the retail industries, where the name tag on the check-out person confers an
identity which has little to do with individual character, everything to do with
a quasi-personalised and dramatised conception of service.
(Kershaw 199 4 : 166)In turn, some authors have argued that the metaphor of performance is a key
to thinking about new embodiments which add value to market-based encounters;
the workplace becomes ‘a stage’, the service centre is ‘theatre’, the self is ‘per-
formed’, various kinds of training such as ‘role-play’ are used to heighten the effect,
and so on. Though such practices are often derided as inauthentic, Crang, writing
about tourism, rightly argues that this is too easy a move:
For a start, as an explicit manifestation of a more implicit and complex set of
ordering discourses that construct just what social practices it is that managers,
consumers and employees expect to constitute tourism work, these (drama-
turgical) understandings matter despite their conceptual and empirical
confusions. They constitute a way into discursive formations that have shaped
the cultural understandings of what tourism as a matter of fact involves. More
specifically, through the application of managerial theories, they are a powerful
tool in managerial constructions of tourism-related jobs and workplaces.
Second,... they also provide a complementary route to the application and
critique of theories established through other work-based situations, such as
deskilling and flexibility. They offer an alternative to shoe-horning tourism
employment into conceptual moulds cast elsewhere, and raise the possibility
of re-focusing theoretical understandings of paid work more generally. Far
from marginalising studies of tourism employment, some of the particular
concerns reviewed above may actually destabilise the dormant sense of what
is theoretically central and marginal about paid work in contemporary
capitalist societies in the first place.
(Crang 199 7 : 1 4 2)On another sociological account, performance becomes the key to under-
standing what is distinctive about contemporary societies:
Simultaneously, the mediatisation of developed societies disperses the theat-
rical by inserting performance into everyday life – every time we switch into
the media we are immediately confronted by a performative world of repre-
sentational styles – and in the process the ideological functions of performance
become ever more diverse and, maybe, diluted. Moreover, the globalisation
of communications stages the life of other cultures as increasingly performa-
tive, as widening realms of human identity become object to the spectators
gaze, and the social and political resonances of particular crises, such as the
suffering of starving Somalians or the quasi-invasion of Haiti by the United
States, are absorbed by the relentless opacity of the spectacle.
(Kershaw 199 4 : 133)Afterwords 127