Customer Abuse and Aggression as Labour Control Among LGBT Workers in Low-Wage Services

This study examines the relation between customer abuse and aggression, the gender and sexual expression of workers, and labour control in low-wage services. In-depth interviews with 30 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)1 low-wage service sector workers reveal how customer abuse and aggression works in consort with management strategies to reproduce cis- and heteronormativity. Customer abuse and aggression disciplined worker expressions of non-normative gender and sexual identities, leading to concealment and self-policing. Management was complicit in this dynamic, placing profitability and customer satisfaction over the safety of LGBT workers, only intervening in instances of customer abuse and aggression when it had a limited economic impact. It is posited that customer abuse and aggression is not only a response to unmet expectations emanating from the labour process but is also a mechanism of labour control that disciplines worker behaviour and aesthetics, directly and indirectly, by influencing management prerogatives.

Back to the Shop Floor: Behavioural Insights from Workplace Sociology

This article compares insights into decision-making and behaviour developed by Kahneman and Tversky in behavioural economics with the main findings from studies of pay incentives in workplace sociology in the middle decades of the 20th century. The article shows how many of the insights offered by behavioural economists, such as loss aversion, were anticipated and considered by the workplace sociologists. It is argued that the sociological studies offer deeper and more convincing accounts of worker behaviour through a better understanding of the role of social structure, context, and social processes in framing and influencing action.

Gene expression is stronger associated with behaviour than with age and fertility in ant workers

The ecological success of social insects is based on division of labour, not only between queens and workers, but also among workers. Whether a worker tends the brood or forages is strongly influenced by age, fertility and nutritional status, with brood carers being younger, more fecund and corpulent. Here, we experimentally disentangle behaviour from age and fertility in Temnothorax longispinosus ant workers and analyse how these parameters are linked to whole-body gene expression. Our transcriptome analysis reveals four times more genes associated with behaviour than with age and only few fertility-associated genes. Brood carers exhibited an upregulation of genes involved in lipid biosynthesis, whereas foragers invested in metabolism. Additional simulations revealed that the experimental disassociation of co-varying factors reduces transcriptomic noise, potentially explaining discrepancies between transcriptomic studies on worker behaviour in other social insects. Our study highlights the influence of nutritional status on task choice in ant workers.

Current indirect fitness and future direct fitness are not incompatible

In primitively eusocial insects, many individuals function as workers despite being capable of independent reproduction. Such altruistic behaviour is usually explained by the argument that workers gain indirect fitness by helping close genetic relatives. The focus on indirect fitness has left open the question of whether workers are also capable of getting direct fitness in the future in spite of working towards indirect fitness in the present. To investigate this question, we recorded behavioural profiles of all wasps on six naturally occurring nests of Ropalidia marginata , and then isolated all wasps in individual plastic boxes, giving them an opportunity to initiate nests and lay eggs. We found that 41% of the wasps successfully did so. Compared to those that failed to initiate nests, those that did were significantly younger, had significantly higher frequency of self-feeding behaviour on their parent nests but were not different in the levels of work performed in the parent nests. Thus ageing and poor feeding, rather than working for their colonies, constrain individuals for future independent reproduction. Hence, future direct fitness and present work towards gaining indirect fitness are not incompatible, making it easier for worker behaviour to be selected by kin selection or multilevel selection.

Queen pheromones modulate DNA methyltransferase activity in bee and ant workers

DNA methylation is emerging as an important regulator of polyphenism in the social insects. Research has concentrated on differences in methylation between queens and workers, though we hypothesized that methylation is involved in mediating other flexible phenotypes, including pheromone-dependent changes in worker behaviour and physiology. Here, we find that exposure to queen pheromone affects the expression of two DNA methyltransferase genes in Apis mellifera honeybees and in two species of Lasius ants, but not in Bombus terrestris bumblebees. These results suggest that queen pheromones influence the worker methylome, pointing to a novel proximate mechanism for these key social signals.