In this article I examine the attractions and shortcomings of the “positive” neohumanisitic turn in organizational theorizing and how positivity might be developed. I evaluate positivity's moral and cultural underpinnings and claims to separate positive from negative emotions, and I explore the deployment of positiveness in HRM programs of empowerment, emotional intelligence, and fun at work. I conclude with suggestions on how positive scholarship could be reconfigured in light of the present critique and against the emancipatory ideas of critical organizational theory.

On Being Positive: Concerns and Counterpoints

Consumption is a social, cultural, and economic process of choosing goods, and this process reflects the opportunities and constraints of modernity. Viewing consumption as an “institutional field,” the review suggests how consumption bridges economic and cultural institutions, large-scale changes in social structure, and discourses of the self. New technologies, ideologies, and delivery systems create consumption spaces in an institutional framework shaped by key social groups, while individual men and women experience consumption as a project of forming, and expressing, identity. Studying the institutional field requires research on consumer products, industries, and sites; on the role of consumption in constructing both the consuming subject and collective identity; and on historical transitions to a consumer society. Ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis show a global consumer culture fostered by media and marketing professionals yet subject to different local interpretations.

Consumers and Consumption

This article reports on an ethnographic study of female sex workers in Britain who work in the indoor prostitution markets. The empirical findings contribute to the sex-as-labour debate and add to the sociological literature regarding the gendered and sexualized nature of employment, particularly the aesthetic and emotional labour of service work. Grounding the empirical findings in the theory of identity management and emotional labour and work, the article reviews some of the existing examples of how sex workers create emotion management strategies and describes an additional strategy, that of the ‘manufactured identity’. I argue that sex workers create a manufactured identity specifically for the workplace as a self-protection mechanism to manage the stresses of selling sex as well as crafting the work image as a business strategy to attract and maintain clientele. Drawing on comparisons between sex work and other feminized service occupations, I argue that sex workers who are involved in prostitution under certain conditions are able to capitalize on their own sexuality through the construction of a manufactured identity. The process of conforming to heterosexualized images in prostitution is conceptualized as not simply accepting dominant discourses but as a calculated response made by sex workers to manipulate the erotic expectations and the cultural ideals of the male client.

‘It's Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality

This article contributes to the sociology of work by analysing the nature and prevalence of humour as a coping strategy in the sex industry. In conjunction with describing six different types of hu...

Controllable Laughter Managing Sex Work through Humour

This paper explores some of the key features of the ‘second’ global shift or offshoring of a range of service functions from America and Europe to countries like India and China. Service offshoring...

The ‘second’ global shift: the offshoring or global sourcing of corporate services and the rise of distanciated emotional labour

This paper draws upon empirical research into the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. This industry is becoming increasingly important as a provider of knowledge and expertise to employers and individuals. We suggest that the literature on new forms of service employment (emotional labour and hybrid forms of work) has neglected to explore well-paid professional employees. We argue that this group is equally implicated in societal pressures to conform to conventional heterosexual images of femininity and masculinity. Pressures to conform do not have to come from management, but from professional bodies, the media and clients. Image consultancy provides one way of encouraging employees to alter their image as the advice can be packaged as independent of the employer and professional. We conclude that the new profession of image consultancy is more about gender than image. Consultants are selling codified knowledge for the construction of particularly socially accepted or preferred forms of bodily identity.

At Face Value? Image Consultancy, Emotional Labour and Professional Work

A person's image incorporates three principal elements: how you look, sound and present yourself. Alterations in the world of work have increased the importance of image in the work place and have created a demand for a new form of recipe knowledge – impression management. This has encouraged the formation of specialist image consultancy companies, as well as the development of new techniques of image construction and management. This article provides an analysis of the image consultancy industry in the United Kingdom. It explores the geography of the industry, motivations for establishing an image consultancy firm, the networks consultants develop and the methods of client acquisition. The results of a postal survey of image consultants are reported.

Christine A. Wellington

Papers

At Face Value? Image Consultancy, Emotional Labour and Professional Work

Image consultancy in the United Kingdom: recipe knowledge and recreational employment