Contemporary Issue on Aesthetic Labour in Hospitality

Service jobs now account for around three quarters of all jobs in the UK, with retail and hospitality alone providing nearly five million jobs (Hospitality Training Foundation, 2003; University of Warwick, 2004). Organization in the hospitality industry vary enormously, ranging from first class and luxury hotels providing extravagant, full 24-hour service to the more homely comforts of a bed and breakfast establishment; from fast food restaurants to Michelin starred restaurant. In turn, the jobs provided by these organizations demand a variety of skills and attributes from those employees interacting with customers. Increasingly, though, there is an appreciation that employees in these jobs not only provide desired levels of service in terms of responding to customers in a friendly and sociable manner but can also be part of the branding of service companies by becoming, in words of Zeithaml and Bitner (2003, 318), ‘walking billboards’. Witz, Warhurst and Nickson (2003: 44) point out that, for many companies, employees have become part of this branding exercise, with ‘aesthetic labourers … the animate component of the material culture that makes up the corporate landscape’. Aesthetic labour is a concept based on the notion that employers in parts of the service industries described as the ‘style labour market’ (Nickson, Warhurst and Dutton, 2004: 3), such as boutique hotels, designer retailers and style cafes, bars and restaurants, require ‘aesthetic skills’ in addition to social and technical skills from their workers (Warhurst and Nickson, 2005). The genesis of aesthetic labour as a concept lays in early 1990s of newspaper job advertisements that stipulated the attractiveness of applicants as recruitment and selection criteria in the hospitality industry. The term ‘aesthetic labour’ is analytically complex. It refers to the hiring of people with certain capacities and attributes that favourably appeal to customers and which are then developed

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