How the “Commercialized Performance of Affiliative Race and Ethnicity” Disrupts Ethnoracial Hierarchy: Boundary Processes of Customers’ Encounter with South Asian Waitpersons in Hong Kong’s Restaurants

This study analyzes how the “commercialized performance of affiliative race and ethnicity” (CPOARAE) generates boundary processes that disrupt established ethnoracial hierarchies. The CPOARAE involves three parties: managers of a service workplace, workers lowly positioned in the ethnoracial hierarc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSociology (Oxford) Vol. 56; no. 2; pp. 333 - 350
Main Author Ming-tak Chew, Matthew
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.04.2022
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Ambiguity
Commercialization
Consumers
Customers
Ethnicity
Hierarchies
Interviews
Managers
Race
Restaurants
Workers
Workplaces
Hong Kong China
China
multiscalarity
affiliative ethnic identity
performing race
racial fluidity
ethnoracial
global sociology of race and ethnicity
boundary processes
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Summary:This study analyzes how the “commercialized performance of affiliative race and ethnicity” (CPOARAE) generates boundary processes that disrupt established ethnoracial hierarchies. The CPOARAE involves three parties: managers of a service workplace, workers lowly positioned in the ethnoracial hierarchy, and ethnoracial majority customers. The managers hire workers to carry out affiliative racial and/or ethnic performance to make customers feel that they are being served by workers who belong to highly positioned ethnoracial groups. I analyze the symbolic boundary disorientations of Han-Chinese Hongkonger customers, which result from customers’ confrontation with ethnoracial ambiguity during CPOARAEs. These boundary processes show that despite being a capitalistic product and a popular cultural practice, CPOARAEs have the potential to disrupt and remake ethnoracial hierarchy. This study’s data are primarily collected from multiple in-depth interviews with 24 customers and participant observation in several restaurants, and secondarily from interviews with managers and workers.
ISSN:0038-0385
1469-8684
DOI:10.1177/00380385211037866