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Gender, Work and Organization.

Vol. 16 No. 3 May 2009

I Cant Put a Smiley Face On: Working-Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the New Economy
Darren Nixon*
The growth of the service economy has coincided with the large-scale detachment from the labour market of low-skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low-skilled men, this article explores the mens attitudes to entry-level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working-class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low-skilled service work as a future source of employment. Keywords: men, masculinity, service work, emotional labour, working class

Introduction
he service sector now provides most employment in contemporary Britain. Services currently account for over 80 per cent of all employment, up from 60 per cent in the late 1970s (Nixon, 2005). Yet, the rise of the service economy has coincided with the large-scale detachment from the labour market of men. Since the late 1970s male employment has actually declined, while the number of working-age men classied as economically inactive has doubled from 1.4 to 2.8 million (Alcock et al., 2003). During the same period female employment has expanded by over 4 million and women have taken around two-thirds of the 6 million service jobs generated since the late 1970s (Nixon, 2005). This highly signicant shift in the structure of employment
Address for correspondence: *Leeds Metropolitan University, D1002a Civic Quarter, Leeds LS1 3HE, e-mail: d.nixon@leedsmet.ac.uk
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reects traditional patterns of occupational segregation by sex. De-industrialization and the decline of employment in manufacturing has led to the collapse of demand for the male manual workers who dominate employment in the declining heavy industries (Green and Owen, 1998), while the growth of the service sector has stimulated demand for the female workers who have historically dominated many of the occupations found in this sector (Bradley, 1989, 1999; Hakim, 1979; Honeyman, 2000; Simonton, 1998). Yet, economic restructuring has not affected all men equally. The most signicant declines in male economic activity over recent years have been among manual workers and men with few skills and education qualications (Gregg and Wadsworth, 1998; Alcock et al., 2003; Faggio and Nickell, 2003). Over a third of men with no qualications are currently economically inactive in Britain compared to only 5 per cent of men educated to NVQ level 5 and 10 per cent of men educated to NVQ level 3 (Campbell et al., 2001). Similarly, male manual workers are up to four times more likely to be unemployed as men from managerial or professional occupational backgrounds (Campbell et al., 2001). Thus, while men with high-level skills and educational qualications continue to have very good employment prospects in the contemporary economy, low-skilled manual workers are heavily over-represented among the general stock of long-term unemployed and economically inactive men in Britain (Alcock et al., 2003; Campbell et al., 2001; Nixon, 2005). Older (50+) and younger (1624) men have faced particular difculties in contemporary labour markets. Both groups exhibit economic inactivity rates up to four times higher than men of prime working age (2440) (Alcock et al., 2003). Low-skilled younger men have experienced signicantly lengthened transitions into work due to the decline of established routes into relatively well paid semi-skilled and unskilled manual employment (McDowell, 2003), while older male manual workers displaced by de-industrialization and technological change have retreated from the labour market suffering from discouraged worker effect, swelling the numbers on sickness benet to historically unprecedented levels (Alcock et al., 2003). These issues are exacerbated by the fact that the industrial regions that have suffered most from de-industrialization and male job loss also tend to be areas with relatively sluggish growth in service sector employment. Men residing in these high unemployment/low vacancy former industrial areas are signicantly more likely to experience unemployment and economic activity than others, regardless of any other factor (Green and Owen, 1998; Hogarth and Wilson, 2001; Turok and Edge, 1999). Despite the huge social signicance of the large-scale detachment from the labour market of low-skilled male manual workers (Alcock et al., 2003), few empirical studies have attempted to examine why such men are continuing to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth a very worrying trend indeed (Gregg and
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Wadsworth, 2003). McDowell (2003) explored the employment aspirations of working-class male school leavers and argued that growth areas of entrylevel service employment challenge a key component of working-class masculinity: defending the right to stick up for yourself (see also Bourgois, 1995; Newman, 1999). McDowell (2003) suggests that the idealized embodied masculinity of working-class men is fundamentally at odds with the deference and docility required in the low-level service jobs that now dominate employment opportunities for those with few skills. Lindsay and McQuaid (2004) explored the theory that entry-level service employment may be particularly unattractive to the unemployed, although they did not theorize masculinity as a key barrier to service work. The research reported a highly signicant general dislike of entry-level service work with only 16 per cent of jobseekers saying they were likely to consider entering retail, 15 per cent saying they were likely to consider entering hospitality and 13 per cent saying they were likely to consider entering call centre work. Being male, having little experience of service work and seeking wages of 200+ per week were the key factors associated with the rejection of entry-level service work as a future source of employment. The authors also highlight the lack of empirical research on the attitudes of the unemployed towards entry-level service work and call for more research into why such work may be particularly unattractive to unemployed men. This article attempts to ll this gap in the literature by offering a major contribution to the debate on the attitudes of unemployed men towards entry-level service work. The article reports data generated from in-depth interviews and focus groups with 35 unemployed low-skilled men and focuses on their attitudes towards the types of low-level service jobs that now dominate the available vacancies in job centres. The article argues that the mens masculine working-class habitus is antithetical to many forms of entrylevel service work, showing that it is the high level of emotion management required in many forms of service work, particularly the need to show deference to customers during the service encounter, that most challenged the mens usual ways of being. It is suggested that two key factors structured the unemployed mens perceptions of service work: the sex-typing of the occupation and the nature of the service encounter, with the men only seeking service employment in male-dominated occupations where the worker retains a relatively high degree of power, authority and control within the service encounter.

The service economy


The service economy can be simply dened as an economy where most employment is generated in the service sector, although some denitions also highlight the increasing importance of a growing customer service ethos or
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culture throughout the economy (DuGay and Salaman, 1992; Sturdy et al., 2001, p. 3). Yet the extremely heterogeneous nature of service sector employment makes generalizations on the nature of service work highly problematic (Gershuny, 1987). Therefore, it is useful to briey disaggregate service sector employment in Britain to gain a better understanding of the kinds of occupations that are growing and are accessible to unemployed men with few skills. Conventional service sector employment analysis is based on the grouping together of broadly similar service activities (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2000, pp. 8183). Elfring (1989) constructs four sub-sectors of service employment in which each subsector is characterized by four main service activities. Although the subsectors cannot be considered internally homogenous due to the wide range of occupations they include, the model does provide a clear picture of the nature of service sector employment growth in Britain over recent years. Elfrings model is the current system used by the OECD (2000) and similar to that used by other important writers in the eld (see Nixon, 2005). Table 1 presents Elfrings four service sub-sectors. Producer services are intermediate inputs to further production services where other businesses are the primary customers, rather than households. The fastest growing activities in this sub-sector are business and nancial services. These occupations are at the forefront of the knowledge economy, making extensive use of ICT and high-skill workers (OECD, 2000, p. 82). Producer services primarily generate highly skilled white-collar work and so the sub-sector is a key source of employment for men and women with high-level skills and educational qualications, although men outnumber women in top-end occupations, while women signicantly outnumber men in low-level clerical occupations. Social services is the largest service sub-sector and is characterized by the fact that many of the services provided are not sold openly on the market but are provided by the state. Skill and educational requirements are generally high, although the sub-sector generates both very highly skilled and lowskilled occupations. Women dominate many of the lower level caring, nursing and clerical occupations, but the sub-sector is also a key source of professional and associate professional employment for women, although men again dominate very high-level occupations. Distributive services and personal services provide nearly half (43 per cent) of all service employment in Britain and generate most of the low-skilled entrylevel service work in the contemporary economy. These sub-sectors are therefore a crucial source of employment for those with few skills and educational qualications. Distributive services includes service activities that are provided to both businesses and households (such as delivery services), whereas personal services are provided to households for nal consumption. Much of the employment in distributive services is manual, low skilled and male dominated, although the fastest growing service activity in the sub-sector
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Table 1: Service Sector Employment in Britain


Distributive services Final consumption Personal services Social services Final consumption

Subsector

Producer services

Main economic function Households Households

Intermediate inputs to further production

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Primary consumer

Business

Market/ non-market Key service activities

Market Business and professional, nancial, insurance, real estate 0.71 23 30 0.22 5,647,190 13 0.15 2,445,300 Generally very low Poor. Lowest paying sector

Movement of people, information and commodities. Intermediate/nal Business and households Market Retail, wholesale, transport, communication Market Hotels, bars, restaurants, recreation, amusement, cultural, domestic, personal 1.45 10 2.07 27 36 0.48 6,629,310

Non-market Government, health, educational, misc. social services

0.81 16

21

Female to male ratio Percentage of employment* Percentage of all service employment* Annual growth rate** Total employed in subsector* Education/skill Mixed: average in transport, low in retail Mixed. Poor in retail

0.53 3,928,480

Generally very high

Employment conditions

Very good. High pay

Mixed both very high and also low levels Generally good

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Source: adapted from OECD (2000) *data for 1998 **19841998.

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retail is female dominated. Transport services provide a number of maledominated manual occupations such as driving trains, buses, coaches and taxis and long-distance haulage and delivery services. As nearly half (45 per cent) of all male employment in the service sector is provided by distributive services it is a key area of employment for low-skilled men. In contrast, personal services generate an array of female-dominated, consumer-oriented, low-skilled interactive servicing occupations in areas like bars, restaurants, hotels and personal and domestic services. The service economy is thus characterized by the growth of very different kinds of work. The simultaneous growth of very highly skilled occupations in producer and social services and very low-skilled occupations in distributive and personal services is leading to the hollowing out, or polarization, of the employment structure (Castells, 2000; Gallie, 1994, p. 59; Goos and Manning, 2003). Distributive and personal services represent the most accessible sources of future employment for low-skilled unemployed and economically inactive men due to the large amounts of low-skilled employment they generate in areas like retail, transport, hospitality and personal and domestic services. In the latter part of the article I explore unemployed mens attitudes towards these kinds of entry-level service jobs in order to explore their potential as a future source of employment. First, however, it is useful to discuss some of the sociological literature on the nature of service work, particularly womens domination of many areas of low-skilled service employment.

Interactive service work servicing the sovereign customer


Two heavily inuential concepts have emerged from the growing sociological literature on service work (see Bolton, 2003; DuGay, 1996; Korczynski, 2005; Rosenthal et al., 2001; Sturdy et al., 2001; Taylor, 1998). DuGay and Salaman (1992) have argued that businesses are increasingly customer oriented because the customer/consumer is sovereign within a service economy, while Hochschild (1983) has drawn attention to the key importance of emotional labour the management of human feeling during social interaction in the labour process in low-skilled service work. Both concepts highlight the increasing signicance of the relationship between the producer and the consumer of the service and while this relationship takes many different forms depending on the service context, the achievement of the desired service encounter is of critical importance when the service (and indeed the service provider) are the products being consumed (see also Adkins, 1995; Liedner, 1993; Sturdy et al., 2001). DuGay (1996) argues that front-line service workers in retail are encouraged to practice imaginative identication with customers wants and desires, which places increasing emphasis on the consumptive knowledge and
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experience they are able to mobilize in the service encounter. As rms see front-line service workers as literally, embodying the brand, soul, image and values of the corporation, the way workers communicate, articulate and perform their emotional selves through emotional labour during the service encounter is key (DuGay, 1996; Hochschild, 1983). Furthermore, as Nickson et al., (2001) have argued, the way workers present their embodied selves is also increasingly signicant, especially in the style-conscious retail, hospitality and leisure industries. The critical importance of the service encounter and the idea that service workers embody the corporate image or brand is placing increasing emphasis on the personal and cultural attributes of front-line service workers. Thus, in growth areas of low-skilled interactive service employment such as retail and hospitality, the ability to look good and sound right and being able to manage ones emotions in ways conducive to the demands of the customer, regardless of the nature of those demands, are critical skills (Guerrier and Adib, 2000; Nickson et al., 2001). While not all low-skilled service work is interactive and involves direct interaction with customers, research has shown that over half of employees report dealing with customers during most of their time at work (Sturdy, 1998, p. 47). The growing importance of customer service throughout the economy is dissolving old divisions between front-shop and back-shop work as the ability to handle customers becomes a key skill for increasing numbers of workers in the service economy (Department for Education and Employment [DfEE], 2000; Department for Education and Skills [DfES], 2002; Sturdy, 1998).

Servicing as womens work


The importance of the increasing need for workers to engage in emotional and aesthetic labour is that both are thoroughly gendered forms of labour. Historians of occupational segregation by sex have long highlighted the strong tradition of women being employed in caring occupations or those that require friendly, attractive or charming service (Bradley, 1989, 1999; Hakim, 1979; Honeyman, 2000; Simonton, 1998). Hence, women are much more likely than men to be engaged in work that involves social or people skills (Gallie et al., 1998). It appears that employers see emotion management and the ability to engage empathetically with customers as natural female skills (Bradley, 1999; Erickson and Ritter, 2001; Tyler and Taylor, 1998, 2001, p. 69). Indeed, womens supposed gender-specic skills and attributes are often central to the service being provided in the low-level servicing jobs that they dominate. For example, Hall (1993) argues that women do gender through the performance of gendered scripts of good service that encourage waitresses to be friendly, deferential and irty (see also Adkins, 1995; Filby, 1992), while Guerrier and Adib (2000, 2004) suggest that customer expectations of gendered service also play an important part in reproducing the gendered
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Table 2: Occupational occupations 2005

segregation

in

selected

service

Selected occupations Receptionists Hairdressers and barbers Nurses Care assistants and home carers Primary and nursery teachers Retail cashiers and checkout operators Cleaners and domestics Sales assistants Waiters and waitresses Sales and customer service Retail managers Marketing and sales managers Police ofcers Prison ofcers Security guards Taxi/cab drivers

Women Men (%) (%) 96 89 88 88 86 82 79 73 73 69 35 26 18 14 12 04 04 11 12 12 14 18 21 27 27 31 65 74 82 84 88 96

Source: Equal Opportunities Commission (2005).

provision of service. Table 2 shows that womens historical construction as the archetypal low-level service providers is still very much apparent in the contemporary occupational structure. Women dominate the consumer-oriented interactive low-skilled service work in retail, hospitality, sales, customer service and personal and domestic service occupations where workers are required to have excellent emotional management skills and often need to appear highly sensitive to the needs and the demands of customers. Women also dominate care and nursing occupations where the service ethos is quite different from that of the consumeroriented services, and where workers are required to exhibit an even stronger empathy with the needs of the service users. Simonton (1998, pp. 23746) has pointed out that men also have a long history of employment in the service sector, but that the gendered construction of skill has served to siphon off the more prestigious and better paid occupations for men. Hence, men tend to dominate highly skilled occupations in producer and social services and managerial or higher level positions, even in areas where women constitute the majority of the low-skilled workforce, such as retail and sales (Equal Opportunities Commission [EOC], 2005). Low-skilled men tend to cluster in a relatively narrow range of sex-typed masculine service niches in areas
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such as warehousing, distribution, transportation and protective services (police, prisons and security). In these jobs interaction with customers is relatively low, workers need not engage in high levels of emotional labour or exhibit a deferential demeanour, and the cultural and personal attributes of the workers are of little importance. In the protective services in particular, workers retain a relatively high degree of power and authority within the service encounter. Where men do work in low-level service occupations they tend to work in areas very different to those that women work in. But generally, it is women who dominate many areas of low-skilled service work, particularly customer-oriented interactive servicing jobs and care work. Female domination of many growing areas of low-level service work presents a major challenge to the low-skilled men displaced by de-industrialization and technological change because historically, men have rarely substituted for women in the labour market and have been highly reluctant to enter womens work as it may compromise their masculinity (Bradley, 1999; Cockburn, 1988; Fagan and Rubery, 1995; Reskin and Roos, 1990; Williams, 1993). Unemployed low-skilled men generally have little experience in female-dominated areas of low-skilled service employment and there is a clear mismatch between the technical and practical skills they possess and the customer handling and communication skills required in many service jobs (Hogarth and Wilson, 2001). Yet, as womens jobs are providing an increasing share of employment, a very small number of men have begun crossing over into female-dominated service jobs and a new literature has emerged that investigates what happens to men and their masculinity when they do engage in such womens work (Cross and Bagilhole, 2002; Lupton, 2000; Simpson, 2005; Williams, 1993, 1995). Lupton (2000, p. 38) argues that female-dominated service employment carries three specic threats to mens masculinity. Firstly, mens ability to reinforce and regenerate their masculinity in the workplace is reduced because they cannot establish the homosocial relations that characterize masculine work cultures (Bird, 1996). Secondly, they fear being feminized through their exposure to women, and thirdly, they fear the threat of being stigmatized as effeminate or gay. Cross and Bagilhole (2002) and Simpson (2005) report virtually identical ndings in their studies of men working in a range of feminized service occupations. All the studies report men responding to the challenges presented to their masculine identity by reconstructing their role and tasks within the occupation as more masculine. This reconstruction sometimes took the form of men lying to their friends about their genderatypical work. Simpson (2005) also suggests that over half of the 40 men in her study reported signicant role-strain, generated both by internal conicts and from peer pressure from suspicious male friends. While these emerging studies show that some men have begun to enter female-dominated service occupations, they also highlight the peer pressure and challenges to masculinity that continue to make womens jobs highly
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unattractive to men. It is also signicant that most of the men in these studies possessed skills and qualications that allowed them to seek relatively highlevel feminized service occupations that at least offered the potential for progression into higher status managerial roles. In contrast, the low-skilled feminized service work accessible to poorly educated working-class men offers few such masculine compensations. Middle-class men may therefore be more open to feminized service work than working-class men. Thus, before looking at the attitudes towards entry-level service work of the 35 unemployed low-skilled men who took part in this research, it is worth briey exploring why working-class masculinity may be particularly antithetical to low-level service work.

Working-class masculinity
Skeggs (1997) has suggested that working-class women seek to distance themselves from this class label because of the negative stereotypes it encapsulates. Yet, Skeggs (1997, p. 3) also acknowledges that there are very respectable discursive positions for working-class men to inhabit. Being working class can be a source of respectability and pride for men and it has been through carrying out particular types of work that this pride and respectability has been generated. Specically, it is the construction of skilled manual work and low-skilled grafting as particularly masculine forms of labour that has enabled working-class men to inhabit positive and respectable discursive positions in relation to women and middle-class men (Gray, 1987; McDowell, 2003; Skeggs, 1997). Working-class men may invest in their class identity to the point that they positively value not being middle class (Skeggs, 1997). This valorization of male working-class experience and culture nds its strongest expression in the form of protest or macho masculinity described by Willis (1977; see also McDowell, 2003; ODonnell and Sharpe, 2000). Willis observed how the lads dismissed the earoles for conforming to the middle-class values of the school and argued that (m)anual labour is associated with the social superiority of masculinity and mental labour with the social inferiority of femininity. In particular manual labour is imbued with a masculine tone and nature that rends it positively expressive of more than its intrinsic focus in work. (Willis, 1977, p. 148) Working-class men fall short of the standards set by middle-class cerebral masculinities that privilege intellect, academic success and non-manual labour (McDowell, 2003). Yet, hard and heavy manual labour, or grafting has enabled working-class men to construct themselves as quintessentially more masculine than potentially more powerful men of the middle classes. Manual labour has thus been a key source of identity, pride, self-esteem and power for working-class men (ODonnell and Sharpe, 2000) and as Arnot (2004,
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p. 17) suggests, working-class men celebrate their masculine sexuality and their physical (manual) culture. Due to the strength of their identication with manual labour and its specic importance in the construction of masculinity, it seems unlikely that unemployed working-class men will seek to enter gender atypical service employment as it simply offers none of the masculine compensations provided by heavy or highly skilled manual labour (Cockburn, 1988). Furthermore, Mac An Ghail (1996, p. 67) states that (t)here is now a considerable literature highlighting the way in which working-class masculinities are frequently embedded in the productive manual skills, experience and relations of all male shop oor life. Yet, the masculine work cultures that characterize all male shop oor life are highly inappropriate in many service environments, and this may be a further key factor orientating working-class men away from entry-level service work. Stress relief for example, is often achieved through relatively aggressive forms of masculine horseplay, piss-taking, winding-up and joking (see Collinson, 1988; Gray, 1987; Hodson, 2001). Shouting, swearing and playghting are all relatively acceptable forms of behaviour in back-shop manual environments like the factory or the warehouse, or outdoors on construction sites, yet they are generally unacceptable behaviour in heavily managed, customer-oriented service environments. Similarly, McDowell (2003) suggests that the display of idealized embodied masculinity may now be serving to disbar young working-class men from many types of entry-level service work as while these service roles often require passive and docile bodily deportment, responding to the demands of customer sovereignty unquestionably is antithetical to young working-class men whose culture valorizes sticking up for yourself, speaking your mind and fronting up when challenged. Unemployed low-skilled men of all ages in this study experienced massive difculties engaging in emotional labour and hiding their true feelings without fronting up or shouting back when challenged by managers or customers. Indeed, this research suggests that sticking up for yourself is a dening characteristic of the masculine working-class habitus. Bourdieus (1984) concept is useful here because it stresses that class and gender are internalized in the subconscious as dispositions to act or think in particular ways. As these dispositions are embodied, they are far more deeply rooted than attitudes and identities. Thus, the habitus reveals social identities not just in statements and beliefs but in embodied social practice (Savage et al., 2004, p. 98). Class and gender are emphasized as things that exist underneath the skin, in our psyches, in our reexes, so that we may unconsciously reproduce class and gender structures through our routine social practices (Skeggs, 1997). This is not to suggest that the habitus is xed or that our usual ways of being cannot be altered (MacLeod, 1987). But it does suggest that change is not an easy process, especially for those with limited resources with which to
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reconstruct themselves (Skeggs, 1997). This is borne out by the experiences of the low-skilled unemployed men in this study who struggled to adapt their usual ways of being in ways appropriate to many forms of service work, effectively closing off key areas of potential employment in the contemporary economy.

Background
The ndings reported here represent a small part of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded PhD thesis (No. R42200024311, Nixon, 2005), which explored the employment aspirations and work orientations of unemployed men in Manchester. The city has suffered particularly severe male employment decline as a consequence of economic restructuring. De-industrialization has pulled the guts out of the place ... leaving it languishing near the bottom of many league tables of labour-market vitality (Peck and Ward, 2002, p. 3). Manchester lost a greater proportion (19 per cent) of its skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing employment than any other comparable area in Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s (Bailey and Turok, 2000, p. 639) and male employment in manufacturing has declined by a staggering 62 per cent since the early 1970s (Giordano and Twomey, 2002, p. 54). These male job losses in manufacturing have not been signicantly offset by male employment growth in services total male employment in Manchester has declined by 38 per cent since the early 1970s, which is nearly triple the national decline of 14 per cent (Giordano and Twomey, 2002, p. 60). At the time of the research (20022003) the male economic activity rate in Manchester was 62 per cent, compared to a national average of 73 per cent, while the unemployment rate was 7 per cent, compared to the national rate of 4 per cent. In the most deprived, multiply disadvantaged wards of inner-city Manchester ofcial unemployment rates were about 10 per cent, while rates of male economic activity were below 50 per cent (Nixon, 2005). In recent years Manchester has responded to the decline of its industrial base by seeking to rebrand itself as a post-industrial cultural economy. Spearheaded by the redevelopment and investment stimulated through hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games, the citys regeneration has been built on the development of its service sector, particularly the retail, leisure, tourist, hospitality and creative industries. These industries were expected to provide the bulk of new employment opportunities in the city (Manchester City Council, 2004). In this context, the broad aim of the research was to explore how the men displaced by de-industrialization and male job loss were responding to radically restructured local labour markets. The research sought to explore unemployed mens attitudes towards areas of new job growth in the service sector to assess whether the growth of the service economy in Manchester could alleviate the burden of male unemployment and economic inactivity.
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Thirty-ve in-depth interviews and ve focus groups were conducted with unemployed men contacted through four different training centres for the unemployed in the city. Attendance at unemployment-training centres is compulsory after 6 months unemployment and it was reasoned that the low-skilled male manual workers disadvantaged by de-industrialization were more likely to be found among the longer term unemployed attending training centres than those attending job centres. Once the researcher was granted access to the training centres, he approached men to participate in the research. All the requests for participation were successful. Age and ethnicity were the only criteria used in selecting the unemployed men to participate in the case study. In terms of age, in line with the literature (see Arnot, 2004, for review), I anticipated that younger men would exhibit fundamentally different orientations to work than older men. In order to capture such generational differences, I decided to purposively select roughly equal numbers of men in three age bands: 1825 (13/35), 2640 (12/35) and 41+ (10/35). In relation to issues of race and ethnicity, Mac An Ghail (1996) has suggested that de-industrialization has created a crisis of white, working class masculinity (see also Arnot, 2004; ODonnell and Sharpe 2000), while MacLeods (1987) seminal comparison of white and black working-class youth demonstrated that race and ethnicity has a crucial impact on the construction of identity, masculinity and aspirations (see also Mac an Ghail 1996, McDowell 2003). However, I did not have the resources to examine in sufcient depth how race and ethnicity also impact on orientations to work and therefore selected only white unemployed men to participate in this study. The men who participated in the research should be seen as a particularly low-skilled, poorly educated sub-section of unemployed men. Over half had been unemployed for a year or more, compared to only a quarter of all unemployed men in the UK (Nixon, 2005). Almost two-thirds (63 per cent) held no educational qualications whatsoever, and 91 per cent held qualications at NVQ level 2 or below. In terms of their usual occupations (see Table 3), ve (15 per cent) of the men usually worked in skilled trade occupations, although only one of these men had a formal qualication related to their trade. Nineteen (54 per cent) of the men usually worked in low-skilled manual occupations, although over half (ten) of this group struggled to name a specic usual occupation because they changed jobs so frequently. One of the men usually worked in retail and the remaining ten (28 per cent) men had very little work experience to speak of. Most (eight out of ten) of the men with little work experience were under 24, and the other two were in their midthirties. In national statistics men with little work experience are classied by the occupations they sought. As all these men were seeking low-skilled manual work, particularly warehousing or labouring work (see Nixon, 2006), they can therefore be classied as low-skilled manual workers. This means that in total, 82 per cent of the sample can be classied as low-skilled manual
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Table 3: Usual occupations of sample


All male unemployed (UK) Per cent 8 5 7 5 21 2 6 16 30 * ** 100

Sample Occupation (Standard occupational classication 2000 major groups) Managers and senior ofcials Professionals Associate professional and technical Administrative and secretarial Skilled trade occupations Personal services Sales and customer service Process, plant and machine operatives Elementary occupations None* Various** Total No. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. 5 N.A. 1 1 8 10 10 35 Per cent N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. 15 N.A. 03 03 23 28 28 100

Source: Ofce of National Statistics 2005 (*/** data not collected on national level).

workers, although in Table 3 I have classied those who changed jobs frequently and those with little previous experience separately to emphasize the mens self-denitions.

Emotional labour and interactive service work


Aside from the younger men who generally had little formal work experience, most of the men who took part in the research had carried out a variety of male-dominated skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled manual occupations in factories and warehouses or outdoors in labouring jobs. In terms of previous experiences of service work, driving and security were most common, although ve of the men had worked for at least a year in retail and many of the younger men had an experience of retail through work/training placements. However, only one of the 35 men in the study said they usually worked in a service occupation (retail). For the older men in particular, low-skilled interactive service work represented quite a radical new challenge: Sales assistant, no, rule that out completely ... I suppose Id be frightened by it, never done anything like that before ... services, its not my cup of tea
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really ... I think I wouldnt be good at it. Wouldnt have condence in it. (Jim, aged 45, former sewing machine mechanic) Not interested in shop work. Its just not my thing. I dont love it, dislike it, its just not my thing to be on a till, things like that.... Its just not my scene. (Larry, aged 56, former mail sorter) Jim was frightened by interactive sales work and doubted he had the necessary skills for services. The idea of retraining in a completely new occupational area at the age of 45 was a daunting prospect, as it made his previous work experience and current skills appear redundant. Hence, Jim was retraining as an auto-electrician, an occupation that extensively utilized the skills he had developed throughout his working life. Larry was similar to Jim in that he had little experience of interactive service work and was retraining in a familiar area forklift truck driving. Larry knew that he didnt want to do shop work but struggled to articulate exactly why. Just as Jim stated services, its not my cup of tea, Larry remarks, Its just not my scene. Dereks comments help explain exactly what it was about interactive service work that wasnt the mens thing. Derek had previous experience of retail through working as a sales assistant in a furniture store a historically male-dominated niche of retail due to the association of furniture with craft skills (Simonton, 1998). However, Derek had strongly disliked the pressure of the sales environment and the need to chase customers. He insisted he simply didnt have the patience for customer-facing interactive service jobs: Bar staff no ... not my cup of tea serving somebody drinks. Dont have the patience for that ... checkout operator, not really good with gures, well, I wouldnt want to do that. Telephone sales, no. Too much talking, Id lose my patience. (Derek, aged 50, former circuit board assembler) Dereks suggestion that it is the patience required in interactive work that is most problematic for him was a remarkable comment, because he had worked as a circuit board assembler for 13 years, a ddly job that requires a great deal of patience. Derek had patience, but not when it came to serving customers. The implication is that it is the requirement to be what customers want you to be (Lawson, 2000, p. 74 in Korczynski, 2005) that most challenged Dereks patience. There is an implicit recognition in Dereks comments that interactive service work involves the subordination of the worker to the needs and requirements of customers, and although customer sovereignty may, in fact, be an enchanting myth, especially in sales work, where the service worker may be required to be both deferential and authoritative in seeking to control customers by persuading them to purchase goods or products (Korczynski, 2005), Derek simply didnt have the ability to engage in such identity games without losing his patience (see Sturdy, 1998). It was this reluctance to behave in tightly prescribed ways and the inability to deal with
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the demands of customers without losing patience that turned many of the men away from customer-oriented interactive service work. It has been suggested that younger working-class men may be more amenable to service work because they have little experience of the masculine work cultures characteristic of the male-dominated heavy industries (Lindsay and McQuaid, 2004). The younger men (under 25-years old) who took part in this study did have very limited work histories. Most had left school with no qualications and ended up unemployed and on youth training schemes. Yet, because service work now provides an increasing share of low-skilled employment in the economy, many of the younger men did have an experience of service work gained primarily through work and training placements in retail. Yet, rather than opening up potential areas of employment in services, these training placements actually served to turn the younger men away from retail and other forms of interactive service work. Patience was again the key issue: Ive got no patience with people basically. I cant put a smiley face on, thats not my sort of thing. (Colin, aged 24, unskilled manual worker) I was doing retail work, you know, sales assistant, and I just thought Id change it, go in the warehouse ... The customers treated you like shit and you couldnt say nowt or youd get sacked ... having to take it all and you just thought, I aint taking this. (John, aged 20, warehouse worker) I cant it hack it in shops and that, man, no. (Jacob, aged 19, unskilled manual worker) If someone [a customer] gave me loads of hassle Id end up lamping them. (Graham, aged 21, unskilled manual worker) The comments of the younger men who had experienced interactive service work are highly revealing. In all four examples the younger men emphasize how hard they nd it to passively eat shit in the service encounter (see Korczynski, 2005). Like Derek, discussed above, Colin had no patience with people and struggled to put a smiley face on, John couldnt take it, Jacob couldnt hack it and Graham would lamp a customer who gave him hassle. Clearly, the issue of patience was central to the mens dislike of interactive service work. The mens resistance to eating shit was challenged by the power of the customer in the service encounter. As Grahams remark suggests, in their everyday lives the young men would front up or become aggressive when confronted or challenged. They would not passively take shit from anybody. Yet, within the service encounter the customer is always right and therefore the young men often had to be docile and deferential within that encounter. But they simply couldnt do it.
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Liedner (1993) has suggested that men have particular difculty swallowing their pride and taking abuse from customers in the service encounter. This is due to the fact that masculinity is associated with power and authority and service work involves humiliating interpersonal subordination (Bourgois, 1995, p. 14). For Newman (1999) such subordination can serve to reinforce feelings of low self-worth among younger service workers. These issues are magnied in the case of young, unemployed, poorly educated men with repeated experience of failure at school and in the labour market. The young men were very defensive and highly sensitive to criticism. They were acutely aware that their usual ways of being were wrong or inappropriate in the service economy this had been made painfully clear by their experiences in the labour market and the constant focus on soft skills and attitude training on schemes aimed at getting them job ready. They didnt feel good about themselves or their lives, although this was often masked by a cloak of aggressive macho masculinity. Thus, both the younger and older unemployed men rejected entry-level interactive service work as a future source of employment because it challenged their patience to the extent that they couldnt control or manage their emotional and physical reactions to customers. Their propensity to front up when challenged was also apparent in the mens relationships with managers. Over a third of the men in the study mentioned that they had experienced signicant problems with managers and these difculties sometimes led to violence. Graham once hit a teacher on a training course, Jack head-butted a manager while working in a warehouse and Tony punched a manager while working in a retail outlet. These extreme examples demonstrate the extent of the difculties the men had controlling their emotions when challenged or confronted in the workplace. The men knew that their propensity to front up was causing them major difculties in the labour market and in the workplace, but they struggled to modify and adapt their usual ways of being. For most men it seemed that the best way of dealing with the problem was to avoid high-stress work environments, and interactive service work, especially sales and shop work, clearly came into this category. The younger men were more likely to at least try interactive service employment, but when they did, their habitus betrayed them. The young men struggled and ultimately failed to keep their emotions in check in the service encounter because they tended to take criticism very personally and lacked the emotional management skills and verbal dexterity to deect or resist confrontation in anything but an aggressive or physical manner. Bolton (2003) is right to describe interactive service workers as skilled emotion managers. As Johns tactical retreat from retail work into the warehouse highlighted, the men struggled to perform emotional labour and hide their true feelings in the workplace and clearly preferred back-shop environments like the warehouse, where they were far removed from the demands of customers and the service encounter (Nixon, 2006).
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Masculine service niches


The men did not nd all types of service work equally unattractive. The jobs of hospital portering, driving and security work were all popular soughtafter occupations and the police force, armed forces and social work were also mentioned as potential sources of employment. What made the men more amenable to these service occupations? Two factors appeared key: the sextyping of the occupation and the nature of the service encounter. The men were remarkably consistent in rejecting any form of female-dominated service work. As we saw above, female-dominated jobs like telesales, checkout work, sales assistant and waiting staff were all rejected as potential sources of employment. But although the men expressed a very strong preference to work alongside other men (see Nixon, 2006) they did not explicitly refer to the sex-typing of the occupation as a key factor in rejecting such work. Rather, the men suggested that it was the high level of customer contact and their inability to keep their patience and manage their emotions when dealing with customers that led them to reject such jobs. Yet, as I discussed earlier, it is precisely because these jobs do involve a lot of emotional labour and because women have been constructed as having better emotional skills, that they are female-dominated in the rst place. Furthermore, the most popular service jobs that the men sought driving, security and hospital portering are all clearly gendered masculine and male-dominated, which suggests that the sex-typing of the occupation was a key factor inuencing the mens perceptions of service work, even if they didnt acknowledge it as such. The second issue the nature of the service encounter was the key issue that the men themselves highlighted when articulating their dislike of interactive service work. Korczynski (2005, p. 76) notes that the golden rule of sales work is that workers should never openly disagree or argue with a customer. Bearing in mind the mens inability to exhibit a deferential demeanour and their propensity to front up when challenged, it was perhaps unsurprising that sales work was seen as highly unattractive. Telesales was seen as a particularly unattractive form of sales work because workers are often placed under very tight surveillance and interaction with customers is often very tightly prescribed and scripted (see Glucksmann, 2004). This kind of sales environment allows very little space for the kinds of stress relief and banter that characterize the masculine work cultures in the manual environments in which the men usually work. In contrast, the most popular and sought after service occupations allow more freedom to get out and about and involve much lower levels of surveillance and control. There is also far less need to engage in emotional labour in such jobs. Hospital portering was popular, for example, because this working environment allowed the men to escape occasionally from front-line service duties and the men would be dealing with clients in a far less pressured or potentially confrontational environment than in customer-oriented sales work. Indeed, it is arguable that
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in the service occupations that the men sought the customer is not sovereign and the worker has much greater power in the service encounter. Hence, in jobs like bus-driving or taxi-driving there is little need to be deferential to customers and the worker both controls the vehicle and has the power to eject the customer at any point. In security and police work the customer is more likely to be deferential than the worker. Equally, although in the role of hospital porter workers are required to be highly sensitive to patients needs, there is little need to be deferential. Thus, the nature of the service occupations that the men sought suggests that the issue of retaining power, control and authority within the service encounter underpinned the mens construction of appropriate potential service occupations. Where service work requires deference and docility and could be considered menial and therefore emasculating, the men rejected it but where the men were able to retain some power within the service encounter and need not show deference to customers or clients, they were far more amenable to the work. Thus, for the low-skilled unemployed men discussed here, masculinity is clearly associated with power, control and authority within the service encounter, and emotional labour is a skill reserved for womens jobs. In an economy where low-skilled male manual workers constitute the bulk of the unemployed and economically inactive, and customeroriented sales and interactive service jobs represent the key source of low-skilled employment, these ndings are of concern, because they suggest that the continued growth of the service economy will not alleviate the growing problem of male economic inactivity and unemployment. However, as Glucksmann (2004) remarks, it is also important to note that the linkages within the economy mean that the growth of some forms of service work, for example regional call and distribution centres, also create openings in other areas of the economy such as warehousing, delivery services and forklift truck driving. This research suggests that it is these kinds of male-dominated service occupations that are likely to provide the key routes back into employment for low-skilled unemployed and economically inactive men, although it is doubtful that growth in these occupations will be strong enough to absorb the growing number of low-skilled unemployed and economically inactive men.

Conclusions
This article has shown that the unemployed low-skilled men in the study rejected growing forms of low-skilled customer-oriented interactive service employment because such work calls for dispositions, skills and ways of being that are antithetical to the male working-class habitus. The men rejected female-dominated interactive service occupations that involved high amounts of emotional labour because they struggled to manage their emotions and be passive and deferential within the service encounter and because
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such work denied them the opportunity to relieve their stress in their usual ways through shouting, swearing, taking the piss and having a laugh. Thus, the men remained rmly oriented towards low-skilled manual occupations despite the signicant symbolic and numerical decline of this form of labour in the new economy (Savage, 2000). While previous studies have pointed out that middle-class men working in gender-atypical service employment tend to attempt to re-gender the occupation as masculine, the low-skilled unemployed men discussed here did not consider genderatypical service work a potential future source of employment. The men continued to imbue manual labour with the social superiority of masculinity and implicitly constructed emotional labour as something that they didnt do. Yet caution should be exercised in extrapolating from this the idea that low-skilled unemployed men are therefore consciously disbarring themselves from new forms of employment. The usefulness of the concept of habitus is that it emphasizes how classed and gendered dispositions to act or think in particular ways are internalized in the unconscious and manifest themselves in embodied social practices. Reconstruction is therefore not straightforward, especially for men like those in this study, who lack the cultural capital and resources to reexively play with their identities (Savage et al., 2001; Skeggs, 1997). The mens rejection of low-skilled femaledominated interactive service work as viable forms of future employment should therefore not be read as an example of masculine disdain of womens jobs. Rather, it should be read as a defensive reaction to the increasingly aesthetic consumerized service economy that brands these men and their embodied skills and dispositions as redundant and decient. Finally, it is important to note that the men discussed here represent a particularly lowskilled, poorly educated subset of all unemployed men. They were therefore, representative neither of all unemployed men, nor even of all unemployed working-class men. A working-class habitus rooted in higher-level manual skills may well have more purchase in the current economy (Savage et al., 2004), although more research is needed to explore how more highly skilled working-class men are navigating their way through contemporary servicedominated labour markets.

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