Assistant Professor of Sociology, Dr. Kyla Walters, has published a chapter, "Retail work, race, and aesthetic labor" in The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics, edited by Maxine Leeds Craig.
Abstract: The labor expected of workers and how race shapes workplace dynamics varies within the retail industry. In clothing stores, branding efforts to create a signature look and lifestyle determine the type of labor workers do. Fashion retailers differentiate themselves from competitors through branding techniques involving the merchandise, the marketing, and the in-store models – retail workers. Given employer expectations, these service workers perform aesthetic labor to embody the brand by being attractive, stylish, and exuding the company’s image. Doing so is charged with racialized beauty ideals, which retailers’ labor and marketing practices reproduce. Despite the centrality of race within these processes, racial analyses of aesthetic labor remain relatively scant. This research tends to examine the aesthetic cultivation of workers as branded vehicles or the appraisal of aesthetic capital within the labor process without considering race. However, scholars and students should consider how racial forces shape beauty politics in aesthetic labor.