Eileen Otis
Biographic Data
| ID | 252120 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eileen Otis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eileen |
| FAMILY NAME | Otis |
| SIGNATURE | OTIS E |
| AFFILIATIONS | State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0643-550X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
From the factory floor to the retail aisle: Reconstructing Burawoy’s labor politics in the age of merchant capital
Labor-process theory has long treated production as the privileged site of capitalist accumulation. Yet in an era defined by global retail chains, logistics networks, and platform capitalism, value is secured not only in production but also in circulation. This article argues that contemporary capitalism depends upon realization labor: the labor that transforms commodities into sales. Drawing on ethnographic research in Walmart stores in China, I…
The Gender Fix: Outsourcing Feminism and the Gender Politics of Supply Chains
Decades of feminist research has revealed the dismal labor conditions for women in global supply chains. Given this reality, why does Walmart use women in its supply chain as icons of female empowerment? Combining the Marxist notion of a 'spatial fix' with a feminist analysis of symbolic resources, we develop the concept of a 'gender fix' to understand a growing field of corporate programs that use women as symbolic resources to restore the image…
One store, two fates: Boundary work and service capital in China’s retail sector
How do collective identities gain salience in the workplace? How are new “capitals” created in the process? To answer these question, this study examines the confrontation of two distinctly positioned socio-economic groups that for the first time labor as co-workers in urban China, in a new type of workspace; the modern retail store. One group is the urban service proletariat, who struggle to earn a living in precarious service jobs but have lega…
Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations
The Deficient Worker: Skills, Identity, and Inequality in Service Employment
Skill is central to inequality in the workplace, as a basis of material reward and status recognition. While much research treats skill as a set of abilities possessed-or not-by a worker, scholars have yet to grasp the organizational processes whereby jobs come to be taken as rudimentary and the worker performing them unskilled and therefore deficient. To illuminate these processes, we travel to Beijing, China, where workers are loquacious about …
China's Beauty Proletariat: The Body Politics of Hegemony in a Walmart Cosmetics Department
In her best-selling book, Beautiful Faces Grow Rice (Meili liandan zhang dami), author Lu Junqing articulated an emergent aesthetic and economic logic: women's pursuit of beauty is the most certain means of achieving career success. In an industry that is rapidly growing, millions of women flock to retail beauty counters where they consult with cosmetics sales agents about how to best enhance their appearance so as to ensure their place in the la…
Bridgework: Globalization, Gender, and Service Labor at a Luxury Hotel
Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global luxury hotel in Beijing, China, reveals how women workers learn to span cultural divides as gendered capacities. These workers must not only 'look good and sound right,' they must look familiar and sound understandable. Adopting the term 'bridgework,' the…
China
Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China
Socialist Market Inequality
China's gradualist transition to markets, in which the Communist Party maintained pre eminent authority, spawned an economic ex pansion that has been anything but gradual. Thanks to the spectacular economic growth, the total number of people dwelling in poverty plummeted from 250 to 32 million in just over 20 years (Davis and Wang forth coming). But, soaring growth has also creat ed vast disparities in living standards. How do China's socialist-e…
Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China
Despite the international growth of the service sector, an industrial paradigm defines the study of global labor. This is because analyses of service work typically focus on firms in the United States, while studies of global labor concentrate on manufacturing. I develop a framework for analysis of global service work by comparing ethnographic cases of labor in two global, luxury hotels in China. Each hotel is linked to the same U.S.-based global…
The Dignity of Working Women: Service, Sex, and the Labor Politics of Localization in China's City of Eternal Spring
This article examines a five-star hotel in China's southwest Yunnan province where local management adopted the organizational template and service protocols of a U.S.-based transnational hotel firm and, at the same time, informally organized escort and sexual services for guests. The original organizational template evolved into a highly punitive labor regime that management considered necessary to discipline what they considered to be the "unru…
The Otherness of Self: A Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China
Guanxi Civility: Processes, Potentials, and Contingencies
Building on research that analyzes how social relations and networks ( guanxi) shape the Chinese market, this article asks a less-studied question: How is the market changing guanxi? The authors trace the transformation of guanxi from communal, kin-based ties to a cultural metaphor with which diverse individuals build flexible social relationships in late-socialist China. As a 'generalized particularism,' this cultural metaphor provides something…
Giving Care, Writing Self: A "New" Ethnography
The Reach and Limits of Asian Panethnic Identity: The Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Class in a Community-Based Organization
Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China
Despite the international growth of the service sector, an industrial paradigm defines the study of global labor. This is because analyses of service work typically focus on firms in the United States, while studies of global labor concentrate on manufacturing. I develop a framework for analysis of global service work by comparing ethnographic cases of labor in two global, luxury hotels in China. Each hotel is linked to the same U.S.-based global…
Guanxi Civility: Processes, Potentials, and Contingencies
Building on research that analyzes how social relations and networks ( guanxi) shape the Chinese market, this article asks a less-studied question: How is the market changing guanxi? The authors trace the transformation of guanxi from communal, kin-based ties to a cultural metaphor with which diverse individuals build flexible social relationships in late-socialist China. As a 'generalized particularism,' this cultural metaphor provides something…
Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations
China's Beauty Proletariat: The Body Politics of Hegemony in a Walmart Cosmetics Department
In her best-selling book, Beautiful Faces Grow Rice (Meili liandan zhang dami), author Lu Junqing articulated an emergent aesthetic and economic logic: women's pursuit of beauty is the most certain means of achieving career success. In an industry that is rapidly growing, millions of women flock to retail beauty counters where they consult with cosmetics sales agents about how to best enhance their appearance so as to ensure their place in the la…
The Reach and Limits of Asian Panethnic Identity: The Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Class in a Community-Based Organization
Bridgework: Globalization, Gender, and Service Labor at a Luxury Hotel
Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global luxury hotel in Beijing, China, reveals how women workers learn to span cultural divides as gendered capacities. These workers must not only 'look good and sound right,' they must look familiar and sound understandable. Adopting the term 'bridgework,' the…
The Dignity of Working Women: Service, Sex, and the Labor Politics of Localization in China's City of Eternal Spring
This article examines a five-star hotel in China's southwest Yunnan province where local management adopted the organizational template and service protocols of a U.S.-based transnational hotel firm and, at the same time, informally organized escort and sexual services for guests. The original organizational template evolved into a highly punitive labor regime that management considered necessary to discipline what they considered to be the "unru…
Giving Care, Writing Self: A "New" Ethnography
The Reach and Limits of Asian Panethnic Identity: The Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Class in a Community-Based Organization
Guanxi Civility: Processes, Potentials, and Contingencies
Building on research that analyzes how social relations and networks ( guanxi) shape the Chinese market, this article asks a less-studied question: How is the market changing guanxi? The authors trace the transformation of guanxi from communal, kin-based ties to a cultural metaphor with which diverse individuals build flexible social relationships in late-socialist China. As a 'generalized particularism,' this cultural metaphor provides something…
The Otherness of Self: A Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China
Socialist Market Inequality
China's gradualist transition to markets, in which the Communist Party maintained pre eminent authority, spawned an economic ex pansion that has been anything but gradual. Thanks to the spectacular economic growth, the total number of people dwelling in poverty plummeted from 250 to 32 million in just over 20 years (Davis and Wang forth coming). But, soaring growth has also creat ed vast disparities in living standards. How do China's socialist-e…
Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China
Despite the international growth of the service sector, an industrial paradigm defines the study of global labor. This is because analyses of service work typically focus on firms in the United States, while studies of global labor concentrate on manufacturing. I develop a framework for analysis of global service work by comparing ethnographic cases of labor in two global, luxury hotels in China. Each hotel is linked to the same U.S.-based global…
The Dignity of Working Women: Service, Sex, and the Labor Politics of Localization in China's City of Eternal Spring
This article examines a five-star hotel in China's southwest Yunnan province where local management adopted the organizational template and service protocols of a U.S.-based transnational hotel firm and, at the same time, informally organized escort and sexual services for guests. The original organizational template evolved into a highly punitive labor regime that management considered necessary to discipline what they considered to be the "unru…
Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China
China
China's Beauty Proletariat: The Body Politics of Hegemony in a Walmart Cosmetics Department
In her best-selling book, Beautiful Faces Grow Rice (Meili liandan zhang dami), author Lu Junqing articulated an emergent aesthetic and economic logic: women's pursuit of beauty is the most certain means of achieving career success. In an industry that is rapidly growing, millions of women flock to retail beauty counters where they consult with cosmetics sales agents about how to best enhance their appearance so as to ensure their place in the la…
Bridgework: Globalization, Gender, and Service Labor at a Luxury Hotel
Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global luxury hotel in Beijing, China, reveals how women workers learn to span cultural divides as gendered capacities. These workers must not only 'look good and sound right,' they must look familiar and sound understandable. Adopting the term 'bridgework,' the…
One store, two fates: Boundary work and service capital in China’s retail sector
How do collective identities gain salience in the workplace? How are new “capitals” created in the process? To answer these question, this study examines the confrontation of two distinctly positioned socio-economic groups that for the first time labor as co-workers in urban China, in a new type of workspace; the modern retail store. One group is the urban service proletariat, who struggle to earn a living in precarious service jobs but have lega…
Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations
The Deficient Worker: Skills, Identity, and Inequality in Service Employment
Skill is central to inequality in the workplace, as a basis of material reward and status recognition. While much research treats skill as a set of abilities possessed-or not-by a worker, scholars have yet to grasp the organizational processes whereby jobs come to be taken as rudimentary and the worker performing them unskilled and therefore deficient. To illuminate these processes, we travel to Beijing, China, where workers are loquacious about …
The Gender Fix: Outsourcing Feminism and the Gender Politics of Supply Chains
Decades of feminist research has revealed the dismal labor conditions for women in global supply chains. Given this reality, why does Walmart use women in its supply chain as icons of female empowerment? Combining the Marxist notion of a 'spatial fix' with a feminist analysis of symbolic resources, we develop the concept of a 'gender fix' to understand a growing field of corporate programs that use women as symbolic resources to restore the image…
From the factory floor to the retail aisle: Reconstructing Burawoy’s labor politics in the age of merchant capital
Labor-process theory has long treated production as the privileged site of capitalist accumulation. Yet in an era defined by global retail chains, logistics networks, and platform capitalism, value is secured not only in production but also in circulation. This article argues that contemporary capitalism depends upon realization labor: the labor that transforms commodities into sales. Drawing on ethnographic research in Walmart stores in China, I…
Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · China (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Marketing (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Emotional Labor in Professions (5 works)