COMMODIFICATION AND EXPLOITATION OF AESTHETIC LABOR

Year 2023, Volume: 21 Issue: 4, 275 - 295, 01.01.2024

Hülya Yeşilyurt Temel

https://doi.org/10.11611/yead.1370467

Abstract

This study examines what bank employees do in the face of their managers' aesthetic expectations and controls and how they experience this process. The main argument of the research is how one's aestheticism plays a role in working life. The research is designed on the main question 'Is the aestheticism of bank employees used as a means of labor exploitation? Phenomenology, one of the qualitative research designs, was adopted and the 'interpretative phenomenology' type of phenomenology research design was used. For sample selection, a total of 20 participants, both male and female, from public and private bank employees were interviewed using snowball sampling method. The research data were obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews with the participants. Analyses were conducted using MAXQDA 22, a computer-aided qualitative data analysis program.
As a result of the research; employees evaluated aesthetic labor not only as physical/visual aesthetics, but also as a whole from different perspectives such as auditory, intellectual and harmony/harmony aesthetics. Employees strive for aesthetic labor in order to participate in employment and sustainability of employment in a postmodern order based on competition. Due to the functioning of the surveillance mechanism, employees take care to keep these efforts dynamic in both manager and customer relations. The growth of the services sector has led employees to develop aesthetic labor strategies as well as aesthetic labor efforts and skills. In the research, the results of aesthetic labor exploitation of the employee in various aspects such as gender-based discrimination, commodification of labor, surveillance mechanism, obligation, emotional mask, glass ceiling, self-alienation, unfair rewarding, time and cost were reached. In this context, when a sectoral and gender-based evaluation is made, aesthetic labor exploitation is more intense in private banks and female employees.

Keywords

Labor, Aesthetic Labor, Emotional Labor, Banking

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