The labour of distinction and the new spirit of service: How do modern butlers produce status for elites and what drives them to do so?

As economic inequality rises, wealthy groups increase their capacity to hire domestics and other service workers for their personal consumption needs. In this talk, I explore how this dynamic manifests in a surprising yet pertinent case study: the return of the “butler” occupation.

Drawing from an ethnography where I trained and worked as a butler in the UK, as well as interviews with butlers and an analysis of historical documents, I consider how labour process, status accumulation, and elite formation intersect in high-end domestic work. Through the notion of the ‘labour of distinction’, I show how butlers produce and reproduce elite lifestyles, enabling wealthy individuals and families to convert economic capital into symbolic capital in a way that goes beyond classic models of opportunity hoarding. In turn, I then consider what stakes butlers themselves have in serving elites. Here, I show how (1) butlers engage in a kind of illusio centred on delivering “high levels of service” (one which they typically developed from their prior experience in the luxury hospitality sector); and (2), in the act of producing it, butlers vicariously consume an elite lifestyle (one that is otherwise inaccessible to them on account of their prior position in social space).

In contrast to the ideologies of religion and ascription that legitimised the servant role in the nineteenth century (Coser, 1973), servanthood and social class today tend to be expressed by butlers through the more modern mediums of professionalism and lifestyle. I finish the talk by theorising this as part of a ‘new spirit of service’, one that operates as elites increasingly incorporate service roles into their households in the twenty-first century.