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Annie Lin (Sociology major and Public Policy Minor)
"Care to Smile? Relationships and Voluntary Friendliness in Electronics Retail"
Sponsor: Michael Burawoy, Sociology
Project Description
Past research on the service sector indicates that workers often suffer from negative psychological consequences when forced by their managers to be friendly. Workers, workers' rights advocates, businesspeople, and scholars alike have therefore searched for ways to set up the work environment such that workers will be friendly even without management coercion. Taking this search effort into an under-researched sector, Annie will join electronics retail teams this summer to examine how companies' encouragement of relationship-building between employees and customers affects employees' likelihood of providing "voluntary" friendliness. Annie will sell electronic gadgets and give tutorials of computers while conducting ethnographic research and in-depth interviews.
Scholar's Photo
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A genuine but socially-produced smile. |
Scholar's Journal
When doing participant observation it is easy to confuse what is “real.” Constant physical, mental, and emotional involvement in the field blurs the distinction between what is “really my life” and what is “the life I’m researching.” Since I am studying a workplace, the distinction that blurs is between “my work” and “work.”
For starters, I am physically at the workplace (my fieldsite) much more often than at home. My assigned work hours become the central schedule around which all my “own” activities are planned, not only because work takes up much of my waking hours but also because it takes up most of my body’s energy. On a typical day, I wake up two hours before I need to be at work: if I am scheduled to start work at 10, I’ll get out of bed at 8; if I don’t have work until noon, I won’t get up until 10. After driving close to an hour to my worksite, I spend eight hours on my feet talking to customers, then drive another hour home. It is usually close to sunset or already dark by the time I return home. I eat dinner in half shutdown mode, my body at a level of numbness where I can still feed myself but cannot do much else physically. I gauge how loud my body is protesting to decide whether to take fieldnotes (my “own” work) that night or the morning after. I go to bed soon after, knowing I’ll wake up the next morning almost exactly two hours before I’m scheduled to start work. Oh, but this is all research, not my real life? My body disagrees. Physically, I am very much living the life of a “real” store employee.
I am also completely mentally involved in the job. This is not just because really throwing myself into this work allows me to take better fieldnotes and be a better participant observer (it does), but also because of my fairly human desires to actually do “the job” decently and build good relationships with those around me. Thus when the job trainer explains all the features of a new product to me, I give him my full attention… not just so that I can discover meanings and sociological insights in his behaviors but also because I really want to learn these features so I won’t appear clueless in front of customers. And when a customer begins raising his voice at me over his broken electronics equipment, when the entire store is mobilizing and preparing for an especially busy day, or when a parent asks me sincerely “Which model of computer should my son get?”, I find myself completely mentally occupied with work. My work, research, is in the back of my mind, but it is always in the back… and sometimes it escapes my mind completely. Mentally, I am very much doing the job of a “real” store employee.
Then there are those scary moments when I realize that the management strategies I am studying are also having emotional and psychological effects upon me. I caught myself, for example, frantically looking for my name on a list in the break room that ranked every employee’s sales numbers. As a researcher I have speculated that managers put this list up in order to boost store sales (by generating informal competitions among employees over who can sell the most), but this insight clearly does not prevent me from wanting to “climb the list” myself. I also frequently use the pronoun “we” when describing the worksite to other people: “we had a really busy week,” “we are hiring some new employees,” and most tellingly, “we hit our sales goal today.” These are the moments when I see that as much as I try to be “objective,” I cannot shield myself from the power of the environment. Emotionally, I am very much experiencing the feelings of a “real” store employee. I become simultaneously the investigator and the investigated, the researcher and the research subject, the analysis and the data. This is perhaps what sets participant observation apart the most from other research methods.
I was carrying out a heavy computer for a customer one day when I wondered what grounds I have for telling myself that this work is just “what I’m studying” and not “what I am.” My feet were hurting from hours of continuous standing, my mind was occupied with the customer’s needs, and my heart was telling me to walk faster so those other customers who had already been waiting patiently for so long don’t have to wait longer. I also knew that even after my eight hours of work, many conversations, emotions, and encounters from the day would return home with me. Yes, none of this is “really my life” because it is temporary, and on a larger scale my “real” life is perhaps very different from that of my coworkers. Yet in those months when the workplace is for much of my waking hours the center of all my physical, mental, and emotional energy… in those months it is really my life. This (albeit temporary) blurring between “my life” and “the life I’m researching” is what absolutely excites me about participant observation. It is also why I now hold even deeper respect than before toward those for whom this life is not temporary.
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