Here I worked as a uniformed salesclerk in a cashmere sweater boutique.Although I never really“blended in”in either of these two sites,in each setting my presence achieved a kind of normalcy as I became another fixture of the environment,and my foreignness meant that my research was never covert,that I could take field notes openly and raise all sorts of issues and questions with my informants.
Although the two department stores ostensibly operated on the same organizational model with regards to merchandising and commission-based pay schemes,the structure of work was different in key ways(Hanser2007).Sunshine,for example,operated with a flexible,despotic work regime in contrast to the job security and worker autonomy found at Harbin No.X.In contrast to Harbin No.X’s stable workforce made up of largely middle-aged women,Sunshine’s more deferential and“distinctive”workforce of young women under30experienced high levels of turnover.These factors suggest that the two organizations and their managers were differently invested in the production of
distinction and social difference on the sales floor–an issue I return to in the conclusion–but they tell us nothing about the actual content of those interactions and the texture of inequality in urban China today.
“Serving the people”in a state-owned department store
In the fall of2001,I was assigned work at the down coat counter in the women’s department of the Harbin No.X Department Store.This state-owned department store had retained many aspects of a state-socialist workplace and an urban Chinese work unit. Particularly notable,however,was the store’s proletarian quality of service that extracted little deferential behavior from salesclerks.Managers,focused more on the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state than a stratifying consumer market,intervened little in service interactions and did not structure sales work around the production and marking of social distinctions.As a result,workers and customers,drawn from similar socioeconomic strata, could view each other as roughly social equals,and store workers even established a hierarchy of knowledge and expertise from which they actively disciplined–and were rarely disciplined by–customers.Salesclerk deference was not an expected part of the service interaction and did not serve as a means for expressing the class distinctions that would be such an important part of the service interaction at the luxury department store.
A socialist(service)organization
As both a physical and social space,the state-owned department store was characterized by a distinctly proletarian,even revolution-era,feel.The store’s material form was vast, covering an entire block in the heart of the city,a massive ring of eight towering floors of

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