Rachel Sherman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3686043 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Sherman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Sherman |
| SIGNATURE | SHERMAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2241-4277 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 346 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Anxieties of Entitlement
Despite the rise of the “moral economy” as a frame for analyzing increasing inequality, few scholars have explored the moral dimensions of elites’ experience and interpretations of their own privilege. Based on in-depth interviews with 50 affluent New York parents, this paper focuses on how they manage the peculiar concept of “entitlement”. In U.S. political culture, this concept links individuals’ dispositions and behaviors to whether they deser…
Uneasy Street
Uneasy Street
A very expensive ordinary life
Scholarship on elites, including on their consumption, tends to focus primarily on social closure and the pursuit of social advantage. Research has therefore not investigated the meanings and morality of elites’ lifestyle choices, particularly from the perspective of the wealthy themselves. Yet understanding this lived experience is critical to understanding the cultural dimensions of inequality. This article draws primarily on in-depth interview…
Uneasy Street
Uneasy Street
Conflicted cultivation
Behind the Scenes with the One Percent
The Art of Conversation
This ethnographic essay analyzes This Progress, an interactive artwork by Tino Sehgal, shown at the Guggenheim in New York City. This “constructed situation” violates conventional expectations of interaction and art, with the aim of fostering meaningful conversations among strangers. The article explores what kinds of talk emerged in these encounters, illuminating possibilities for and challenges to participatory political culture in public space…
Making Care Count
Freelancing Expertise
Vegas at Odds
Book Review| December 01 2011 Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960 – 1985 Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960 – 1985Kraft, James P. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010 273 pp., $55.00 (cloth) Rachel Sherman Rachel Sherman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2011) 8 (4): 159–161. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1377051 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permis…
The Production of Distinctions
Beyond interaction
The literature on the role of customers in service work has neglected work that does not involve significant face-to-face interaction, assuming it to be distant from customer influence and thus highly routinisable. This article uses ethnographic data from housekeeping and room service in two urban luxury hotels in the USA to look comparatively at how customers influence this work and its management. It argues that customers affect several non-int…
Time Is Our Commodity
The emergence of personal concierge and errand services in the past decade offers a rare opportunity to look at a fledgling occupation with uncertain prospects and in particular to examine its rhetorical struggles for legitimacy. Providers of these services are attempting to commodify household and personal tasks largely associated with women's labor. Based on interviews and participant observation, this article demonstrates that this association…
Class Acts
In this lively study, Rachel Sherman goes behind the scenes in two urban luxury hotels to give a nuanced picture of the workers who care for and cater to wealthy guests by providing seemingly unlimited personal attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extended ethnographic research in a range of hotel jobs, including concierge, bellperson, and housekeeper, Sherman gives an insightful analysis of what exactly luxury service consists of, how m…
Rethinking the Ethnographic Local
This article reviews four recent books on workers in the global economy. Taking a range of approaches, these monographs draw on qualitative data to describe workplaces and workers in a variety of economic, cultural, and political contexts. Wilson's analysis of 'intimate economies' in Bangkok brings together economic processes with the multiple social identities of worker-consumers. Adler and Adler offer a deeply grounded portrait of diverse types…
Producing the superior self
In the luxury hotel, unequal entitlements between workers and guests - both to human attention and labor and to social and material resources generally - are prominent. Participant observation in two hotels shows that one of the myriad ways interactive workers respond to their subordinate position is to establish themselves as superior to others. They use comparative strategies of self to situate themselves as privileged on a range of symbolic hi…
Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy
The recent revitalization of the American labor movement presents a paradox for social movement scholars. Long seen as exemplifying the conservative goal and tactical transformation associated with Michels’s iron law of oligarchy, few would expect organized labor to embrace radical goals and tactics. Yet some local unions have done just that. This article addresses the question of how social movement organizations are able to break out of bureauc…
From state introversion to state extension in Mexico
Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy
The recent revitalization of the American labor movement presents a paradox for social movement scholars. Long seen as exemplifying the conservative goal and tactical transformation associated with Michels’s iron law of oligarchy, few would expect organized labor to embrace radical goals and tactics. Yet some local unions have done just that. This article addresses the question of how social movement organizations are able to break out of bureauc…
Producing the superior self
In the luxury hotel, unequal entitlements between workers and guests - both to human attention and labor and to social and material resources generally - are prominent. Participant observation in two hotels shows that one of the myriad ways interactive workers respond to their subordinate position is to establish themselves as superior to others. They use comparative strategies of self to situate themselves as privileged on a range of symbolic hi…
A very expensive ordinary life
Scholarship on elites, including on their consumption, tends to focus primarily on social closure and the pursuit of social advantage. Research has therefore not investigated the meanings and morality of elites’ lifestyle choices, particularly from the perspective of the wealthy themselves. Yet understanding this lived experience is critical to understanding the cultural dimensions of inequality. This article draws primarily on in-depth interview…
The Production of Distinctions
Time Is Our Commodity
The emergence of personal concierge and errand services in the past decade offers a rare opportunity to look at a fledgling occupation with uncertain prospects and in particular to examine its rhetorical struggles for legitimacy. Providers of these services are attempting to commodify household and personal tasks largely associated with women's labor. Based on interviews and participant observation, this article demonstrates that this association…
Conflicted cultivation
Beyond interaction
The literature on the role of customers in service work has neglected work that does not involve significant face-to-face interaction, assuming it to be distant from customer influence and thus highly routinisable. This article uses ethnographic data from housekeeping and room service in two urban luxury hotels in the USA to look comparatively at how customers influence this work and its management. It argues that customers affect several non-int…
From state introversion to state extension in Mexico
Anxieties of Entitlement
Despite the rise of the “moral economy” as a frame for analyzing increasing inequality, few scholars have explored the moral dimensions of elites’ experience and interpretations of their own privilege. Based on in-depth interviews with 50 affluent New York parents, this paper focuses on how they manage the peculiar concept of “entitlement”. In U.S. political culture, this concept links individuals’ dispositions and behaviors to whether they deser…
Freelancing Expertise
From state introversion to state extension in Mexico
Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy
The recent revitalization of the American labor movement presents a paradox for social movement scholars. Long seen as exemplifying the conservative goal and tactical transformation associated with Michels’s iron law of oligarchy, few would expect organized labor to embrace radical goals and tactics. Yet some local unions have done just that. This article addresses the question of how social movement organizations are able to break out of bureauc…
Producing the superior self
In the luxury hotel, unequal entitlements between workers and guests - both to human attention and labor and to social and material resources generally - are prominent. Participant observation in two hotels shows that one of the myriad ways interactive workers respond to their subordinate position is to establish themselves as superior to others. They use comparative strategies of self to situate themselves as privileged on a range of symbolic hi…
Rethinking the Ethnographic Local
This article reviews four recent books on workers in the global economy. Taking a range of approaches, these monographs draw on qualitative data to describe workplaces and workers in a variety of economic, cultural, and political contexts. Wilson's analysis of 'intimate economies' in Bangkok brings together economic processes with the multiple social identities of worker-consumers. Adler and Adler offer a deeply grounded portrait of diverse types…
Class Acts
In this lively study, Rachel Sherman goes behind the scenes in two urban luxury hotels to give a nuanced picture of the workers who care for and cater to wealthy guests by providing seemingly unlimited personal attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extended ethnographic research in a range of hotel jobs, including concierge, bellperson, and housekeeper, Sherman gives an insightful analysis of what exactly luxury service consists of, how m…
Time Is Our Commodity
The emergence of personal concierge and errand services in the past decade offers a rare opportunity to look at a fledgling occupation with uncertain prospects and in particular to examine its rhetorical struggles for legitimacy. Providers of these services are attempting to commodify household and personal tasks largely associated with women's labor. Based on interviews and participant observation, this article demonstrates that this association…
Vegas at Odds
Book Review| December 01 2011 Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960 – 1985 Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960 – 1985Kraft, James P. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010 273 pp., $55.00 (cloth) Rachel Sherman Rachel Sherman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2011) 8 (4): 159–161. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1377051 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permis…
The Production of Distinctions
Beyond interaction
The literature on the role of customers in service work has neglected work that does not involve significant face-to-face interaction, assuming it to be distant from customer influence and thus highly routinisable. This article uses ethnographic data from housekeeping and room service in two urban luxury hotels in the USA to look comparatively at how customers influence this work and its management. It argues that customers affect several non-int…
Freelancing Expertise
Making Care Count
The Art of Conversation
This ethnographic essay analyzes This Progress, an interactive artwork by Tino Sehgal, shown at the Guggenheim in New York City. This “constructed situation” violates conventional expectations of interaction and art, with the aim of fostering meaningful conversations among strangers. The article explores what kinds of talk emerged in these encounters, illuminating possibilities for and challenges to participatory political culture in public space…
Conflicted cultivation
Behind the Scenes with the One Percent
Uneasy Street
Uneasy Street
A very expensive ordinary life
Scholarship on elites, including on their consumption, tends to focus primarily on social closure and the pursuit of social advantage. Research has therefore not investigated the meanings and morality of elites’ lifestyle choices, particularly from the perspective of the wealthy themselves. Yet understanding this lived experience is critical to understanding the cultural dimensions of inequality. This article draws primarily on in-depth interview…
Uneasy Street
Uneasy Street
Anxieties of Entitlement
Despite the rise of the “moral economy” as a frame for analyzing increasing inequality, few scholars have explored the moral dimensions of elites’ experience and interpretations of their own privilege. Based on in-depth interviews with 50 affluent New York parents, this paper focuses on how they manage the peculiar concept of “entitlement”. In U.S. political culture, this concept links individuals’ dispositions and behaviors to whether they deser…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (4 works)