Economic Geography

Embodied interactive work
Over the last two decades or so, feminist theories about pleasure and desire,
about the embodied performance of work as well as critiques of traditional expla-
nations of gender segregation such as human capital theory have produced a new
vocabulary and a new research agenda within (part of) economic geography. The
turn to post-structuralist feminist theories as well as new work on the nature 
of justice has become a critical part of contemporary analyses of the new service
sector and the cultural economy, in large part stimulated by the changing nature
of production and work (McDowell 2000b, 2004a). Increasingly, occupations,

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jobs and professions in service economies are characterised by forms of work that
have been defined as interactive or embodied in economies that as a whole depend
on the construction and manipulation of consumer desire (Bauman 1998). One
of the distinctive aspects of service sector employment lies in its very description:
it is about providing a service, about servicing the needs of others, whether these
needs are goods, ideas, knowledge or personal services such as a massage or a
meal. In this exchange between the providers and consumers of a service, there
is almost always a close personal exchange or an interaction between the provider
and consumer in which the personal characteristics of the service provider take on
a far greater significance than in older forms of employment and exchange.
Robin Leidner (1993) has argued that in ‘interactive’ work in the service sector
work, the bodily attributes of the service provider are an important part of the
service provision. Weight, height, looks, accent and demeanour, the sexualised
desirability of employees all take on an importance that was by and large irrele-
vant when the typical form of employment, for men at least, was in the manufac-
turing sector. Thus in growing numbers of service occupations, the interaction
between clients and providers has become an exchange based on the manipulation
of emotions and desire, a transaction in which the gender, weight, looks, bodily
performance and the sexuality of the server is a key part of the exchange/seduction.
Feminist philosopher, Iris Marion Young (1990) has argued that these embod-
ied characteristics need to be part of new definitions of justice. She has explored
how the idealisation of a particularly desirable body – young, slim, white –
constructs various ‘Others’ as ineligible or less desirable workers in service
economies, especially in high status forms of work. 
Building on arguments about embodiment and inter-personal interactions,
geographers and sociologists have begun to explore the ways in which embodied,
often scripted performances in the service sector construct new patterns of 
inclusion and exclusion in which men and women, young and old, white and
non-white workers are differently constructed and so differentially valued as
potential employees. Paul du Gay (1996), for example, in a study of fashion retail
outlets, has shown how a scripted exchange, based on an ideal of youthful equal-
ity, is common in clothes shops aimed at the youth market. Here the conven-
tional distinction between the workers and clients is blurred in interactions that
depend increasingly on the similarity of the sales staff and the customers and
their participation in a sociable, yet scripted, ritual that is based on a false notion
of equality and familiarity. In these exchanges, a groomed, trimmed, tamed and
toned, sexually desirable body and the capacity for continual self-discipline is an
increasingly significant aspect of the employment relationship, as it increasingly
is in many professional occupations. In the retail sector, on the shop floor and
elsewhere, casual flirting is a recognised part of the script in which both young
men and young women, whether customers or assistants, have learnt to partici-
pate, perpetuating a myth of equality between them. 
But these embodied attributes of gender – the ideal body, the maintenance of
a deferential attitude to clients, the ability to seduce clients through looks and
(practised) talk – are neither equally distributed nor equally maintained among the
Feminist economic geographies
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service sector workforce, and putative employers also make assumptions about
prospective employees that maintain or create patterns of gender and class
discrimination. Furthermore in the daily interactions and assumptions that struc-
ture relations between employees and between employees and clients the
gendered body matters in different ways. In my work in the City of London I
looked at the ways in which different attributes of masculinity and femininity
mattered in different arenas in three merchant banks, showing how the perform-
ance of gender and the construction of a professional persona in the workplace
varied both between men and women and between different spaces, but in ways that
typically constructed women as ‘less legitimate’ employees.