The Working Class in the Service Sector: Outlining the Issue and Reviewing Current Sociological Discourse

Abstract

This study focuses on reviewing and analyzing the current sociological discourse devoted to the problems of routine service labor. The article reveals such aspects as the specifics of interactive service work, methods for assessing the size and composition of the service portion of the working class, how the updated properties of labor relations influence the traditional methods used by researchers to conceptualize them, the specific qualities of class consciousness inherent to the service sphere. It has been established that in foreign discourse of sociology of labor, research in the service sphere is currently at the forefront. The focus is on such problems as the structure of the new post-industrial working class, the inclusion of the client into the traditional worker/employer dyad as a third element that reconfigures the stable structures of labor relations, the increased importance of “emotional labor”, physicality and the so-called “soft qualities” of workers, the ideology of consumer sovereignty and the problems that it generates, the precarization of labor that leads to the deprivation of interactive service workers, the class consciousness and resistance practices of routine services employees. In domestic science, this issue is considered mainly from the standpoint of economics and management. In Russian sociology, service research has not been fully updated, there is no theoretical foundation, and the concept of service workers as part of the working class has not yet taken form. The majority of Russian authors rely on the structural and functional paradigm in the study of the service sphere, which does not correlate with the problems relevant to international sociology and the methods of their analysis.