Twenty-first century butlers and the new spirit of service

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 29: Worker and Employer Beliefs and Justifications

Abstract

More than fifty years ago, Lewis Coser (1973) argued that the “servant” had become obsolete, claiming that such a “premodern” occupation could not function within modernity without religious legitimations. However, with parts of the contemporary service sector exhibiting the very characteristics that Coser viewed as “premodern” – especially within services to wealthy elites – there is reason to review Coser’s thesis. In this paper, I do just that through the case study of the twenty-first century butler, drawing from an ethnography where I trained and worked as a butler myself, interviewed private service butlers (N=24), and analysed servant instruction literature and memoirs (N=33) spanning the last two centuries. After showing how variants of servant characteristics are exhibited in butler practices, I turn to the question of how butlers consent to these conditions. On top of economic factors such as necessity and security, the paper highlights: (1) how butlers coming from the luxury hospitality sector engage in a kind of service illusio, where the desire to deliver “high levels of service” renders their occupation craft-like and vocational; and (2) how butlers find symbolic rewards by working in close proximity to elites, especially in the chance to vicariously consume a lifestyle that they could otherwise not access. I suggest that these constitute features of a “new spirit of service”, one that expresses servanthood and social class through the more modern mediums of “professionalism” and “lifestyle”, securing servant-like labour within worlds of work generated by wealth inequalities.

Author

• Bryan Boyle, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies