Hospitality workers and gentrification processes: Elective belonging and reflexive complicity

This paper contributes new understandings of the dynamics and processes of gentrification that contribute to wider transformations of class relations. We argue that the hospitality sector, specifically the tastes, dispositions and practices of young hospitality workers, are central in how gentrification processes currently function. We extend concepts of elective and selective belonging, and reflexive complicity, to analyse how young hospitality workers understand their own labouring practices as contributing to gentrification in their local areas. We show how their aesthetic and ethical orientations to place, especially their workplaces, make their experience of hospitality work more palatable. At the same time, their tastes are ‘put to work’ in venues that contribute to the vibes and aesthetics aimed at middle class consumption practices, while creating symbolic boundaries for long-term residents who are being ostracised in the process. In this way, the high cultural capital bar workers possess thus become spatial bouncers for high economic capital property developers, where reflexive complicity is instrumentalised as a process of symbolic violence. We propose that hospitality labour, and the everyday relationalities and working practices of young workers, are crucial for understanding the contemporary processes of gentrification and class formation.