Flight Attendants and the Management of Gendered ‘Organizational Bodies’

Abstract

The management of the ‘organizational bodies’ of flight attendants is our main focus in this chapter. Building on Witz, Haiford and Savage’s (1997) concept of temporally and spatially ‘organized bodies’, we use the term ‘organizational body’ here to refer to the mode of embodiment, the manipulation of the presentation and performance of the body, which must be maintained in order to become and remain an employee of a particular organization and to ‘embody’ that organization. In an examination of the gendered organization and regulation of organizational bodies in the context of waged work, the chapter draws on empirical research into the recruitment, training and supervision of female flight attendants as an example of the constitution of ‘organizational bodies’ as fundamental to the functioning of contemporary service organizations. In the case of a flight attendant, the achievement and maintenance of an ‘organizational body’ involves being subject not only to organizationally specific management techniques, but also to those occupational discourses which operate in the industry generally and which serve to define the role and identity of a flight attendant (Tyler and Abbott 1998). At least in part, this is as the embodiment of an organizational identity — as the material signifier of an organizational ethos — or as one Qantas executive put it, ‘the packaging of a product’ (cited in Williams 1988). A female flight attendant must, therefore, learn to practice certain ‘body techniques’ (Mauss 1973).