Sociology Compass· 2014Q1
Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender, and Beauty
- 182citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2014year
Short summary
Aesthetic labor is defined as the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers based on their physical appearance, offering a sociological lens to understand how beauty's value is constructed and stratified.
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Key points
- Aesthetic labor involves screening, managing, and controlling workers based on physical appearance.
- The concept moves beyond emotional labor to focus on worker corporeality in the service economy.
- It distinguishes aesthetic labor from body work and embodied cultural capital.
- Applications are reviewed across organizational, freelance, and market labor contexts.
- Aesthetic labor situates beauty's value within power relations of class, race, and gender.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Sociology Compass, 2014 · DOI ↗
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Field: Museology
MuseologyArts and Humanities