Book review: McDowell L (2009) Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 272 pp. £22.99 paper. ISBN: 978 1 4051 5978 4

It is easy to feel pessimistic about the landscape of work and employment today. Few can ignore rising unemployment and widespread insecurity. Yet the key issues of work and working life for social scientists in the future must reach beyond the headline trends of who works where and at what rate of pay. Equally significant to unequal life chance is the nature of employment – including persistent sexism and neglected human rights to respect, rest and refreshment. Working Bodies reminds us that the labour market restructuring we are now so familiar with – trends of deindustrialization, the ‘new’ knowledge economy, and the rise of precarious work; bears down through fleshy, sentient bodies in damaging, often denigrating, ways. Elsewhere among the new publications on this changing landscape of livelihood, Andrew Ross (2009) highlights the uneven and contradictory effects three decades of deregulation and privatization have had on notions of flexibility, autonomy and nonalienating work. The difference is that Linda McDowell goes further to expose the exploitations that interweave class, ethnicity and gender in the spatial division of labour in the new ‘high-touch’ ‘servicing’ economy. Reflecting on the landscape of service employment in the credit crunch and its aftermath, readers may feel a sense of urgency to turn our pessimism to anger – to speak out against degrading and exploitative employment. Working Bodies represents a synthesis of Linda McDowell’s substantial and groundbreaking body of research and publication on work and employment, gender and identity. The book begins with a familiar geography of social divisions of labour and combines this with new case-study material and a review of existing literature, especially that from sociology and feminist geography, bringing fresh insight to the interactive jobs that require copresence, face-time, intimacy and emotional labour. Those already familiar with McDowell’s prolific output, such as Gender as Work in the City (1997), Redundant Masculinities? (2003) and Hard Labour (2005), will not be disappointed with this treatment of the body/work relationship and the timely attention to low-paid ‘high-touch’ as opposed to the well-paid ‘hightech’ labour which more frequently dominates the headlines. The book is structured in three parts and carefully organized as a classroom resource: after the first three chapters of ‘essential reading’ students and teachers are encouraged to ‘dip in and out of’ five case-study chapters on: ‘intimate work in the home’ (eg, agency, domestic work, elder-care and childcare) (Chapter 4), sex-work (Chapter 5), boxers, bouncers and bodyguards (Chapter 6), care work and beauty work (Chapter 7), and ‘routine interactive work’ (employment in shops, clubs and fast-food outlets) (Chapter 8). The book concludes in Chapter 9 by rehearsing some of the main arguments about continuity and change in service-sector employment and by staking a claim for the significance of geographical analysis in this field. This final chapter also includes a useful discussion of methods (on the significance of case studies and ethnographies) which will appeal to dissertation students embarking on qualitative social science research. This interdisciplinary book will provide a valuable supplementary undergraduate text for a wide range of teaching on human geography, sociology and urban and regional development. The book begins in Part One by examining the epochal changes of ‘restructuring’, from ‘making things’ to ‘selling goods and providing services’, of ‘modernity’ to ‘post-modernity’, of casualization, feminization, job loss and 432 Progress in Human Geography 35(3)