Vibes as Value: Young Workers and Affective Labour in the Service Economy

Vibes as value explores the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry. It develops an approach to hospitality work as a form of affective labour that produces value in the form of ‘vibes’, showing how youth, gender, sexuality, race and social class are embodied and made productive in the service economy. Vibes as value: Young workers and affective labour in the service economy explores subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry in the context of broader transformations in the relationship between work and life. By focusing on the labour performed by young hospitality workers, the book develops a new understanding of how identity construction creates value in the contemporary service economy. Drawing on a program of empirical research including extensive interviews, ethnographic observation, and photo-elicitation methods, the book shows that in the hospitality industry, the product of work consists of sensations, atmospheres, or what the workers interviewed for this book called ‘vibes’. The book reveals how vibes are unique products of work, created through moments of energetic relationality that transform the subjectivities of both workers and consumers. By analysing the social relations and practices that contribute to the creation of vibes, this book proposes a new way of thinking about hospitality work as ‘affective labour’. In this way, Vibes as value situates this ubiquitous, precarious and poorly remunerated form of work as a way of understanding how the contemporary self is intertwined with value relations. Vibes as value explores the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry, and thereby how youth, gender, sexuality, race and social class are embodied and made productive in the service economy. It shows that the key product of hospitality labour is ‘vibes’, or moments of enjoyment and relationality co-produced through exploitative relationships amongst workers and consumers. In the process, the book theorises hospitality as a form of affective labour organised through the normative and structural relations of precarious service work. It shows how identity construction produces value within the highly unequal social terrain of the service economy, and how hospitality labour enacts hierarchies of value extending far beyond the limits of the industry itself.

Pagina's: 176, Hardcover, Manchester University Press