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Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life

University of California Press

The logic of work routinization is simple, elegant, and compelling. Adam Smith's famous discussion of pin manufacture laid the groundwork: instead of paying high-priced, skilled workers to do a job from start to finish, employers could split the job into its constituent parts and assign each task to minimally qualified workers, thus greatly reducing costs and increasing output (Smith 1776). Frederick Taylor's system of scientific management, aimed at removing decision making from all jobs except managers' and engineers', pushed the division of labor still further. Routinizing work processes along these lines offers several benefits to managers. First, designing jobs so that each worker repeatedly performs a limited number of tasks according to instructions provided by management increases efficiency, through both greater speed and lower costs. Second, it results in products of uniform quality. And its final and most enticing promise is that of giving management increased control over the enterprise.

These systems for dividing and routinizing work were conceived for manual labor and were first widely implemented in manufacturing; therefore most sociological work on routinization has been based on studies of this sector (e.g., Blauner 1964; Burawoy 1979; Sabel 1982). As the clerical work force grew in importance, the principles of routinization were applied to what had been considered "brain work," transforming some clerical functions into rote manual tasks and reducing the scope, variety, and opportunity for decision making in many jobs (see Braverman 1974; Garson 1975; Glenn and Feldberg 1979a; Mills 1951). In recent years the service sector has come increasingly to dominate the U.S. economy (Mills 1986; Noyelle 1987; Smith 1984), and the routinization of jobs that require workers to interact directly with customers or clientswhat I call "interactive service work"has been expanding as well, challenging

employers to find ways to rationalize1 workers' self-presentation and feelings as well as their behavior. As routinization spills over the boundaries of organizations to include customers as well as employees, employers' strategies for controlling work affect not only workers but the culture at large.

Although many of the rationales, techniques, and outcomes associated with routinizing other kinds of work are applicable to interactive service work, the presence of customers or clients complicates the routinization process considerably. When people are the raw materials of the work process, it is difficult to guarantee the predictability of conditions necessary for routinization. Organizations attempting routinization must try to standardize the behavior of nonemployees to some extent in order to make such routinization possible (see Mills 1986). It is part of the labor process of many interactive service workers to induce customers and clients to behave in ways that will not interfere with the smooth operation of work routines.

In addition to the issues of deskilling, autonomy, and power already associated with work routinization, the routinization of interactive service work raises questions about personal identity and authenticity. In this sort of work there are no clear distinctions among the product being sold, the work process, and the worker. Employers of interactive service workers may therefore claim authority over many more aspects of workers' lives than other kinds of employers do, seeking to regulate workers' appearance, moods, demeanors, and attitudes. But even when management makes relatively little effort to reshape the workers, interactive service workers and their customers or clients must negotiate interactions in which elements of manipulation, ritual, and genuine social exchange are subtly mixed.

Routinized interactive service work thus involves working on people in two senses. The workers work on the people who are their raw materials, including themselves, and the organizations work on their employees.2 These processes can be problematic, both practically and morally. This book explores these practical difficulties and moral and psychological stresses through case studies of two

Here, as in Max Weber's work, "rationalization" means the use of abstract rules and precise calculations to organize social action to meet given ends.

For managerial views on the distinctive features of interactive service work, see, e.g., Lovelock 1988; McCallum and Harrison 1985; Normann 1984.

organizations that have taken the routinization of interactive service work to extremes, McDonald's and Combined Insurance.

The literature on work routinization is centrally concerned with the relative power of employers and workers. Braverman's influential account of work routinization as a process of deskilling (1974) presents the struggle for control in its starkest terms. When workers rather than employers are most knowledgeable about how best to accomplish tasks, management does not have absolute control over the work process: how long tasks take; how many people are required to do a job; how much work can reasonably be completed in one shift. When management determines exactly how every task is to be done, it loses much of its dependence on the cooperation and good faith of workers and can impose its own rules about pace, output, quality, and technique. Moreover, since the removal of skill from jobs makes workers increasingly interchangeable, management's power to dictate wages, hours, and working conditions is expanded.

Among the most serious criticisms of Braverman's account is that it overstates the capacity of management to get its own way (Friedman 1977; Littler 1990; Thompson 1989). Historical and sociological research has documented the capacity of workers acting individually and collectively to resist managerial plans in ways that affect how routinization is implemented or even undermine it altogether (e.g., Edwards 1979; Halle 1984; Montgomery 1979; Paules 1991). The amended picture depicts workplaces in which the interests of workers and employers are, almost invariably, directly at odds, with outcomes determined by the resources each group has at its disposal in the struggle for control.

This revised account is still inadequate, however, for understanding interactive service work. There, the basic dynamic of labor and management struggling for control over the work process is complicated by the direct involvement of service-recipients: customers or clients, respondents or patients, prospects or passengers.3 All three parties are trying to arrange the interactions to their own advantage,

There is no commonly used term for the nonemployees involved in service interactions. I will frequently use the inelegant term "service-recipients" for this generic category, since, unlike "customers" or "clients," it can include people involved in noncommercial or nonvoluntary interactions. It is not an ideal term,however, since some types of participants, such as survey respondents, do not receive any service.

whether they want to maximize speed, convenience, pleasantness, efficiency, customization of service, degree of...