store evoked the era of the sociali

store evoked the era of the socialist worker: each day, Harbin No. X opened
its doors to a highly operatic broadcast of the store song, steeped in revol-
utionary fervor and sung in military chorus style, entitled ‘Soar, Harbin No.
X!’ The song was infused with the language of the Chinese revolution and
extolled the contributions of China’s workers to a glorious future. Physi-
cally, the store was a socialist behemoth, a massive eight-storey structure
engulfing a full square block of land in one of the city’s central districts.
Inside, working-class sales clerks dealt with mostly blue-collar shoppers.
Rural families in town for a day of shopping and working-class urbanites
in blue or white work smocks enhanced the store’s populist and proletarian
feel.
It was here I worked for two-and-a-half months as a uniformed sales
clerk selling down coats in the women’s department. My assigned position
at Harbin No. X was on the Ice Day counter, where I joined a team of three
sales clerks: Big Sister Zhao, in her early 40s; Big Sister Lin, in her late 30s;
and Little Xiao, in his late 20s. I worked an unpaid ‘internship’, so that I
did not compete with my co-workers for sales commissions. My fellow
clerks received me with enthusiasm and wasted no time in showing me the
sales counter ‘ropes’.
Distinction work, social change, and postsocialist trajectories
As my weeks at the Ice Day down coat counter slipped by, I marveled at
the time and attention our customers devoted to the purchase of a single
item: a down coat. Skeptical shoppers would interrogate sales clerks about
price, brand name, quality of the merchandise, and store return policies. In
response, sales clerks would not only answer these queries but also
challenge the very basis of customer concerns. They did this in two ways:
first, workers evoked Harbin No. X’s status as a reliable state enterprise.
Second, Harbin No. X sales clerks engaged in frank, sociable service inter-
actions that evoked a nostalgic working-class culture in order to convey the
underlying message that Harbin No. X was the appropriate place for elderly
and working-class consumers seeking to avoid the perils of the reform-era
marketplace.
The emergence of skeptical shopping at the store and worker responses
to it signaled that the sharp lines that once had defined the store’s repu-
tation as a reliable state-owned retailer and that set it apart from the risky
geti
marketplace were no longer distinct. Largely a class-coded practice,
skeptical shopping was a clear reaction to the perceived risks of the market-
place, especially at its lower tiers. For while wealthier shoppers could buy
their way out of China’s risky urban marketplaces by shopping in exclus-
ive settings, shoppers with more modest incomes honed skeptical shopping
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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