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| Thought Leaders: Culture |
Upstairs, Downstairs
Rachel Sherman
01/01/2007
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The access workers had to intimate information about guests
gave them a sense of power. I witnessed their laugh fests over guests who
stashed pornographic magazines in "their" room for the next visit, locked
themselves out of the room naked, dropped the telephone out the window, or used
the wastebasket as a latrine after one too many martinis. But they also felt
sorry for guests who had to spend all night working in the business center or
who were staying in the hotel because they were getting divorced. They were
genuinely eager to provide guidance to a guest unschooled in luxury consumption,
as long as the guest was willing to defer to workers’ knowledge.
Friendly relations allowed workers to establish a sense of
equality with guests. Judging guests, learning about their problems and helping
them enabled workers to feel superior. Workers rarely talked about wanting or
expecting to have the jobs, possessions or lifestyles of guests. Instead, they
reduced affluence to just one of many possible individual characteristics, and
not always a positive one. They philosophized that "having money doesn’t make
you happy."
Guests also preferred not to think about the obvious
inequality, and, for the most part, wanted to be nice in order to see themselves
as meriting friendly treatment. Both workers and guests upheld a long-standing
American principle of reciprocity. But at the same time, they reinforced another
cherished American custom: pretending class differences do not exist.
Rachel Sherman is an assistant professor of sociology at Yale.
This article is based on findings developed in her new book,
Class Acts, to be published in January by the University of
California Press. |  |
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