Bryan Boyle and Dieter Vandebroeck’s paper “The Labor of Distinction: Butlers, Service Work, and the Production of Elite Lifestyles” has just been published in the American Sociological Review. In this paper, Boyle and Vandebroeck theorize a type of labor that serves elite status, one that is linked to the rise of a new transnational class of super-wealthy individuals. They develop a theoretical framework that captures the core characteristics of this ‘labour of distinction’ and elucidate this model through Boyle’s insightful and meticulous ethnography of the modern-day ‘butler’.
It is not just the first time that research by VUB-sociologists appears in the American Sociological Review, but also the first time that the doctoral research of a Phd-candidate at a Flemish university gets printed in the ASR, the highest ranked journal in our field.
More information about this paper can be found here.
