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Sales floor trajectories

Distinction and service in postsocialist China

University of British Columbia, Canada

This article considers experiences of social change and downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large, state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions. Sales clerks did so by calling forth the waning symbolic capital of state socialism and translating it into a form of postsocialist, working-class nostalgia. In an effort to appeal to a downwardly-mobile, working-class clientele in a reconfigured marketplace, sales clerks simultaneously traced the downward social trajectory of China’s diminished urban proletariat.

Key Words: China • service work • postsocialism • social change • social mobility • distinction • trajectory

Ethnography, Vol. 7, No. 4, 461-491 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138106073147


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