This article considers experiences

This article considers experiences of social change and
downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical
tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large,
state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It
demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of
working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions.
Sales clerks did so by calling forth the waning symbolic capital of state
socialism and translating it into a form of postsocialist, working-class
nostalgia. In an effort to appeal to a downwardly-mobile, working-class
clientele in a reconfigured marketplace, sales clerks simultaneously traced
the downward social trajectory of China’s diminished urban proletariat.
KEY WORDS
■
China, service work, postsocialism, social change,
social mobility, distinction, trajectory
Like many Communist and former-Communist countries, China’s shift
from a centralized, planned economy and a state socialist system to a
market-driven one has upended the categories that once organized people’s
everyday lives. Shopping plazas replace factories as urban landmarks.
Businessmen earn recognition as ‘model workers’. The urban working class,
once the vanguard of China’s revolutionary aspirations, is now viewed as
an inefficient and undisciplined workforce (Rofel, 1989), a ball-and-chain
on state enterprises and the urban economy. Whereas economic reforms
have brought growing prosperity and upward mobility for some, for practices in the inexpensive bazaars and small-scale private merchants they
increasingly patronized.
Sales clerk counter strategies that sought to affirm Harbin No. X as the
appropriate place for working-class consumers to shop, however, are best
understood within a theoretical framework of social distinctions, symbolic
boundaries, and social change. In particular, Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinc-
tion’ helps explain why sales clerks worked to shore up the symbolic bound-
aries between Harbin No. X and its new competitors, especially the
geti
marketplace. At the same time, Bourdieu’s concept of ‘trajectory’ suggests
that the nostalgic appeals made by sales clerks to customers were shaped
not only by a reconfigured retail sector but also by the general downward
mobility of China’s urban working class.
Other scholars have argued that service settings and service interactions
can act as key sites for the production and reproduction of symbolic bound-
aries and social hierarchies (Williams, 2006; Sherman, forthcoming). I
suggest that at Harbin No. X, we find the rise of what can be character-
ized more specifically as what I term ‘distinction work’. Distinction work
is interactive service work (Leidner, 1993, 1996) that produces and recog-
nizes social distinctions. Here I borrow the idea Bourdieu developed in
Distinction
(1984) that the production and consumption of cultural goods
– in this case, the ‘good’ of customer service – involves a struggle over
symbolic categories that enables social groups to define and assert them-
selves through simultaneously hierarchical and relational differences
(Bourdieu, 1984, 1998). Distinction work is fundamentally about social
relations – among managers, workers, and customers, and even relations
among
workplaces, in that work activities communicate a relationship to
other workplaces and the people found there. Service work organized as
distinction work seeks to attract customers and win their loyalty by distin-
guishing a store and its clientele from settings located elsewhere – usually
lower down – in the social hierarchy.
Under China’s socialist planned economy, service sector work (and
retail work more specifically) was
not
distinction work: customers had few
choices and state retailers enjoyed a monopolistic stranglehold on the sale
of consumer goods. Customer patronage was a non-issue, and in fact the
service work performed inside settings like department stores was
conducted in ways far more similar to industrial work than it is today.
However, with the rise of a market economy and new social relations,
retailers compete in an increasingly stratified field of competition. In this
context, the state-sector retail workers I studied mobilized a set of distinc-
tions meant to stake out the store’s rightful place within a reconfigured
environment.
But sales clerk counter strategies also engaged in a form of postsocialist
nostalgia that only took on meaning in the context of a downward slide