Front-Stage Authenticity: Race as Normative Control in Low-Wage Retail Work

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 27: Frontline Service Work

Abstract

Contemporary Work organizations increasingly use normative control strategies that encourage workers to "be yourself" and express authentic identities at work. While research has documented how these appeals to authenticity appropriate workers' non-work identities for corporate benefit, we know little about how race intersects with these dynamics in low-wage service work. Through more than twelve months of ethnographic participant observation as an employee at a national electronic and home goods retail store in heavily Latino Chicago suburbs, I examine how race and ethnicity become central to normative control strategies. I find that in a workplace where more than 75% of workers are second-generation Latino immigrants, racialized workplace culture is co-produced through two interrelated processes: workers actively bring Latino cultural symbols, practices, and immigrant family experiences to the work floor, while management strategically sanctions and institutionally requires these expressions. Contrary to research showing racialized cultural expression confined to back-of-house spaces or suppressed through aesthetic labor requirements, I demonstrate how Spanish and Latino cultural practices operate front-stage in customer-facing operations and become fundamental to how the store generates profit. This co-production functions as normative control: workers' racialized identities become inseparable from job performance, creating feelings of belonging and loyalty while obscuring low wages and limited mobility. Workers cannot opt out or separate their authentic selves from work roles, making control more totalizing as their entire racialized identities are appropriated for organizational benefit. This research reveals how organizations exploit racialized authenticity as a mechanism of control in an era of increasingly diverse low-wage workforces, contributing to our understanding of both normative control dynamics and the role of race in workplace culture and organization.

Author

• Andres Villatoro, University of Pennsylvania