Perspectives from the inside: doormen as invisible clubbing facilitators
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Authors
Date
2016
Department
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Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
89
Series
Abstract
This thesis studied the identity work of Finnish doormen operating in Helsinki. Stemming from author’s own experience as a doorman, qualitative interview data and comprehensive literature review, six different dimensions of identity work were established. These dimensions were social identity, meaningful work, masculine identity work, stigmatized group & dirty work, ambivalent identity work and identity work in a context of marketplace management. The identity work of doormen was found to be very ambivalent, therefore, the ambivalent relations between the aforesaid dimensions were explored in this thesis. In addition to ambivalent relations between the dimensions, the objective of this thesis was to discover identity work of doormen and to tell what kind it is. In order to make this thesis marketing related, the author also aimed to discover how did doormen’s identity work play out in facilitating clubbing experiences. The aforesaid was done by means of exploring and searching analogies from previous consumer research studies regarding marketplace management, marketer-customer-relationship, play and playful consumption and by exploiting once again author’s own experience. By conducting a social psychological discourse analysis and ethnographic research on the interviews of twenty doormen, several contributions to the study of identity work and consumer research were suggested. The different dimensions of identity work were unique and some even difficult to understand for the outsiders. It also became clear that the identity of a doorman is strongly directing the work. Some of the dimensions of identity work were ambivalent per se. The ambivalent relations between the dimensions were not the same strength. Additionally, author discovered four different ambivalence negotiation strategies which doormen used to negotiate ambivalence. These four responses to ambivalence were avoidance, dominance, compromise and holism (Ashforth et al. 2014). Doormen fully controlled the interaction with customers i.e. doorman’s identity work played a big role in facilitating clubbing experiences. Occasionally, doormen let customers to participate in decision making but as soon as the customer agency began to threaten their identity work, they took over the situation. Contrary to previous consumer research studies, in their context doormen are the ones who are making, breaking, creating and supervising the rules. For doormen, the interaction with customers was play and playful consumption, as long as, customers remained in their designated roles. The doormen possessed also huge autonomy and authority on how to do their jobs. The aforesaid was the reason why doormen’s identity work included a lot of activities which were obscure and even illegal. Naturally, dominative role and autonomy of doormen affected customers also negatively.Description
Thesis advisor
Toyoki, SammyKeywords
identity work, social identity, meaningful work, masculinity, stigma, ambivalence, marketplace management, marketer-customer relationship