Introduction

People dress for work. They do it for many reasons; it may be for protection or for symbolical purposes. However, these reasons do not explain why, for example, salespersons wear black straight trousers more often than any other kind of pants, or why a sweater is more commonly seen on a youth worker than, for example, on a lawyer. Some could say that they are normal outfits for those persons. This chapter will examine how these ‘normal outfits’ are constituted and maintained in everyday working life.

To put it in more sociological form, this chapter will be an examination of aesthetic norms in working life and more particularly the process in which norms are created and maintained. In other words, the aim is not to describe the appearance norms of particular occupations, but to focus on the dynamics of these everyday norms: how they are created, maintained, enacted or challenged. I study the everyday encounters that employees have with other people at their work, and how these relations shape situational appearance norms.

I interpret the norms in this chapter through the Goffmanian theatre metaphor, which sees social life as a theatrical play and people as actors (Goffman, 1959). Norms can be seen as the scripts of the play that guide the role performances of the actors. However, the actors may improvise and interpret the scripts in their own ways and thus change the way the play turns out. Moreover, there is no single ‘scriptwriter’ in the theatre of social life nor a single script, but the script itself is a product of interactions between the actors. The focus in this chapter is on those interaction dynamics among different actors, employees' relations to their supervisors, colleagues, customers, clients or other people they encounter in their work. The analysis shows that the aesthetic norms employees face are often the sum of many (sometimes contradictory) expectations rather than ‘coming from the top’ or being solidly established.

The aim of this examination is, first, to describe the dilemmas employees face in interactions with other people in their work, when they are trying to figure out the right way to look. I focus more on the costumes rather than their physical characteristics, such as body size, sex or symmetricity. However, the main interest is not in the actual looks of the employees, but in the meanings they represent. I analyse these meanings in terms of impression management, in which employees battle to match their outfit with the situational expectations of multiple actors (or audiences). This empirical analysis of employees' everyday appearance dilemmas informs us about the situational logics of aesthetic norms. As explicated in the introduction and in the first chapter by Kukkonen in this book, aesthetic norms are at the core of defining how aesthetic capital works and produces social differences.

Theoretical Framework: Impression Management with Work Costumes

Appearances are at the very core of how we structure social life and interact with each other.

(Shulman, 2016, p. 1)

For Erving Goffman, a classical sociological thinker, social life is fundamentally structured as a play in a theatre (Goffman, 1959). In short, for Goffman, we are characters who act in different roles and follow certain scripts in our everyday life. The audience consists of the other people with whom we are interacting, and we are, in turn, their audience. An audience can give different sanctions based on the performances of the actors. In a successful scene, actors play along with the script seamlessly, performing their tasks and sustaining their roles. These performances reproduce a certain social structure, patterning how everyday life is structured. Our everyday interactions and relations rely on the success of these performances. The appearance of an actor is an important part of the performance. Appearances are full of visual symbols that create the impression of the actor for the audience (i.e. the role s/he may be playing, his/her motives, aims etc.) and thus inform how the audience should relate to that person. On some level, we all know this, although we may not necessarily be conscious of it, as we change the way we look depending on the situation. We try to manage the impressions we convey for the sake of successful performances and interactions, ‘to grease the wheels of social interaction’ (Reyers & Matusitz, 2012, p. 143).

Managing impressions is not only an act of an individual presenting oneself but also a way to define, at the same time, the situation and its rules – it tells others how the current situation should be interpreted:

The doctor wears a white coat, the magician waves a wand, and the accomplished chef has a wide assortment of culinary accoutrement displayed in the kitchen. Similarly, professors typically hand out syllabi, meet with students in classrooms, and stand at the front of the room near the board. These symbols of meaning help people key into expected role performances and thus aid in establishing the definition of the situation. Drawing on these symbols of meaning that convey commonly held associations enables us to define a working consensus for successful social interactions.

(Preves & Stephenson, 2009, p. 246)

Impression management aims at credibly performing certain social roles. Conveying a credible impression necessitates an audience who determines the credibility of the performance (Grayson & Shulman, 2000, p. 56). The audience determines whether actors' appearance-based impressions are credible and based on that, it credits or discredits the actor. In sociological terms, crediting and discrediting is akin to sanctioning. Social sanctions (positive and negative) may be formal (explicit) or informal rules that can be expressed in various ways, verbally or nonverbally. Altogether, sanctions are a key mechanism maintaining social norms (Encyclopædia Britannica; Lapinski & Rimal, 2005). At the same time, social sanctions bring out the current social norms, whereas norm-conforming performances are more often ignored, as they are in harmony with expectations. Norms are thus simultaneously produced, maintained, negotiated and challenged. Who is to blame, however, for establishing this script of our everyday show? Everyone in the situation is. Although the power among people is unevenly distributed, all actors contribute to the situational norms that are a result of collective action. People play the roles of an actor and of their audience, often at the same time (Bendor & Swistak, 2001; Claridge, 2020).

From the perspective of an employee and his/her everyday working context, who is responsible for creating, maintaining and monitoring the appearance code of his/her role (costume)? It varies for different occupations, but basically, there are three key audiences that most employees in occupations including human contacts encounter at some point: employers (or superiors and other higher status representatives in the occupation), their workmates (colleagues) and other people employees encounter in their work (customers, clients, employees of other workplaces) (Grayson & Shulman, 2000, pp. 56–57). These categories include a large spectrum of different actors, but altogether, these can be seen as the main audiences receiving and reviewing the credibility of employees at their work.

As mentioned above, actors are not equal when it comes to determining the looks of an employee. As a result, the employees may sometimes need to adhere to norms of which they do not approve or that are even harmful for them. This question has been addressed more in the research on emotional and aesthetic labour (Warhurst & Nickson, 2009; Witz et al., 2003). Studies on emotional and aesthetic labour emphasise that employers demand certain kinds of looks and behaviour more and more from their employees, in other words, requiring more acting skills from the workers (Bryman, 2004, pp. 122–127). These forced norms increase the workload of the employees and may cause, for example, emotional exhaustion, if the employees do not feel comfortable with the roles they have to play (Reyers & Matusitz, 2012). In these cases, employees are depicted to have little chance to determine their appearances and the script of their play is already established. However, few occupations are comprehensive in their aesthetic demands of their employees. Instead, the scripts for aesthetic norms at workplaces are more often written in the dynamics of multiple actors, which are shown in the analysis of this chapter.

Data and Method

As I was interested in the everyday importance of appearance, which often goes unnoticed, in contrast to more obviously appearance-centred situations and occupations (such as actors, models etc.), we contacted with our research group employees from several different occupations that include some kind of service work with people. We aimed to map out the role of appearance more generally in everyday working life, which touches on the experience of many. Hence, we included occupations that require higher and lower education, that are male- and female-dominated and those that are not clearly gendered. We gathered the employees of the same occupations to groups (one to three groups per occupation) and arranged a total of 12 focus group interviews, which each included two to five occupational colleagues and that lasted about two hours each and they were conducted in 2017 and 2018. The occupations were as follows:

• Lawyers and judges

  • One group of 5 women.

• University lecturers

  • Three groups: (a) 4 men, (b) 4 women, (c) 3 women and 2 men.

• Youth workers

  • Two groups: (a) 2 men and 2 women, (b) 3 women and 2 men.

• Car and electronics salesmen

  • Two groups: (a) 2 men, (b) 4 men.

• Nurses

  • Two groups: (a) 4 women, (b) 4 women.

• Bar and restaurant workers

  • Two groups: (a) a man and a woman, (b) 3 women.

I applied an interpretation of Goffman's dramaturgy and the idea of impression management while performing a content analysis of the interviews. I coded all parts in which the interviewees spoke about the appearance norm in their work. I classified these scenes by the audience that was present in the moments the interviewees described. These audience categories consisted of employees' relation to their (a) employer or supervisor, (b) colleagues and (c) outsiders of the workplace (customers, clients, patients, students or other non-colleagues or supervisors). The categories were not mutually exclusive. Instead, in some situations, all of them were present at the same time. This was the case, for example, when a salesman at an electronics store served a customer, while his colleagues and supervisor observed him from a distance, which included three different audiences at once.

Group interviews are unusual data with which to employ Goffman-inspired methodology, especially when the main emphasis is on the content of the interviews rather than on the interviewing situation itself. Whereas Goffmanian analyses usually concentrate on observing the actions of a present moment, in the interview data, the analysed situations are filtered through the interviewees' talk. Thus, the observations are limited to the interviewees' formulations of those situations, which in the group interviews reflect the dynamics and discourses of the groups and their collectively created meanings (Pietilä, 2010). Some aspects of the situations may be left untold and others may be exaggerated, which applies to direct observations as well, but in group interviews, there is another layer that shapes the nature of the data at hand.

Despite its limits, focus group interviews offer excellent data for studying the subject. Different things are said aloud in a group than would be said alone with the interviewer or in a different group. Some of the interviewees knew each other, which also shaped the dynamics of talk. In a group, there is always a certain pressure guiding the conversation and framing the rules that defines what is being said and how. This creates a space that itself reflects the shared norms of the particular group, which is in this case the group of colleagues. In contrast to individual interviews, group interviews produce talk that better illuminates the shared values and perceptions in the group rather than their personal relations to the subject matter (e.g. Frey & Fontana, 1991; Pietilä, 2010, p. 215). For the sake of brevity, all interviewed occupations are not explicitly addressed. Instead, only the most expressive examples that illuminate the dynamics of norm negotiation are discussed in more detail in the analysis.

The focus in the analysis is on the general patterns of how role costumes (i.e. aesthetic norms) are scripted in everyday working life. Group interviews of the selected occupations from Finnish working life function here as a case example. However, it should be noted that, in every occupation, the specific aesthetic norms and appearances of the employees signified different meanings as the employees acted in different roles. For example, a judge acts as a specialist and a neutral representative of the legal system, a waiter acts as a servant of the customers, and a youth worker acts in the role of a reliable adult. In some occupations, there were more formal and explicitly dictated working costumes (such as for nurses, car and electronics salesmen and restaurant workers), whereas other occupations allowed employees to choose their work suits more freely (such as youth workers and university teachers). Moreover, there were occupations (for example, lawyers) that did not have many explicit appearance norms but neither were the employees free to choose their outfit, as their colleagues and other people they encountered actively guarded employees' conformity with the norm. These particular differences among occupations should be acknowledged, although they are not the main interest in the analysis.

Analysis

Conclusions

Here, I have analysed how the role costumes of employees are scripted in workplaces in the relations between employees and the people they encounter at work. I did this by employing a Goffmanian framework, which sees social life as a theatrical dramaturgy and people as actors who exercise impression management while playing different roles. The analysis informed us in many respects on the questions mentioned.

First, it described how aesthetic norms at workplaces are a result of multiple relations. Bosses, customers, students, patients, clients and workmates have certain expectations about how an employee should look; they make interpretations of his or her looks and sometimes express the norm by giving the employee (positive or negative) sanctions. These actors may give contradictory sanctions to the employees, as their expectations are different from each other's: colleagues may admire, whereas the boss may say it is bad for the brand. However, employees do not necessarily change their looks in accordance with the sanctions they get, but they may in some cases challenge the norms or interpret them in their own ways, which eventually puts norms in motion.

Norms are constantly battled, which turns the attention into power relations. Whose sanctions have power over employees' looks? Why are some employees allowed to break appearance norms more than others? Who is the main ‘scriptwriter’ in each situation? Based on my analysis, the answer to these questions is more complex than the space of this chapter allows to explore. It can be said, at least, that there are multiple scriptwriters in each situation. They are the actors and the spectators of the play, giving impressions and interpreting others' impressions at the same time. Some of them, however, are equipped with more status, stronger character, same-minded people or other forms of power that make their sanctions more powerful than those of the others, which ultimately determines in whose play we are acting. A lawyer may be constrained by the general conceptions of professional appearances, which his or her clients, colleagues and other people interpret and guard, for example.

Second, the analysis informed us about the consequences and purposes of impression management: what ends does the norm-conformance serve? The interviewees talked about several occasions on which their appearance had somehow shaped the situations in desirable ways: for some, it helped to get hired, build a trustful relation with another, give credibility or professionalism to one's appearance, ‘grease the wheels of economy’ by pleasing and attracting the customers, or it helped to get the work done in other ways. These positive consequences of impression management became particularly apparent in cases in which impression management failed and appearance norms were broken. These resulted in interpersonal misunderstandings, feelings of shame, contempt, mistrust and inability to make a contact, for example.

From a more sociological perspective, the analysis informed us about mechanisms of how appearance is used in everyday working life to maintain social order. The Goffmanian framework of impression management highlights that we order social life by constructing ‘scenes’, in which we act in certain roles. The scripts of the scenes that set the rules (and norms) for the actors and give meaning to the situation are socially (together) negotiated. Diverging from the script violates the norm, it shakes the social order and as a result, the violator may be sanctioned. Appearance norms sometimes have no purpose other than to be a symbol of a certain social role. For example, why does an electronics salesman have to wear black trousers? Why it is not suitable for a lawyer to wear shiny silver shoes? What purpose do they serve? They are hardly more practical than any other colours for the job, but instead, they are collectively regarded as symbolising these occupations. Shiny silver shoes in a courtroom may be seen as a seed of chaos in the social order of a litigation. It disrupts the expectations of the situation and the sense of known order by drawing the attention: something that does not fit in the picture. At the same time, it opens a door for social change: the audience needs to decide whether or how the act should be sanctioned, which determines whether the social norm is maintained or somehow changed.

Third, it showed that employees may break appearance norms if they find it somehow beneficial for them in their job. Then, they need to struggle between different aesthetic expectations of different audiences and choose which to follow. For example, the more provocative outfit of a youth worker or the less formal jacket of a legal aid lawyer are norm violations, but both render them more approachable in the eyes of their clients and thus helped them in their work. The lawyer changed her outfit after she confronted the security guard, whereas the youth worker continued to rebel against the employer's appearance guidelines. This substantiates the point made in recent studies on aesthetic labour: getting the right looks for a job requires extra unpaid work and resources from the employees (e.g. Donaghue, 2017; Vonk, 2020). Employees often must navigate within the pressure of conflicting expectations, pondering the right choice, what to wear and in whose play to act. This highlights the main argument of this chapter, which is that aesthetic norms are situationally and relationally negotiated and created. In terms of aesthetic capital, that means that when there are multiple audiences with different expectations, it becomes difficult for an employee to predict how his or her appearance will be sanctioned. This makes the exchangeability of aesthetic capital unpredictable and prone to situational codes and norms. It thus necessitates that employees also have the right kind of cultural capital and that they are able to embody it in their physical expressions at work. To conclude, there is no one way appearances act as capital in working life as the conception of the ‘right looks’ is inseparably tied to situational norms and actors with different resources and capabilities.