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This paper introduces the concept of transracial aesthetic labour to understand why and how an international teaching assistant (ITA) vocally changes meanings of his racial identity.

The paper uses a narrative analysis to detail instances of transracial aesthetic labour.

For the ITA, this labour involved orally distancing from or aligning with particular Indian stereotypes for specific contexts.

Transracial aesthetic labour may occur in other industries that deem race an integral part of sounding right or looking good for the job.

The findings highlight the need for ITAs and universities to rethink the meaning of transracial to combat racist perceptions of ITAs' speech.

The paper advances the aesthetic labour literature by exploring how race is vocally performed for this labour and introducing ITAs as aesthetic labourers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance regarding the satisfaction of customer needs in the competitive restaurant industry. Restaurants have seen a transformation in employees’ labor, changing from primarily physical and mental to emotional and aesthetic dimensions. In this study, the effect of managers’ emotional and social competence (ESC) on the aesthetic labor of service and kitchen employees has been investigated.

Empirical data was collected from employees and managers of a restaurant chain. Structural equation modeling was the main analytical tool used to assess the results.

The findings indicated that managers’ ESC affected the aesthetic labor of their service (aesthetic traits (AT), aesthetic requirements and service encounters) and kitchen (AT, aesthetic creativity and aesthetic harmony ) employees. Achievement orientation and adaptability were among the dimensions of emotional competence that contributed the most to aesthetic labor. The most significant elements of social competence were inspiring leadership and conflict management.

The study suggests that managers can improve the aesthetic performance of their employees by using their ESC.

This is the first study of this kind to include kitchen employees while considering the effects of restaurant managers’ ESC on aesthetic labor. The findings indicate the importance of the ESC of managers in improving the aesthetic labor of employees.

Drawing upon the existing theoretical and empirical sourced knowledge of aesthetic labour and gender, this paper aims to explore the exploitation of women’s aesthetic labour in the Chinese airline industry and the underlying causes from a contextual point of view.

This qualitative study has emerged from a broader research project which aimed to explore women’s experiences of work-family conflict and their career aspirations in the Chinese airline industry in which aesthetic labour was prevalent as a significant issue during semi-structured interviews with female employees and HR/line management. Thus, the study draws upon interview data focusing on recruitment and selection of flight attendants in three Chinese airlines. This is complemented by secondary sources of data from Chinese television programmes and job advertisements.

This study reveals that aesthetics is both gendered and context-bound. It exposes that aesthetic labour in Chinese airlines is demanded from women but not men. It highlights that gendered aesthetic labour is continuously shaped by four influential contextual issues – legislation, labour market practices, national culture and airline management practices.

By uncovering the dynamic interconnectedness of gender and aesthetics and illustrating the exploitation of women’s aesthetic labour for commercial gains in Chinese airlines, this paper contributes to the understanding of the gendered aesthetics in the airline industry. It also offers new insights into the theory of aesthetic labour by locating it in a context that differs significantly from other socio-cultural contexts.

For service organisations the interaction between front‐line personnel and the customer is crucial as they aim to create high quality service encounters. Much research has focused on attempts by organisations to inculcate the “right” kind of attitude in their front‐line employees. This paper seeks to extend this analysis by pointing to the increasing importance not just of having employees with the “right” attitudes, but also possessing aesthetic skills. The emergence of aesthetic skills reflects the growing importance of aesthetic labour in interactive services. That is, employers' increasingly desire that employees should have the “right” appearance in that they “look good” and “sound right” in the service encounter in retail and hospitality.

The paper mainly utilises responses to a structured questionnaire from employers in the retail and hospitality industries in Glasgow, although reference is also made to a similar employees' questionnaire.

The evidence from the questionnaires suggests that employers in the retail and hospitality industries are not generally looking for “hard” technical skills in their front‐line personnel, but rather “soft” skills. Such “soft” skills encompass attitude and, importantly, appearance – what we term “aesthetic skills” – and the latter is often underappreciated in academic and policy‐making debates.

The findings of the survey suggest that academics and policy‐makers need to expand the way they think about “soft” skills. Specifically, they need to be aware of the extent of employers’ needs for both social and aesthetic skills.

The findings of the survey have implications from a policy perspective and policy‐makers may need to think about if and how these needs can be incorporated into education and training provision.

Organisations seek to manage and control the dress, appearance and behaviour of their employees for strategic corporate advantage but what are the far‐reaching implications of this for employers and employees? This paper aims to identify the explicit and implicit codes for appearance and behaviour imposed by management and co‐workers.

Adopting a case study approach using ethnographic methods, this research, conducted in a recruitment agency specialising in placing construction industry personnel, draws on data obtained from four in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with senior managers, a focus group with female employees and participant observation methods, and provides an intriguing insight into the grooming and packaging of female employees. Findings – Findings show this aesthetic and behavioural “packaging” of the female employees comes with consequences for client, employer and employee. The females cannot escape the aesthetic and sexualised image imposed upon them as management strategy and often have no choice but to “perform” for clients to manipulate situations for their own advantage.

Because of the research approach adopted and the relatively small sample size, generalizability is limited. It would be helpful to replicate the study in other settings.

The paper highlights the existence of official and unofficial controls over dress, appearance and behaviour and the pressure exerted on women in the workplace.

To ascertain if the use of attractive staff is common practice within the hospitality industry in Edinburgh.

A qualitative approach by a series of semi‐structured interviews. The researcher took an instinctive humanist approach to this study. A sample of 3, 4 and 5 star hotels, bars and restaurants were included. The focus of the research developed from ascertaining if attractive staff were common place into one that, some organisations use more sophisticated techniques to have customers literally buy‐in to the goods and services on offer.

Open admission from respondents, that they use attractive staff. However, aesthetic labor is strongly supported by the use of emotional labor as the worker needs to have a certain empathy with the customer. Furthermore, the aesthetic worker is supported by the uniform, the environment in which the service encounter takes place and provides a performance in which the customer actively participates. The highly developed manner that the organisation induces the customer to perceive when in this environment lead the researcher to propose a 007 Dynamic that happens, as the customer takes on an almost “James Bond” like persona.

A relatively small sample but is perhaps indicative of contemporary hospitality industry common practices.

Hospitality management are using less highly “hard” skilled employees and focusing more on the “soft” skills of new workers.

Customers are susceptible to subliminal messaging from staff appearance, their empathy and environment.

Expertise in English language teaching (ELT) is determined by being a white native speaker of English. Therefore, ELT is a type of aesthetic labour because workers are expected to look and sound a particular way. As nonwhite teachers cannot perform this labour, they may experience employment discrimination in the form of racial microaggressions, which are everyday racial slights. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what types of microaggressions inform several nonwhite teachers that they cannot perform aesthetic labour in private language schools in Toronto, Canada.

The paper utilizes a critical race methodology in which several nonwhite teachers told stories of racial microaggressions.

The teachers were told that they lacked the right aesthetic through microaggressions involving employers being confused about their names, questioning their language backgrounds, and citing customer preferences.

Future research must find out whether nonwhite teachers experience discrimination throughout Canada. Other studies must investigate how intersecting identity markers affect teachers’ employment prospects.

To prevent the discrimination of nonwhite teachers (in Canada), increased regulation is needed. The international ELT industry also needs to fight against the ideology that English is a white language.

There is little literature that examines language/racial discrimination in the Canadian ELT industry and how this discrimination is articulated to teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the consequences of the increasing prominence of soft skills, focusing specifically on the production of these skills and their recognition and recruitment.

The paper draws on interviews conducted with managers in the service sector in France. Two types of services are covered: large‐scale retailing and hotel and catering services.

The paper shows that the demand for soft skills has caused the service labour process to become highly personified and underline the risks this entails.

The personification of the service labour process encourages the development of specific human resource management practices in the spheres of recruitment, pay and training.

The results underline the need for institutional mediation in the regulation of the labour market. The personification of skills has many social implications in terms of discrimination and policies on training and skill recognition.

The originality of the paper lies, first, in the fact that the results relate to France, whereas most of the literature on soft skills has focused on the UK, the US and other English‐speaking countries. Furthermore, the article emphasises that managers’ practices are shaped by their attitudes towards soft skills, and in particular whether they believe them to be acquired or innate.

With a focus on service encounters in the luxury segment of hospitality and tourism, the authors analyse how inherent social class distinctions and status differences are (re-)produced and which role gender plays in this process of “doing class”.

The authors combine concepts of class work and inequality regimes with a focus on intersections of class and gender. The empirical study is based on interviews in Germany with first-class flight attendants, five-star hotel employees, and luxury customers on how they perceive and legitimize luxury services, working conditions and status differences.

The authors identify perceptions and practices of status enhancement and status dissonance among luxury service workers, as well as gender practices and meanings such as specific feminized roles service workers take on. The authors also conceptualize these intersecting patterns of inequality reproduction as “gendered class work”.

The study broadens empirical accounts of labour relations in the service industries. The concept of organizational class work is extended towards worker–customer interactions. With the concept of gendered class work, the authors contribute to research on the intersectionality of class and gender and the reproduction of inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the managerial and developmental concept of talent management in the context of the specific characteristics of the weak labour market attributes of the hospitality and tourism sector in developed countries.

The paper explores these characteristics and analyses talent management scenarios within which businesses can operate, concluding that an inclusive and developmental approach, focusing on talent identification and acknowledgement, is probably the most effective within this sector.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of the concept of talent management in the context of hospitality and tourism that is both inclusive and developmental.

It will be of value to practitioners in helping them to evaluate their recruitment, retention and development practices. It will also be of value to researchers in providing the basis for further study and reflection in this area.

This is the first paper of its kind to apply the concept of talent management to the specific labour market conditions which pertain in hospitality and tourism.