Valuing Inattention and Invisibility

• In Event: Attention! - II: Language, Expertise, and Labor

Abstract

The presentation, based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 in two hotels located in Helsinki, Finland, examines how inattention and invisibility are valued in hotel housekeeping. To the hotel guests housekeeping usually does not raise attention. What they see of the life of the hotel is, mostly, the front stage, as it were, with receptionists welcoming guests and the waiters and waitresses busying themselves at breakfast. Yet housekeeping, in all its inconspicuousness, is crucial for the daily functioning of the hotel. It makes possible the intake of new guests once previous ones have checked out of their rooms. It ultimately makes the rooms sellable. The presentation suggests that the success of the work nevertheless depends on its invisibility. Not only must the traces of previous guests be erased before new ones can arrive, but the work itself succeeds only if it – along with the cleaning staff – disappears and makes itself invisible. If it is there, perceptible, it has failed. Since the work is largely outsourced, a complicated set of valuation practices and devices have been created to extract financial value from this invisibility. The presentation looks at how they are deployed and highlights the conflicts between valuing practices and quality standards in the work. Ultimately, it proposes that there is a large segment of ‘inattention economies’ that we need to pay attend to in order to understand how markets and value creation operate.

Authors

• Ville Savolainen, Tampere University

• Olli Pyyhtinen, Tampere University