Are There Service Work-Games of Resistance? “Work-Play” and Relational Resistance in Dance Club Waitstaff Work

This study tackles an important yet marginalized question in the sociology of work: Are there service work-games of resistance? Sociologists kept trying to find them but had little success. Current studies only find service work-games of consent. Building on Lopez’s idea of “successful social interactions” (SSIs), this study searches for service work-games of resistance. The author finds that worker-customer relations resembling SSIs are already reported in some studies, though it remains unclear whether these SSIs are recurrent enough to qualify as work-games and how much they contribute to resistance. Then, the author coins the term work-play to demarcate between ludic informal work routines that resemble play (i.e., work-plays) and those that resemble games (i.e., work-games). After that, the author explains why work-plays have better resistance potential than work-games and why SSIs likely constitute work-plays instead of work-games. On the basis of the qualitative analysis of waitstaff work in a dance club in Beijing, the author found four recurrent SSIs that constitute work-plays and elaborates how these work-plays operated as relational resistance and triggered conventional resistance. These findings confirm the existence of service work-plays of resistance. This study’s data were collected through 19 months of participant observation at a club and interviews with 57 informants.