Embodied intersectionality and the intersectional management of hotel labour: The everyday experiences of social differentiation in customer‐oriented work

Gabriella Alberti and Francesco E. Iannuzzi

Gender, Work and Organization, 2020, vol. 27, issue 6, 1165-1180

Abstract: This article contributes to debates on critical diversity and intersectionality by focusing on hotel labour in a global tourist destination, the city of Venice. Through a qualitative study it explores how social differences are experienced by workers and valued by hotel management. We find that while management tends to allocate workers to different jobs according to the perceived ‘desirability’ of their embodied attributes by customers, the gendered and racialized divisions among workers do not simply conform with traditional patterns of ‘back’ and ‘front‐of‐house’ occupational positions. Rather they reflect variable compositions along the gender, migration and racial stereotypes reproduced by employers’ attempts to fulfill perceived changing expectations of customers. We develop the notion of ‘intersectional management’ to capture these fluid forms of valorization of social difference, which appear influenced by workers’ practices of embodied intersectionality through the selective performance of entrenched stereotypes, and their everyday encounters with an internationalizing clientele.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12454

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:gender:v:27:y:2020:i:6:p:1165-1180

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0968-6673

Access Statistics for this article

Gender, Work and Organization is currently edited by David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot and Ida Sabelis

More articles in Gender, Work and Organization from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().