Attacking the Cultural Turn: Misrepresentations of the Service Encounter

Service work is often (mis)represented within western sociology throughhyperbolic language, as its increasing incidence and changing character is seenas symptomatic of profound social change. This paper argues that many recentempirical investigations into, and the dominant representations of, the serviceencounter (employment involving employee-customer interaction which isrepresented as a particularly ‘new’ form of work) exaggerate its novelty as‘cultural’ work. Through a critical analysis of some recent empirical accountsof the service encounter and drawing upon one example from the author's ownethnographic research into service encounters within north- eastern England, itis argued that the dominant representations over-emphasise the cultural, andunderplay both the economic and gendered, dynamics of the employment experience.More specifically, we argue that it is the active combination of ‘the economic’and ‘the cultural’ - the way in which gendered demands for employees to developparticular norms, values, personalities and identities are embedded withininequitable economic relationships - which can shape the employment experienceof service employees. Dominant representations of the service encounter alsoreject the contemporary relevance of ‘traditional’ industrial sociologicalanalyses of employment relations. However, given the weak empirical foundationsof ‘the cultural turn’, we argue that this contention cannot be supported. Infact, it is suggested that many ‘traditional’ industrial sociological analysesprecisely examine the interplay between economic, gendered and culturalrelations and therefore continue to have relevance for understandingcontemporary employment. Finally, our arguments are located within debates aboutthe cultural turn within the wider sociological discipline.