Aestheticising retail workers: Orientations of aesthetic labour in Australian fashion retail

Richard Hall and Diane van den Broek

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2012, vol. 33, issue 1, 85-102

Abstract: The term ‘aesthetic labour’ has come to describe the recruitment, selection, development and deployment of physical and presentational attributes geared towards ‘looking good and sounding right’ ( Warhurst and Nickson, 2007 : 104). Further research has identified a degree of stratification within interactive service work, with further distinctions developing around how particular aesthetic requirements reflect firms’ brand strategies, market orientations and how they appeal to different consumer groupings – what we term, following Pettinger (2004 , 2005), ‘aestheticised labour’. This article presents quantitative data and analyses the prevalence, character and use of aesthetic and aestheticised labour in the Australian fashion retail industry based on a study of fashion retail stores in the central business district of Sydney, Australia. Building on previous work, it identifies that what constitutes aesthetic labour varies according to the market segment and character of the store and brand. As such it reinforces the utility of ‘aestheticised labour’ as a means of identifying nuances in the intensity and orientation of aesthetic labour within the retail sector.

Keywords: Competitiveness; control; diversity; equal opportunities; working conditions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X11427592 (text/html)

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:sae:ecoind:v:33:y:2012:i:1:p:85-102

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X11427592

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().