Body Work in Contemporary Society

The appearance and functioning of the human body is central to the establishment and maintenance of social life. In order to present ourselves as competent social actors, people engage in body work — activities and practices associated with grooming and hygiene, as well as exercise and dietary management (Giddens, 1991). These activities help to maintain our bodies according to prevailing scientific standards of nutrition, growth, development and hygiene, and because of their aesthetic component, help us to present ourselves to others as particular kinds of people. Therefore, our participation in certain kinds of body work helps us to create social identities for ourselves. Labor markets favor particular kinds of bodies, which are, in turn, surveyed and managed in the workplace in order to ensure that organizational values are on display to the customer. In the workplace, bodily performance is also typically gendered. Therefore, the embodied capabilities of workers are harnessed by contemporary work practices, especially in the service industry, in ways that researchers call "aesthetic labor" (Warhurst et al., 2000) because of the emphasis within these work practices on bodily performance and presentation (Witz, et al., 2003).

Keywords: Aesthetic Labor; Body Work; Dramaturgical Model; Emotional Labor; Feeling Rules; Profane; Sacred; Techniques of Interpersonal Exchange

Overview

The appearance and functioning of the human body is central to the establishment and maintenance of social life. In order to present ourselves as competent social actors, people engage in body work — activities and practices associated with grooming and hygiene, as well as exercise and dietary management (Giddens, 1991). These activities help to maintain our bodies according to prevailing scientific standards of nutrition, growth, development and hygiene, and because of their aesthetic component, help us to present ourselves to others as particular kinds of people. Therefore, our participation in certain kinds of body work helps us to create social identities for ourselves. Schilling (1993) describes body work as activities and practices associated with grooming and hygiene, as well as exercise and dietary management which include a range of practices such as dietary control and exercise that enable people to work on the body as a vehicle of self-expression and encourage the view that the body is an unfinished product.

However, body work is also what sociologists call morally charged. For instance, research demonstrates that physical appearance, body shape, and size influence the likelihood of people entering particular occupations or being promoted (Nickson et al., 2005). Or, put another way, labor markets favor particular kinds of bodies, which are in turn surveyed and managed in the workplace in order to ensure that organizational values are on display to the customer. Moreover, in the workplace, bodily performance is typically gendered, in that there are expectations about employees' appearance and conduct in ways that conform to idealized notions of masculinity and femininity (Tyler & Abbot, 1998). Therefore, the embodied capabilities of workers are harnessed by contemporary work practices, especially in the service industry, in ways that researchers call "aesthetic labor" (Warhurst et al., 2000) because of the emphasis within these work practices on bodily performance and presentation (Witz et al., 2003).

Social Aspects of the Human Body

Although the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, are generally interested in ration actors (Weber), collective conscience (Durkheim), and social structure (Marx), since the 1980s, sociologists have become much more interested in the role the human body plays in contemporary (modern, Western) social life. This interest has, in particular (though not exclusively) drawn from interpretive traditions and focused on the cultural meanings bestowed on the body, how the body is 'lived' or experienced in everyday life (or, as phenomenologists such as Marcel Merleau-Ponty put it, how people experience "being-in-the-world"), and how the body is used to represent meaning and identity.

Historically and cross-culturally the human body has been and is, used symbolically. For instance, drawing on Durkheim's work on religious ceremony, anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) observed that because the human body is common to all human beings, it is used as a natural symbol to classify and express ideas about the social order. In particular, the kinds of beliefs that societies hold about the body reveal something about what is deemed important for that society, or that it classifies as sacred or profane. For instance, we attribute social and cultural meaning to bodily states and products (tears can be interpreted as signs of sadness or joy) and the body can be used as a physical symbol of social values. As Warner (2000) observes, the Statue of Liberty, gifted to the people of the United States by the people of France in 1886, embodies social values of freedom and liberty.

Many cultures make marks on or modify the body in ways that signify meaning, such as changes in social status or social identity. In contemporary society, which some researchers have argued is characterized by anxiety and self-consciousness (e.g. Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991), there is a tendency for people to become ever more concerned with bodily appearance and to view the body as a vehicle of self-expression (Lasch, 1979). This self-expression is nurtured through consumption activities associated with the cultivation of the body as an outward manifestation of self-identity (Shilling, 1993). This shift toward the body as a vehicle of self-expression has been tied to the birth of cinema, photography, and women's cosmetics (Wolf, 1990) that emphasize the importance of looking and being looked at (Featherstone, 1991). These technologies contribute to idealized images of the human body (often in ways that emphasize current notions of what it means to be fit and healthy) that create points of comparison for people between who they are and who they might become, and in so doing, stimulates the importance of body work or maintenance, through which the human body can be transformed.

Body maintenance includes a range of practices such as dietary control and exercise, pursuing healthy regimes in response to health messages about risky behaviors (such as stopping smoking, eating a "heart-healthy" diet, and engaging in "safer sex"). These strategies enable people to work on the body as a vehicle of self-expression and encourage the view that the body is an unfinished product (Shilling, 1993) that can be endlessly modified through the application of technologies (ranging from exercise to cosmetic surgery).

The Social Significance of the Body

The BodyScholarly interest in the human body has emerged in part as a consequence of social changes that force us to think about it (Howson, 2004). First, demographic changes, such as an aging population and increased life expectancy, mean that a greater proportion of the population is living longer, albeit with expectations of poorer health and perhaps disability. Researchers have argued that this shift toward an older population forces society to acknowledge and care for the aging body in new ways that maintain productivity and aesthetic appeal.

Second, contemporary society is characterized by its emphasis on physical and outward appearance about which people are consumed with anxiety (what to wear, what not to wear, am I too fat, too thin, too tall, too hairy?). Indeed, the human body is one of the key resources that people use to classify and categorize each other and therefore people spend a great deal of time and effort — and money — on maintaining their bodies. Moreover, in a world characterized by chaos and flux (i.e., unanticipated economic recession, natural disasters, 9/11), for many people, their own body is one area of life over which they may feel they have some control, especially in terms of food consumption. As Shilling (1993) puts it, we may not be able to influence global politics but we can show our significant others how disciplined we are by restricting our calorie and food intake. Similarly, we can influence or even manipulate others' responses to us by 'working' on our bodies — through diet, exercise and even surgical modification — often in ways that conform to idealized notions of beauty or work against them.

Finally, social scientists have become increasingly interested in the significance of the human body in social life because of the emergence of new technologies that stretch the limits of what the body is capable and of what the body can become. Genes can be manipulated, body parts replaced with parts from other humans or even animals (xenotransplantation), our faces reshaped, skin tightened, and limbs built. These developments influence the meanings that people attach to their own bodies and the bodies of others. If I have plastic surgery am I pandering to the beauty myth (Wolf, 1990) or taking control of my own life? While these technologies offer the potential to transform and redefine the physical body, they also raise questions about the boundary between nature and culture (Haraway, 1991).

Further Insights

The Self & Body Work

Within a social interactionist tradition, self and society are constituted or constructed through the practical work that that people do in interaction with others and with their physical environments. This interaction involves body work at many levels and includes the visual information we make available to others and how they interpret it. In Erving Goffman's (1971) dramaturgical model, the body is a central resource to how people manage the information they provide to others through facial cues or expressions, physical gestures and mannerisms. For Goffman, the setting in which focused interaction takes place is deemed a front region. In such a setting (a classroom, a party) people use the body's potential for expressiveness, such as appearance, dress, and demeanor in ways that help define the situation as being of a particular sort.

People manage this micro-level body work through a shared inventory or vocabulary of gestures and expressions to which a common set of meanings is attributed. This common understanding helps people make sense of everyday interactions and classify the visual information that is being presented to them, in ways that allow people to modify their own presentations in social encounters. While Goffman refers to these bodily gestures and expressions as body idiom, anthropologists refer to body idiom as techniques of the body (Mauss, 1973) and emphasize that there is distinct cross-cultural variation in the meanings that people attribute to bodily gestures and expressions. For instance, while eye contact is especially important for white, English-speaking Westerners, for some other ethnic groups eye contact is interpreted as aggressive or hostile. Therefore, while people are able to engage in body work in ways that shape social encounters because, largely, they share common understandings of what bodily gestures mean, they may also find themselves in contexts where their bodies work against the flow of smooth interaction. This tension is apparent in studies of the importance of body work in the context of employment.

Body Work & Emotional Labor

The concept of aesthetic labor has been developed from Arlie Hochschild's work on emotional labor, which she defined as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" (1983, p. 7). Through a study of flight attendants and their work, Hochschild argued that in Western culture people in certain occupations become alienated from their emotions through the commercialization of labor because they are expected and perhaps even required to manage and control their emotions. The naturalistic or orgamismic model of emotions emphasizes emotions as feelings that are experienced universally, and which express a range of physiological and biochemical responses to certain kinds of stimuli. In contrast, Hochscild argued that while sensations occur within the body, they have to be acknowledged and interpreted in order to have meaning as feelings. She notes that people may be aware of certain responses or sensations, like the heart beating faster or having a sense of tightness in our stomachs (what some might describe as a "knot"), but argues that these sensations derive their meaning from the social context in which they are experienced. And, as with body idiom, people are able to interpret these sensations through a shared cultural vocabulary of emotion; or as Harré (1991) puts it, through a shared repertoire of emotional language that guides us toward and prompts us to label a feeling in a particular way.

An Example: Flight Attendants

Hochschild uses this model of emotions to explore the work of people in service occupations (such as airline attendants) and in particular, drawing on a Marxist perspective, how modern market relations shape human feelings and incorporate them into the service of capitalism. The occupational restructuring and the expansion of the service sector that began to emerge in North America and Europe in the period after the Second World War has increased market demand for personal and relational skills (Adkins, 1995), particularly those oriented toward the physical and emotional comfort of customers. This phenomenon is what led Hochschild to the example of flight attendants who, twenty years ago, seemed to epitomize this kind of body work and emotional labor. She was especially interested in the relation between emotional labor and femininity, and how flight attendants were trained to deploy what are (still) regarded as feminine traits (that is, expressing sympathy, responding to the feelings of others and taking care of the feelings of others).

Central to the emotional labor of flight attendants is the emphasis on helping others relax. The techniques flight attendants were trained to use largely required attention to facial expressions and bodily gestures that would "look friendly" to customers and put people at their ease. Hochschild found that company documentation spelled out techniques to support the display of friendliness, and that flight attendants were constantly having to monitor their internal feelings and adjust their facial expressions to make sure they were in line with company policy on how to look friendly (a later study by Tyler and Abbott, 1998, had similar findings). This monitoring consisted of at least three key elements.

First, the techniques provided to flight attendants for managing emotional expression reflected norms about what people should feel in a given situation, or as Hochschild puts it, 'feeling rules.' Second, the techniques emphasized particular ways of expressing feelings that Hochschild calls "techniques of interpersonal exchange," such as smiles, tears and physical touch. Crucially, these techniques involve two forms of acting. Surface acting involves modifying one's external appearance, often by adopting a strategy of pretence to give an impression of a particular feeling. For instance, in service occupations, in situations where customers are giving employees a hard time, employees are required to manage what they feel (such as irritation or anger) and instead, work on their faces and bodies to display neutrality, civility, or whatever the organizational code insists on. Deep acting involves working on the way one feels to transform from one feeling into another (for instance, anger into compassion).

The cost of engaging in these forms of body and emotional work include feelings of insincerity and ultimately, for some, burn-out from the constant necessity to create an outward appearance of friendliness while internally dealing with negative feelings. Moreover, such body work and emotional labor can contribute to poor health, such as sleep deprivation and eating disorders (Freund, 1998). More recently, Tyler and Abbott (1998) described the on-going effort and time needed to maintain the female airline attendant's body; specifically the labor of dieting to maintain the company's ideal body weight.

Finally, people who are expected to do emotional labor and the body work that accompanies it may experience stress. The commercialization of feeling associated with service occupations and the ways this work is bought and sold in the marketplace is inherently stressful. Since Hochschild published her seminal work on emotional labor, other scholars have taken up her observations about the role of the body in certain kinds of occupations and developed the concept of aesthetic labor.

Aesthetic Labor

Aesthetic labor refers to the phenomenon that employees are collectively encouraged to embody the desired aesthetic of an organization (or are "made up" to do so) and in so doing, to commercially benefit the organization (Warhurst, et al., 2000). Witz (2003) defines aesthetic labor as "the mobilization, development and commodification of embodied 'dispositions'" (p. 37) and entails the face-to-face interactions between employees and customers in which the service provider is "packaged" for the customer (Warhurst & Nickson, 2007, p. 112). As such, aesthetic labor is inherently embodied, first because it requires the characteristics associated with different kinds of bodies (that display certain racial, gendered and class-associated demeanors and attitudes) and second because bodily conduct is central to the practice of aesthetic labor. That is, employers look for racial, gender and class "markers" in prospective employees that signal to customers, or service recipients, the nature of the service they are consuming (MacDonald & Merrill, 2009, p. 122).

Aesthetic labor occurs when an organization hires people for their particular physical or bodily characteristics and then requires those employees to further develop those characteristics in ways that bring value to the company through specific training in dress or style, body language, or personal grooming (Nickson et al., 2005). Such a process is most notable in industrial sectors such as retail and hospitality, which explicitly recruit "customer-facing employees with the right attitude and good appearance, both of which employers perceive as skills to be employed and then deployed at work" (Warhurst, no date, n.p). For instance, one study interviewed employees working in the hospitality industry to explore whether organizations hired staff on the grounds of their attractiveness and if so, how these organizations exploited employee attractiveness (Quinn, 2008). The study found that employers did hire on the basis of attractiveness and that they used this attractiveness (as well as overall staff appearance, customer empathy, and the physical environment) to build subliminal messages that encourage customers to feel "special" and therefore more likely to use the company's services.

Clearly, in the context of aesthetic labor, the body work that employees are being asked to perform entails transforming themselves in ways that serve organizational interests; there is an ongoing tendency within capitalism to extract value from bodies (Harvey, 1998). Thus, in the context of service industries, employers are not just interested in 'good looking' employees but also employees with the 'right look', or stereotypes (Oaff, 2007).

Viewpoints

The Body as Commodity

However, such body work has implications of and may even contribute to workplace discrimination on grounds of appearance (Oaff, 2007). For instance, there are many studies that show how certain kinds of young women (deemed "attractive" according to idealized notions of femininity) are given preferential treatment in certain categories of face-to-face service work (Entwistle & Wissinger, 2006). This is most discernible, not surprisingly, in the fashion industry, where models literally "sell" their bodies as work.

One study (Entwistle & Wissinger, 2006) details the narrow parameters by which models are hired in the fashion industry (e.g. predominantly young, white European men and women) and the very specific physical requirements that prospective models must meet (for women, a thin, pre-pubescent figure). In order to meet these requirements, prospective models engage in body work or, "commodify themselves" precisely because what they are selling to employers is how their bodies look. Moreover, models must do so in ways that meet the fluctuating demands of the fashion industry and the shifts in the kind of image that is selling at a particular point in time. However, the authors of this study point out that while it is tempting to see the kind of work that models do as surface body work (for instance, dressing in a particular way, cultivating a certain image through make-up, hair and demeanor, diet, exercise and perhaps even using cosmetic surgery), in fact, such body work is indivisible from work on the self. The body, they note (drawing on Merleau-Ponty, 1981), is the vehicle for "being-in-the-world" (p. 82) and "the visible form of our intentions" (Entwistle & Wissinger, 2006, p. 784). What they mean by this is that the body is not an expression of self, or an outward manifestation of an internal state of being, but that body and self are intertwined and that the body's appearance and conduct is who we are.

Research suggests that body work is an inescapable aspect of contemporary life. Managing appearance and working on one's body is key to establishing self and social identity and to presenting ourselves to others as particular kinds of people. However, it also seems inescapable that, at least from materialist or Marxist perspectives, contemporary capitalism requires people to manage and work on their bodies, because so much of what capitalism sells is embodied. The service sector epitomizes embodied labor and, as many researchers observe, extracts exchange value from people's bodies. That is, employees are hired because their appearance, demeanor and emotional expressiveness helps organizations build and sell a particular brand or idealized experience. This argument is especially evident in the fashion and airline industries, where employees are on display and have to actively manage their emotional and bodily expressions and gestures in the service of their employers. Body work entails both a physical component (diet, exercise, surgery, managing facial expressions and bodily gestures) and an emotional component that can be tiresome and even damaging to people. After all, from a phenomenological perspective on the social world, the body is indivisible from self, and indeed, our bodies are ourselves.

Terms & Concepts

Aesthetic Labor: The phenomenon in which employees are collectively encouraged to embody the desired aesthetic of an organization for the commercial benefit of the organization.

Body Work: Activities and practices associated with grooming and hygiene, as well as exercise and dietary management. Includes a range of practices such as dietary control and exercise that enable people to work on the body as a vehicle of self-expression and encourage the view that the body is an unfinished product (Shilling, 1993).

Dramaturgical Model: Erving Goffman's model of how people manage information through performances in order to present particular impressions to those with whom they interact.

Emotional Labor: "The management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7).

Feeling Rules: Social and cultural rules that govern the sorts of emotions people are expected to display and how they are expected to display them.

Profane: Categorically distinct from the sacred by religious ceremonies in traditional societies and by pollution beliefs and taboos in secular societies.

Sacred: Ideas, events, objects or persons that are considered special and beyond the ordinary. Things that are considered sacred are typically treated differently and kept physically apart from the profane.

Techniques of Interpersonal Exchange: Forms of performance through which feelings are expressed (e.g. smiles, tears).

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Suggested Reading

Entwistle, J. (2002). The aesthetic economy: The production of value in the field of fashion modeling. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2: 317-339.

Freeman, C. (2000). High tech and high heels in the global economy: Women, work and pink-collar identities in the Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hancock, P. & Tyler, M. (2000). Working bodies. In P. Hancock, B. Hughes, E. Jagger, K. Patterson, R. Russell, E. Tulle-Winton and M. Tyler (eds). The Body, Culture and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Maidman, S. (2012). Governing the female body: Gender, health, and net-works of power. Foucault Studies, , 193–195. Retrieved October 25, 2013 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=75195889&site=ehost-live

Nixon, D. (2009). 'I can't put a smiley face on': Working class masculinity, emotional labour and service work in the "new economy." Gender, Work & Organization, 16: 300-322. Retrieved February 26, 2010 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=37696840&site=ehost-live

Shilling, C. (2011). Afterword: Body work and the sociological tradition. Sociology of Health & Illness, 33, 336–340. Retrieved October 25, 2013 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=57856798&site=ehost-live

Thomas, H. (2003). The body, dance and cultural theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.