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Aesthetic labour explains how employees are required to look and sound the part in many contemporary workplaces. That such corporeality affects workers' employment prospects, including career progression, is now well documented in research. As such, it can result in employment discrimination based on physical features, more commonly known as ‘lookism’. However, very few jurisdictions proscribe lookism, and little is known about the efficacy of those that do. Based on archival research, this chapter examines the procedures and operation of physical features inclusion in an Equal Opportunity Act in one jurisdiction that does proscribe ‘lookism – the state of Victoria in Australia. As the first analysis of such laws, the chapter provides an important opportunity to assess the efficacy of legal attempts to address employment discrimination based on employee appearance. In so doing, it draws out lessons about the legal challenge to lookism.

In high-end interactive service work settings, asymmetries between workers and customers are typically reflected in the service interaction. Workers must carefully control their emotional and aesthetic displays towards customers by relying on protocol provided by management. Customers, in turn, need not reciprocate such acts. By contrast, this paper theorizes service interactions that, paradoxically, aim to narrow the social distance between those on either side of the counter. Drawing on ethnographic data from a higher-end Los Angeles restaurant, I introduce the concept of proximal service as performed relationships in which server and served engage in peer-like interactions in a commercial setting. I show how management structures this drama through hiring, training, and shopfloor policies, all of which encourage select workers to approach customers using informal, flexible, and peer-like performances. I close by discussing how a branded experience of service amongst equals relates to symbolic exclusion and social inequality, and suggest that proximal service may be on the rise within upscale, urban service establishments seeking to offer a more “authentic” consumption experience.

This study addresses the debate regarding employee discretion and neo-normative forms of control within interactive service work. Discretion is central to core and long-standing debates within the sociology of work and organizations such as skill, control and job quality. Yet, despite this, the concept of discretion remains underdeveloped. We contend that changes in the nature of work, specifically in the context of interactive service work, require us to revisit classical theorizations of discretion. The paper elaborates the concept of value discretion; defined as the scope for employees to interpret the meaning of the espoused values of their organization. We illustrate how value discretion provides a foundational basis for further forms of task discretion within a customized service call-centre. The study explores the link between neo-normative forms of control and the labour process by elaborating the concept of value discretion to provide new insights into the relationship between managerial control and employee agency within contemporary service labour processes.