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This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers' intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised by workers that is connected to the requirement that workers be 'fun' at work to facilitate consumption and to support the labour of co-workers. This sociality also shapes access to employment. However, the way that this takes place sheds light on divisions within the service labour force, in which employment opportunities are distributed through a social 'scene' that excludes migrant and ethnic minority workers. Involvement in this scene places the relationship between the public and the private in workers' social lives into a constant tension, but exclusion increases vulnerability to poor working conditions and exploitation. The article concludes by arguing that the relationship between the public and the private in the practice of affective labour is not dissolved so much as posed as a problem that workers must negotiate within the disciplinary requirements of labour in specific industries and the modes of embodied inequality shaping the service labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to recent debates about the relationship between affective labour and class by exploring the classed distinctions enacted through affective labour in the urban night-time economy. Bringing theories of affective labour into a dialogue with Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the article explores the affective and symbolic dynamics of hospitality labour in a gentrified inner-urban neighbourhood of Melbourne, Australia. It shows how the practice of hospitality labour enacts classed distinctions and tensions emerging from the gentrification of inner-urban areas, and how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of class contribute to the valorisation of affect in hospitality venues. The valorisation of affect are processes in which the value attributed to an atmosphere or consumption experience is based on the forms of distinction practised within the venue, enacted in aesthetics, tastes and modes of embodiment. The article also shows how practices of class distinction – both 'punching up' and 'managing down' – are connected to the gendered politics of service work in the way that workers manage the threat of violence or sexual harassment in venues. In general, the article shows how the classed dynamics of gentrification are enacted in affective economies, and therefore how Bourdieusian analysis of class can be usefully deployed in theoretical debates about affective labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is youth and youthfulness in the contemporary economy. Drawing on theories of immaterial labour, the article moves beyond an existing focus on ‘young people’ as capital accumulating subjects to theorize the production of youthfulness as a quality that circulates through immaterial economies and that is mobilized to confer a particular form of value on consumer goods, service interactions and labouring subjectivities. The production of youthfulness is made possible through relations between the micro-level production and consumption that take place within youth cultures and modes of sociality, the production practices and marketing activities of firms, and young people whose capacities for embodiment, sociability and youthful consumption cultivated both within and outside of paid employment contribute to their constitution as labouring subjects. Within this network of relations, youthfulness is mobilized to distribute playful affects, offer the possibility of hedonistic leisure/pleasure and confer symbolic distinctions of cutting edge style. These economies of youthfulness constitute a specific means by which production, consumption, labour and leisure intersect in the labouring subjectivities and immaterial products of the contemporary service economy, and contribute to the formation of valorized and devalorized youth subjectivities in relation to the new economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976: 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the 'hidden abode of production': the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new 'hidden abode' outside employment, for example in the 'production of organization' and in consumption. Although they can open up this new 'hidden abode', without LPT's fine-grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the 'new economy'. Through developing an expanded conception of a 'new hidden abode' of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]