Hospitality work and the sociality of affective labour

Abstract

This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers’ intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised by workers that is connected to the requirement that workers be ‘fun’ at work to facilitate consumption and to support the labour of co-workers. This sociality also shapes access to employment. However, the way that this takes place sheds light on d..