Service Work: Critical Perspectives

Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairy tale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers’ experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studies of different types of service work, but there has been little progress in attempts to theorize the nature of service work, per se. This book fills this gap by bringing together major scholars from the US and UK who use a range of critical perspectives to explore key elements in the organization and experience of contemporary service work. It will make an invaluable secondary text for advanced undergraduates and graduates studying courses/modules such as sociology of work, industrial sociology, social theory and work, organization studies, and organizational theory.

Marek Korczynski is Professor of Sociology of Work at Loughborough University. He is the author of On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy, co-authored with Steve Frenkel, Karen Shrine, and May Tam, Social Theory at Work, co-edited with Randy Hodson and Paul Edwards, and Human Resource Management in Service Work (Palgave MacMillan 2002).

Cameron Macdonald is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering, and Working in the Service Society  (co-edited with Carmen Sirianni).