The Politics Of Production In Service Industry And Moral Career Of Waitresses

The emerging consumerism in modern China since the1980s has re-contextualized urban space and a rampant materialism has radically changed people’s life styles. Besides ostentatious banquets, KTV clubs and bars are the most popular sites of leisure consumption. Nightlife culture is becoming not only a new form of urbanism in Chinese cities, but also a new platform of economic growth. Meanwhile, new service industries also need increasing numbers of low-waged laborers. Drawing on the ethnography research, this study explored the gendered regime of labor production in the urban service industry. The study found that through enhanced appearance and heart management, they are trained to be the object of males’desire and obedient servants. In the labor process, the emotional labor and aesthetic production are the core production mechanisms.In addition, this research reveals the moral careers of the young girls who are working as waitresses in the nightclubs and how the stigma of job affects the individual’s self-identity and moral narrative. Through the perspective of Goffman’s’stigma theory’, it can be reviewed that in the nightclub industry, women are often caught in the situation of multiple role-playing and role conflict, individuals are able to use the information control, distinguish between different selves and the audience isolated ways, to achieve the purpose of self-adaptation. However, these adjustment methods will have the possibility of failure. When moral boundaries moved, the actors will face the risk of self-division and self-exile. Due to the low professional prestige and the stigma of professional, the workers have been looking for escape and the possibility of change.