Servitude and Service Work in Literature

This class brings the sociology of work into conversation with representations of servitude and service work in novels and television. The founding theorists of sociology were trying to make sense of the development of capitalism and the industrial revolution, and placed work at the center of their analyses. As our industrial economy transformed into one dominated by service work, scholars shifted their attention to new forms of work and developed new frameworks for theorizing interactions and relationships in the service sector workplace. How do we understand a workplace where interactions with customers, clients, or patients is a significant part of the work? How do we understand circumstances where we pay others to care for – and even to love – the old, the sick, and the young? What happens when one person’s workplace is another person’s home? And what does precarity look like, and feel like, in the service economy? These are some of the issues we will be examining this semester.

Fictionalized representations of workers and workplaces help illustrate the sociological points we are learning, and are especially good at exploring the interactions and relationships central to service work. They can also bring us closer to the emotional experience of work. In Part I of the course, we will get our sociological grounding in the study of interactive service work. In Part II, we will examine different forms of work and pair sociology with novels and TV shows.