Bringing in the Excluded? Aesthetic labour, skills and training in the ‘new’ economy doc

Identification by us of this ‘new’ form of labour provides the basis to review some of the implications in relation to skill acquisition and usage, current training provision and social

Bringing in the Excluded? Aesthetic

labour, skills and training in the ‘new’

economy

DENNIS NICKSON, CHRIS WARHURST, ANNE MARIE CULLEN &

ALLANWATT [1]

The Scottish Hotel School, The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G4 0LG

ABSTRACT Debates about the nature of work, employment and skill formation in the

‘new’ economy have, to date, neglected the notion of ‘aesthetic labour’ Identification by us

of this ‘new’ form of labour provides the basis to review some of the implications in relation

to skill acquisition and usage, current training provision and social exclusion as it effects an area of the economy that is predicted to have massive jobs growth Thus, the article briefly reports on a pilot ‘aesthetic skills’ training programme developed within the Glasgow milieu

to address some of these concerns Despite some concerns about social control, we consider the role of such dedicated training in improving the employability of the long-term unemployed and conclude that provision of this type has a role in addressing social exclusion

in the labour market.

Introduction

In response, and sensitive, to the ‘skills deficit’ that is emerging as a result of the structural shift in the economy and employment, this article will report on research that has attempted to explore an under-developed and under-appreciated form of labour in interactive service work (in this case retail, tourism/hospitality, and financial services) in the ‘new’ Glasgow economy This labour is termed by us

‘aesthetic labour’ and details of the initial empirical research that led to the

development of the concept can be found in Nickson et al (2001) Furthermore, a

discussion of the conceptualisation of the relationship between aesthetic labour,

aesthetics and organisation is outlined in Witz et al (2003) Essentially, though, we

see such labour as a supply of embodied capacities and attributes possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment Employers then mobilise, develop and commodify these capacities and attributes through processes of recruitment, selection and training, transforming them into ‘competences’ and ‘skills’ which are then geared towards producing a ‘style’ of service encounter deliberately intended to appeal to the senses of customers, most obviously in a visual or aural way Although analytically more complex, ‘looking good’ or ‘sounding right’ are the most overt manifestations of aesthetic labour In essence, with aesthetic labour, employers are

ISSN 1363-9080 print; 1469-9435 online/03/020185-19  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1363908032000070684

seeking employees who can portray the firm’s image through their work, and at the same time appeal to the senses of the customer for those firms’ commercial benefit This article focuses on issues that arise from aesthetic labour; principally, skills, training and social exclusion A key consideration is the possibility that certain potential employees will be excluded from these ‘style’ labour market jobs, and indeed more general employment involving interactive service work This exclusion arises firstly because employers determine who is aesthetically acceptable during recruitment and selection processes; because current training provision is not geared

to meeting employers’ skills demand with supply; and many of those excluded appear to be self-selecting in not applying for such jobs

This last point is important According to the Scottish Executive (1999) creating and sustaining employability is the responsibility of the state, individuals and training providers However, in the UK there has been a shifting of responsibility to individuals to ensure their employability, which means not just attaining and maintaining employment but also progressing within it To do so individuals are being encouraged to develop an awareness of their own human capital—that is, their skills, knowledge and so on—and the necessary training to generate that capital Whilst the state remains the largest source of funding for vocational training, the latter is provided by intermediate training agencies This approach is economistic, with an assumption that individuals are able to ‘fit’ themselves into the market, by meeting (employers’) demand with supply Significantly, the skills that provide for employability are not just technical but also ‘people’ skills As the Scottish Executive (1999, p 37) states, ‘There is also a need to develop the personal skills and attributes of the individual in a way which will make them attractive to potential employers.’

The Scottish Executive notes that people skills are those relating to effective interpersonal, communication and social skills We argue that this definition is too narrow and requires conceptual broadening to include ‘aesthetic skills’ In order to address the development of this more broadly defined people skills, the research team have been working collaboratively with the Wise Group—a social enterprise with charitable status—whose objective is to help long-term unemployed people find and keep jobs From this collaboration a training programme has emerged that sought to address the development of aesthetic skills in a group of long-term unemployed people in Glasgow

This article will firstly briefly discuss the reality of job creation and skill formation

in the so-called ‘new economy’ In particular, this section will suggest there is a need for a more nuanced reading of the type of jobs created in the new economy Specifically, the extent to which knowledge jobs are being created is often overstated and does not recognise the reality of large numbers of routine interactive service jobs Following this analysis, the article will then consider some of the more fundamental aspects of foregrounding aesthetics and style as an important part of contemporary service workplaces The subsequent section of the article considers the skill needs that pertain to aesthetic labour This discussion then includes a short review of current training provision and social exclusion in relation to the labour market The review of the relationship between aesthetic labour, skills training and

social exclusion provides the context to assess the response of one training provider, the Wise Group, to this increasingly important ‘new’ skill As part of this discussion the article will also attempt to assess some of the more difficult questions to arise from a training programmes of this type Firstly, whether such training merely equates to a form of social control; and secondly the desirability, not just feasibility,

of training for potentially low-waged, low-skilled jobs in areas such as retail and hospitality

Jobs, Skills and ‘Body’ Work

Despite claims that we are all now Californian-style cyber workers, with high incomes and high job satisfaction, there is as much continuity as change in contem-porary work and employment (Warhurst & Thompson, 1998) It does need to be recognised, however, that there have been some key developments in work and employment There have been some significant occupational changes, with a dis-cernible shift from agriculture and manufacturing to services across the advanced economies This trend is set to continue The National Skills Task Force (NSTF) (1999) predicts that the numbers of professional and associated employees is set to grow dramatically to 2009 However, it is an ‘hourglass economy’ that appears to be emerging in the UK (Nolan, 2001) This economy comprises an expansion of high skill, high wage, high value added work at the top end of the labour market and the expansion of low skill, low wage, low value added work at the bottom end In this respect, the largest jobs growth, increasing by over 30% over the same period, will take place in personal and protective services (NSTF, 1999) Most actual and forecast job growth, then, has occurred in more mundane services It is these, what

might be termed, ‘McJobs’ involving low skill, low wages, little training, and which are highly routinised and stringently monitored and not ‘iMacJobs’ requiring

con-siderable training and involving high skill, wages and autonomy that characterise employment in the so-called ‘new’ economy [2]

Such trends have huge consequences for the skills demanded of employees by employers Certainly cyber workers will need ‘thinking skills’, identifying and solving problems by manipulating symbols and ideas, but most new jobs will involve ‘person

to person’ skills, requiring good interpersonal interaction (Scottish Office, 1999) Most usually, these person-to-person skills are framed in terms of emotion manage-ment skills (see for example, Hochschild, 1983) but we would argue that increas-ingly many service workers now require aesthetic skills involving corporeal management, and most particularly in what we have termed the style labour market (Warhurst & Nickson, 2001) Reflecting on these developments, and providing a comprehensive review of knowledge, skills and competitiveness in the UK, Keep and Mayhew (1999) make the point that the meaning of the term ‘skill’ has expanded considerably in recent years They note, ‘Many employers … appear to be using the term “skill” to embrace personal characteristics and psychological traits.’ It is at this point that ‘skill’ becomes part of ‘competency’ The latter is usually regarded as encompassing the skills, knowledge, behavioural characteristics and other attributes that for employers provide for the prediction of superior work performance (Storey,

2001) Importantly, Keep and Mayhew (1999, p 10) continue, ‘This broadening of the spectrum and mix of knowledge, capabilities, traits and physical attributes that can be grouped under the umbrella term of skills raises a number of major issues for policy-makers.’

The implications of the shifting patterns of work, employment and the skills required of employees has engendered something of a dualism in terms of whether these trends are to be applauded or decried For example, Gorz (1982, p 71) describing the ‘post-industrial proletariat’ suggests that for them, ‘Work … does not belong to the individuals who perform it, nor can it be termed their own activity It belongs to the machinery of social production, is allowed and programmed by it, remaining external to the individuals upon whom it is imposed.’ Indeed, more recently in his critique of contemporary work, Gorz (1999) rails against what such work entails because, lacking materiality, there is nothing produced from it upon which individuals can achieve self-realisation by inscribing themselves More specifically in considering the essence of service work, Gorz even suggests that the

‘professionalisation of “interpersonal skills” as a means of expanding employment poisons our day to day culture’ (p 71)

By contrast, Bell (1974) in his work on the so-called ‘post-industrial society’ regards these developments as less of a degradation of work and more simply a positive reflection of a transformation of a society based upon fabrication to intellectualism Bell uses the game metaphor to describe a ‘game against nature’ in the pre-industrial phase, a ‘game against fabricated nature’ in the industrial era and

a ‘game between persons’ in the post-industrial era Clearly, in this game between persons the utilisation of ‘interpersonal skills’ becomes a key component of work and employment Indeed, we would argue that increasingly, as a further development, how we ‘present’ ourselves in this game is equally important

Whilst useful in delineating the debate about the nature of work in the post-manufacturing era, neither Gorz nor Bell explicitly considers the embodied aspects

of service work For Bell, with his emphasis on intellectualism, the focus becomes scientific, technical and professional occupations and the emergence of knowledge-type workers For Gorz, the focus in on the development and empowerment (to use current terminology) of the working class for itself He similarly suggested that a new vanguard of highly qualified, mainly, again, technical and white-collar workers are emerging concerned with the control of work To consider the issue of embodiment

in work we need to consider the wider sociological literature, especially that which indicates how individuals’ corporeality can be ‘made up’ (du Gay, 1996) through organisational strategies and processes To explore this possibility, it is necessary to turn to the work of Bourdieu and Goffman

Bourdieu (1984) articulates the body as ‘physical capital’ or embodied disposi-tions to be ‘made up’ These disposidisposi-tions refer to durable ways of standing, speaking, walking and so of feeling and thinking Elaborate techniques of body work, with care and repair, are necessary to develop new bodily schemas of posture, movements and subjective states Unfortunately, Bourdieu’s analysis is wholly concerned with body work for societal—mostly class—reproduction We would argue that it is also useful for understanding organisational reproduction It is here

that Goffman’s work has utility for interrogating the production and performance of aesthetic labour, capturing its visual elements of ‘face-to-face, body-to-body, seen-seer to seen-seen-seer’ (Crossley, 1995, p 145) and its aural element of voice-to-voice; in short, alerting us to both the sentient and sensible aspects of aesthetic labour This reproduction can be best explained by reference to Goffman’s exposition of the staged and scripted performance of the embodied self in the workplace This dramatugical mode of analysis is most salient in Goffman’s (1959, p 83) description

of service work:

one finds that service personnel, whether in profession, bureaucracy, busi-ness, or craft, enliven their manner with movements which express proficiency and integrity, but whatever this manner conveys about them, often its major purpose is to establish a favourable definition of their service

or product

Bourdieu then provides an understanding of body work and Goffman an apprecia-tion of how this body work is performed in the workplace, and which underpins our conceptual understanding of the aesthetic labour that is an emerging feature of work and employment in Glasgow and other post-manufacturing economies (for further

elaboration of this conceptualisation, see Witz et al., 2003).

The Importance of Aesthetic Labour and its Impact on Skills Demand

Within Glasgow’s employment shift from manufacturing to services, we have identified an emerging style labour market, encompassing designer-type retail and hospitality outlets, and which is attracting much media and practitioner attention (see, for example, Frewin, 1999) These perceptions are encapsulated by the labelling in the popular press of Glasgow as ‘the style capital of Scotland, if not all

of Britain’ (Anon., 1999, p 25)

A key issue to arise from this development is a misunderstanding of the type of skills that are currently being sought in the service economy and which can lead to potential employees being excluded Acknowledgement of the existence of the need for aesthetic skills and competencies in the style labour market is not to suggest that organisations have embarked upon a new wave management strategy that is appli-cable to all service organisations Equally, though, there is some evidence from our research that the aesthetic skills and competencies being sought by employers in the style labour market are now occurring less systematically in other high street retailers, banks and hospitality outlets

That said, we do also recognise that the notion of self-presentation and aesthetics

in the workplace is by no means a new phenomenon For example, within much of the popular business literature great play is made of way in which individual employees can manage their image by engaging in ‘impression management’ or

‘non-verbal influencing’ in order to socially negotiate their interactions with other organisational members Thus, we aim to ‘package’ and ‘sell’ ourselves in a way that enhances our career prospects Moreover, in relation to personal aesthetics, Hopfl (2000, p 197) has argued that ‘the cultivation of appearances, even a certain

theatricality—as a key constituent of organisational success—is not a recent inven-tion’ She notes how candidates for the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—as long ago as the 16th century had to have ‘a pleasing manner of speech and verbal facility and also good appearance in the absence of any notable ugliness, disfigurement or deformity’ (2000, p 204) In a similar vein there are allusions to the importance of presentation and a recognition of ‘body work’ in organisations in the work of a number of authors (see for example, Adkins, 2000; Hancock & Tyler, 2000), all of whom focus on service work However, the conceptualisation of labour in all these works is primarily induced by an interest in sexuality and gender, and less with a process of commodification

Moreover, we would argue that employer demand for aesthetic skills and compe-tences is becoming more prevalent because of its perceived commercial utility as the service sector expands In the 1980s retailers were concerned with seeking differen-tiation via image, based on ‘design interiors’ This concern with the service organis-ation’s image projection has now enveloped the organisorganis-ation’s employees, Lowe and Crewe (1996) note Constantly ‘on display’, these employees are increasingly regarded by employers as part of the service product

It is no surprise therefore that a recent survey of company dress codes undertaken

by Industrial Relations Services (2000) highlights the importance companies now place on their employees’ appearance when dealing with customers Relatedly, it is important to note that all organisations have an aesthetic appeal but the form of aesthetic being offered may vary from one type of service organisation to another The aesthetic of a style restaurant in Groucho St Jude’s boutique hotel in Glasgow will be very different from that of Harry Ramsden’s fish and chip restaurant in the same city

It is important to note that aesthetic skills do not replace but complement social and technical skills In the style labour market, management need, and employees use, a matrix of skills; technical, social and aesthetic Previous research has empha-sised the first, current research has brought greater attention to the second, but the third—aesthetic—has been overlooked to date

Our research indicates that employers in industries such as retail and hospitality are not, in the first instance, seeking potential employees with technical skills This findings affirm those of the Work Wise report (Farquhar, 1996) that technical skills rank low with Glasgow employers as criteria for recruitment and selection, in fact 23rd out of 24—just above being a member of a youth organisation! Technical skills tend to be developed once employees are inside the organisation, and then usually derived from ‘on the job’ training in routine interactive service work Given this situation we need to consider some of the potential policy ramifications, to which attention now turns The Work Wise survey of employers covered a range of sectors Disaggregated for retail alone in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, a desire by employ-ers for technical skills again does not appear in the top ten criteria Instead, in this industry, as in the style labour market more specifically, employers seek person-to-person skills Clearly, employers do want social skills, such as communication and team working They also rely upon the physical appearance, or the modulated voice and understated accent or more specifically, the embodied capacities and attributes

of those to be employed

Three Policy Issues: skills, training and social exclusion

The Skills that Matter

Policy-makers and academics are engaged in a keen debate about the importance of skills for enhancing individual employability, firm productivity and national compet-itiveness There is now clear evidence that aesthetic skills have become an important element of the skills that matter Aesthetics skills are clearly the key skills demanded

by designer retailers, boutique hotels and style bars, cafe´s and restaurants, not just

in Glasgow but across the UK, in cities such as Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester

In a national survey of skills needs in hotels, restaurants and pubs and bars undertaken by the Hospitality Training Foundation (HtF), the national training organisation for the industry, 85% of employers stated their employees’ personal presentation and appearance to be very important Personal presentation and appearance was ranked 3rd both now and in the future, making it more important than even employees’ ability to follow instructions, demonstrate initiative or have communication skills (HtF, 2000)

Policymakers are beginning to realise that people or person-to-person skills are as important to employers as thinking skills We would argue that these person-to-per-son skills need to be better conceived Affecting a desired service encounter requires the use of both social and aesthetic skills in the style labour market Employability here relies upon employees’ skill in also managing their appearance, corporeality and voice Along with social, aesthetic skills then form those person-to-person skills, as Table I indicates

Undoubtedly, California-style cyber workers are at the cutting edge of the new economy; however, as we have noted, their numbers are limited now and are predicted to remain so There will be cyber workers who enjoy their time musing in and able to afford high price lattes and cappuccinos at the style bars, cafe´s and restaurants And they will want these places, its hardware (that is the physical environment) and software (that is the people serving them), to be pleasing to them What is required is a more balanced approach to skills supply and demand A plethora of discussion articles and reports now offer differing terminology for the range of skills which employers need The lexicon has grown large: ‘vocational skills’, ‘cognitive skills’, ‘manual skills’, ‘core skills’, ‘generic skills’ and ‘technical

Table I Redefining person-to-person skills

Person-to-person skills Social Aesthetic

key elements key elements

management of feelings management of appearance emotion management corporeal management

examples examples

empathy looking good communication sounding right

skills’ are but some As we noted earlier the umbrella of ‘skill’ has broadened considerably in recent years That many of these skills are not easy to accredit with formal qualifications can prove problematic both for training providers and the funders of that training Giving a set of activities a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) is not the answer, though it is a preference of many in Government Too often skill is conflated with qualification, or the latter used as a proxy measure of the former Instead, there is a need to focus on the skills used at work We would suggest that there are a range of skills that now matter given that the definition of skill has broadened reflecting economic shifts

Government training policy needs to be balanced and coordinated to address this range of skills Funding bodies should encourage training bodies not to compete in cherry-picking areas of training for new economy jobs, as currently defined by policy-makers, but ensure that supply meets demand by ascertaining and responding

to the needs of all employers; in both the so-called new and old economies Unfortunately, current vocational training policy for the whole economy tends to

be driven by a traditional approach—the technical skill model, transmuted recently into information technology (IT) skills [3] Taking a wider view of the economy and the changes in it suggests a very different prescription

Training for Industry

Discussions about personal aesthetics have long focused on middle-class occupa-tions such as management, professionals and ‘City types’ There are still endless discussions in the business press about the cut and colour of suits and the whole

‘grooming for success’ theme of management training (Spillane, 2000) But what is accepted at the top end of the labour market is also now becoming more important

at the lower end And fortunately, the importance of aesthetic skills and its current omission is beginning to permeate debate about the supply-side of vocational training in the UK In their overview of the current training provision in the UK, Keep and Mayhew (1999) suggest that the style labour market represents a so far unappreciated ‘flipside’ to the knowledge economy in terms of training provision The importance of personal aesthetics for not only ‘getting into’ but also ‘doing’ a job is recognised by Keep and Mayhew (1999, p 11) who argue that ‘vocational education and training providers would appear to need to be thinking about speech training, deportment, and personal grooming classes rather than degrees, GCSEs or NVQs’

The announcement in January 2000 by Tessa Jowell, then UK Minister respon-sible for the New Deal, that all New Dealers would be offered personal presentation courses as part of a ten-point plan to improve this Government initiative is a tacit admission of the importance of the need for aesthetic skills Research has shown that bespoke training programmes for the long-term unemployed significantly enhances individuals’ employability Targeting New Deal training programmes in areas of high unemployment is regarded as a priority (Finn, 2001) The emergent style labour market might compound this high unemployment To appreciate this point

Table II Unacceptable discrimination?

Three young women were dismissed from their motorway services employment

because their manager told them that they were not the sort of people that the

company wanted to employ One wore glasses, one was too quiet and the other black.

A supermarket check-out girl was sent home by her manager to shave her legs

because doing otherwise would ‘put customers off’.

A 21-year-old man was rejected for a part-time job in a bar because he had a ponytail

which, the manager felt, ‘might put off the customers’.

A sales assistant was dismissed for becoming ‘too fat and ugly’ whilst she was

pregnant.

One designer boutique said that they would never employ anyone over a dress size 16 because

it did not project the right image.

A 29-year-old manager stated that she would soon have to leave her work in a trendy

city centre bar after her next birthday because of her age.

Railway guards were told to roll down their sleeves to hide tattoos from customers or

face the sack A top union official accused the company of undermining safety by

hiring guards based on their looks and ability to sell to passengers, rather than on

operational and safety knowledge.

These examples are drawn from our own research and:

A NON (2000) Barman wins in brush with sex bias laws Metro, 13 January, p 12.

L AMB, J (1999) Face value gains credence in ‘unwritten’ HR policies, People

Management, 25 November, pp 14–15.

R ODRICK, V (1997) Guards turn ugly in safety dispute, Evening Times, 1 August,

p 1.

the article will now briefly consider the extent to which the emergence of aesthetic labour may lead to social exclusion

‘Too Posh For Me’: social exclusion and the style labour market

Designer-type retail and hospitality outlets are part of product segmentation Our research and other examples, however, point to the discrimination that can occur in the recruitment and selection of employees for the style labour market, as well as more prosaic customer facing jobs (and see Table II)

These examples appear as anomalous but discrimination is more widespread, even structural Used widely by EU policy-makers, the term ‘social exclusion’ is relatively new to political and academic debate in the UK but it is attracting much attention (see for example, Atkinson & Hills, 1998) Social exclusion has become a compre-hensive term, encompassing employment, income, welfare, social experience and democratic participation In the UK, use of the term reflects interest patterns or distortions to a social system, for example, discrimination It is also used to highlight

the dynamic processes through which people are disadvantaged, including employ-ment opportunities Changes in the labour market are one developemploy-ment that has led

to inequalities of income and so contributes to the process of social exclusion It is suggested that the development of policies that offer employment opportunities for the long-term unemployed, older and younger workers should be a focus of atten-tion The causes of social exclusion are structural, not random Factors such as unemployment and discrimination serve to create and sustain it Tackling exclusion arising from economic ‘distortions’ is a key issue for policy-makers because of its direct (welfare payments for example) and indirect (crime, health and so on) costs

as well as its negative effects on the country’s competitiveness by restricting available and apposite labour

In the context of an emergent style labour market there are a number of key issues

in relation to this exclusion; discrimination by employers, self-exclusion by the unemployed and the mismatch between training supply and need The first issue involves acknowledging who is being employed Evidence would suggest that designer retailers, boutique hotels and style bars, cafe´s and restaurants, are drawing upon particular segments of the labour market Most notably these organisations tend to seek younger people from middle-class suburban areas, especially students, who could often be thought of as having what Bourdieu (1984) has termed the

‘cultural capital’ required to work in these organisations Clearly, there is a related point here in terms of access to further and higher education Students who have access to higher education, in particular, may well undergo a process of socialisation that allows them to further refine and develop the cultural capital which may be inherent anyway from their largely middle-class backgrounds (Langlois & Lucas, 2002)

In Glasgow, commuters from the middle-class suburbs now fill 50% of jobs Resultantly, younger people from those areas of Glasgow with the highest unem-ployment, the working-class inner-city areas, who might have been expected to be absorbed into the service sector as manufacturing declined in the city, are seemingly being excluded The consequence is a high percentage of inner-city long-term unemployment This suggests that a key issue is the mismatch between the skills that the unemployed can offer and their relevance or otherwise for the type of jobs likely

to be available Drawing again on the Glasgow example, 20,000 people are unem-ployed in the city but there exists 5500 unfilled job vacancies, the vast majority of which are in retail and hospitality (Holland, 2000) Our contention would be that a proportion of these jobs are likely to remain unfilled unless long-term unemployed people are equipped with aesthetic skills

In addition to the recruitment and selection strategies of companies, a second issue is that those being excluded appear also to be self-selecting The Glasgow University-based Training and Employment Research Unit (TERU) (1999) reports the results of a number of focus groups held with unemployed people, and which sought to ascertain the perception of the unemployed in Glasgow towards growth sector jobs—that is, jobs in hospitality, retail and call centres The report suggests that there may be something of an expectations gap between employer requirements and the perception of these requirements by the unemployed This is partially