Eileen Otis publishes "Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China"
Eileen Otis (Ph.D. 2003) has published a new article based on her dissertation research. This article examines how local consumer markets impact staff-customer relationships. Are relationships and interactions between staffs and customers influenced by gender and local communities and markets? Why, in service work, such as hospitality services where women constitute the majority of the workforce, do workers display different gender norms or organize customer relations differently in different settings?
Eileen Otis' work was published in the American Sociological Review. Otis studies this phenomenon by comparing two luxury hotels in two Chinese cities, Beijing and Kunming, both run according to the same business plan created by a U.S. corporation.
She finds that in the Beijing hotel, which caters largely to Western businessmen, female service workers use feminized practices, which originated in the United States, to anticipate and cater to customer needs. In the Kunming hotel, female service workers display their expertise at their jobs to maintain control over their customers, who are largely Chinese businessman entertaining clients.
One reason for this type of interaction is that workers do not want to be mistaken for sex workers, who are common in the area. The hotels are both working off of the same business plan, but the workers’ on-site interpretations of the plan vary widely due to localized customs.
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