The “Right” Person for the Job: Exploring the Aesthetics Of Labor Within the Events Industry

Abstract

The events industry is an underresearched section of the service sector and can be usefully understood as a “customer-orientated bureaucracy” (Korczynski, 2002). The dual, and often contradictory, logics of customer orientation and bureaucratization coexist and place heavy demands on employees. The concept of aesthetic labor, first conceived by Warhurst, Nickson, Witz, and Cullen (2000), has been usefully applied to recruitment processes in other parts of the service sector, notably hospitality and retail, in order to understand better the complex and embodied demands required of employees in contemporary service organizations. This article presents an exploratory study into the recruitment process in the events industry in the UK. Through an analysis of online event management job advertisements, the implicit embodied attributes required of successful candidates are explored, and the underlying gendered and class-based assumptions of these corporeal dispositions are considered.