The Hairdresser As Artisan

THEMES INFLUENCING THE FUTURE OF

BOOTH RENTAL IN HAIR SALONS

Tomas Jose Lopez

B.A., The University of West Florida, 2004

A thesis submitted to the Department of Anthropology College of Arts and Sciences The University of West Florida In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

2010

The thesis of Tomas Jose Lopez is approved:

______Rosalind A. Fisher, M.A., Committee Member Date

______Terry J. Prewitt, Ph.D., Committee Member Date

______Robert C. Philen, Ph.D., Committee Chair Date

Accepted for the Department/Division:

______John R. Bratten, Ph.D., Chair Date

Accepted for the University:

______Richard S. Podemski, Ph.D., Dean of Graduate Studies Date

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my family for instilling in me a love of learning and belief in the value of rational discourse. My thesis committee has helped me not only to realize this project as an end in itself, but develop as a researcher overall. For a multidisciplinary, qualitative study such as this, they have been an ideal group of mentors and guides.

Dr. Terry Prewitt introduced me to the concepts of themal analysis and form criticism that have deeply influenced this work; his help with the organization of this thesis has been invaluable. Ms. Rosalind Fisher made numerous helpful observations and helped me ask better questions. She also steered me toward much of the rich and varied sociological literature that I have drawn upon. My chair, Dr. Robert Philen, has mentored me from the start and has helped me to take a project that has often looked as problematic as it appeared promising and to make it into a reality. I also wish to thank Ms. Mary Ann

Fabbro for her help with the early drafting of the research design, and Ms. Jackie Crane for being both an outstanding landlady and a friend as well. I also wish to thank Suni

Turnage for his faith in me throughout this entire process.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

ABSTRACT ...... vi

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 A. Relevance of the Study ...... 9 B. Methodology ...... 10 C. Values of Autonomy and Creativity ...... 16

CHAPTER II. THE HAIRDRESSER AS ARTISAN ...... 24

CHAPTER III. SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE STUDY OF THE SKILLED TRADES ...... 36 A. The Hairdresser in Recent History ...... 39 B. The Role of Occupational Licensure ...... 42

CHAPTER IV LAW AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY IN MODERN COSMETOLOGY ...... 56

CHAPTER V. BEAUTY SHOP AND OTHER CELLULOID BEAUTY SALONS ...... 65

CHAPTER VI. AUTONOMY, PROFESSIONALISM, AND BOOTH RENTAL: PERSPECTIVES FROM WORKING COSMETOLOGISTS ...... 78

CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSIONS ...... 86

REFERENCES ...... 90

APPENDIXES ...... 101 Appendix A. Informed Consent Form ...... 102 Appendix B. Narrative Interview Prompts ...... 105 Appendix C. IRB Approval Form ...... 107

ABSTRACT

THEMES INFLUENCING THE FUTURE OF BOOTH RENTAL IN HAIR SALONS

Tomas Jose Lopez

The practice of booth rental in hair salons in its present form is a relatively recent development that has met with wide acceptance by many self-employed cosmetologists on one hand, but with vocal opposition by other industry actors. In recent years, the social science literature devoted to beauty culture in the U.S. and to beauty salon culture in particular has improved both in quality and quantity; yet there is little available in this literature that addresses the cultural significance of how hairdressers get paid according to different remunerative structures. The greatest gaps in scholarship surround booth rental salons. The author uses his 20 years of experience as a licensed cosmetologist, a set of extended narrative-prompt and grand-tour interviews with regional salon owners, and a multi-disciplinary literature review to discover some of the cultural values or, in themes, that have made booth rental a common practice in the 48 states that permit it and that are likely to influence its continuation as a viable business organization model in

U.S. hair salons.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

According to Merriam-Webster OnLine Dictionary, the noun “hairdressing” denotes either “1. a: the action or process of washing, cutting, curling, or arranging the hair b: the occupation of a hairdresser” and “2: a preparation for grooming and styling the hair” (Merriam-Webster OnLine 1993b). In the second, broader sense of the term, hairdressing is an extension of primate grooming behavior and serves to promote individual health and well-being as well as to promote social bonding between individuals and to diffuse interpersonal tensions.

However, the narrower first definition reveals the uniquely human dimension of hairdressing, which entails not only grooming, but the manipulation of hair as a symbol of individual and group identity. Hairstyles can communicate social and economic status, sexual availability (Leach 1958; Mageo 1986), marital status, or state of mind (Leach

1958; Hallpike 1969). Hair can function as an expression of individual style, a highly politicized symbol, or an expression of identification with a particular part of society.

It is impossible to reconstruct all the different business models used by beauty salons, barbershops, wig parlors, or other purveyors of beauty products and services.

However, it is clear that there have always been small shops as well as self-employed artisans who have worked alone in a fixed location, accompanied a single employer, or called on clients in their homes. A measure of what Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983) calls

“emotion work” or “emotional labor” has also long been part of the hairdresser’s job description. The hairdresser’s art involves making clients feel good about the service they receive, the person providing the service, and the place of business in which the transaction occurs.

There have been many ways by which a hairdresser has been able to work and receive pay throughout history. For most of the last 40 years, the main forms of remuneration have been to work alone within an owned or leased space; to employ others as the owner of a salon and receive what profits remain after paying salaries, commission or hourly wages to employees and any other associated expenses; to own or lease a salon and lease stations to others for an agreed-upon rate; to work as an employee of a salon- owner; or to work as a self-employed person by leasing space as a tenant in a “rental salon.”

In recent decades, the option of leasing salon space, or booth rental, has become increasingly common in the states that permit it. Both the owner of the building and the tenants are self-employed; neither tenant nor landlord can be defined as independent contractors. The landlord gets a set price, and the tenant’s actual commission rate will vary according to his or her net earnings after rent and other expenses.

Thus most cosmetologists work from a fixed location. The Internal Revenue

Service treats mobile salons as legal; these are the only types of salons that fit the agency’s definition of “independent contractor” (Internal Revenue Service 2009a). While there are clients who will appreciate the convenience of a mobile salon, working out of a single “tax home” often works best for stylists and customers alike.

With respect to stylists working out of fixed locations, it is often hard to tell whether a cosmetologist is self-employed and leasing a work station or a paid employee

(Internal Revenue Service 2009a; 2009b; 2009c; 2009d; 2009e; 2009f) . For many hair salon customers, the topic of payment for services is the first clue: does payment go to the salon or directly to the person doing the hair? Self-employed tenants receive direct payment, and pay rent out of the receipts taken in (Internal Revenue Service 2009b;

2009c; 2009e). An employee does not “keep her own purse” and collects receipts on behalf of the employer. Thus, even though the booth renter works at a station that is often indistinguishable from that of an employee, he or she is in fact a small business owner (Internal Revenue Service 2009a).

In many cases, salon owners are also licensed as cosmetologists and will supplement any earnings from rents or commissions with those earned through their own labor. Whether salon owners employ staff, work alone, or rent space to tenants, the popular image of the salon owner in movies and plays is that of one who is very much a presence in the salon, if not the anchoring presence and center of attention.

It is within the variation of organizational structure that the present study finds its focus, for it is there that hairdressing shows its uniqueness among the skilled trades.

North American hairdressers have had an ambivalent relationship with professional regulation. On the one hand, many see stricter regulations and contractual agreements as vital to their business interests (Barreto 1990; Benham 1980; Freeman 1974, 1980;

Maurizi 1980; Rottenberg 1980). Some even argue that increasing technical and educational requirements are the only way that society will confer upon cosmetologists

the respect they deserve. On the other hand, others believe that expertise is something that one has or has not and that no amount of regulation is going to change that.

However, it is to the subject of competition within and between hair salons we must now turn, for it is where discussion of business management topics unfolds within the discourse of professional identity. Why is booth rental popular, and why does it remain controversial? To merge these two questions into one, what are the cultural factors influencing the practice of booth rental? To answer this question, a few questions about beliefs and attitudes are now in order.

Some cosmetologists believe that salon owners who lease space to other cosmetologists undermine the fiscal health of salons that employ staff directly. The argument is that rental salon owners “poach” the talent that employers have putatively groomed and nurtured by offering them a less restrictive work environment and the possibility of keeping a higher percentage of their earnings than they would under a conventional commission or wage scheme. Employers express, with some justification, that rental salons have an unfair advantage in that they do not usually invest in the training of inexperienced stylists, but draw those who are established enough to strike out on their own. The solution of some of these business owners is to seek a ban on the landlord tenant arrangement in its present form through legislation.

A common premise is that the salon owner who leases space undermines the health, safety, well-being of the public as well as his or her fellow-cosmetologists.

According to this logic, a hair salon cannot operate properly if it contains a sodality of self-employed persons operating side-by-side under a common roof. Moreover, a landlord cannot ensure that tenants state their earnings honestly and pay what they owe.

According to this logic, the truly professional business owner exercises creative, administrative and legal control over everything that takes place under his or her roof. To exercise this control legally, all workers must be employees of the salon. The conclusion of these arguments is that booth rental should be illegal, not only for the good of salon owners, but for the good of all.

Publications and statutes from state regulatory bodies in Florida, Pennsylvania and California stress the public good by way of consumer protection (California

Department of Consumer Affairs, Board of Barbering and Cosmetology 2008; Florida

Department of Business and Professional Regulation: Board of Cosmetology 2007; New

Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs: New Jersey State Board of Cosmetology and Hair

Styling 2007; New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, Division of Consumer Affairs

2005; Pennsylvania Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs, Board of

Cosmetology 2008; Pennsylvania Code 2007).

Until recently, the leading publisher of cosmetology texts did not address booth rental in its standard text (Milady Publishing Company 2000). In an ancillary text,

Edward J. Tezak refers to booth rental as a "relatively new form of wage and salary idea"

(Tezak 2002:105) and stresses the potential pitfalls and ambiguities of deciding who pays for what; the tone is generally a discouraging one.

More recently Milady Publishing has included a discussion of booth rental as a possible work arrangement in its standard textbook. The discussion, though brief in the most recent edition, makes it sufficiently clear that except for lower overhead and initial startup investment, the responsibilities of booth renters and conventional salon owners are nearly identical (Milady Publishing Company 2008:842). A parallel silence is

notable in a contemporary barbering text; booth and chair rental occurs widely in barbershops as well (Scali-Sheahan 1998).1

Can the well-being of the public or of a profession truly come to danger because some salon owners and their stylists enter into a landlord-tenant relationship as opposed to an employer-employee one? Can regulation that illegalizes landlord-tenant or “booth- rental” practices protect the public good, or is it merely a strand in a protectionist narrative? These are the questions that inspired the writing of this thesis.

The answers have not come as easily as I expected, for they have required that I look at the issues surrounding professional regulation, personal identity and the beauty salon not only “from below” as a hairdresser and a self-employed person in a regulated profession, but alternately “from above,” as legislators, legal scholars, economists and other social scientists do. The result is that this thesis is a cultural study of a skilled trade, and that part of the personal and professional identity of hairdressers throughout time and across cultures is their status as artistic skilled crafts persons, or artisans.

To understand why booth rental is common in the U.S. despite widespread opposition to it from many sectors of the beauty industry makes sense if one but situates hairdressing within its historical context as a skilled trade. Artisans often tend to identify with their work, own at least some of their own means of production, and thus take pride in the products they craft or the services they provide. Thus, it is not enough to understand hairdressers primarily as either service workers or artisans, but to recognize

1 I will occasionally refer to barbers and barbershops throughout this thesis, as they share many of the same regulations and can often perform many of the same services, with a few exceptions. Since most of my knowledge is specific to hairdressing, though, I have only made comparisons when it seems relevant and helpful to do so. 6

that they are both, making them atypical of both the majority of service workers and the majority of artisans.

This is a personal document as well as an academic one; it is an ethnographically informed study of an aspect of hairdressing written by a hairdresser. It is a qualitative study of hair salons and salon owners in the U.S., a topic of which I have extensive first- hand knowledge. Specifically, this is a thematic study of structural relationships within independently owned cosmetology salons that is based on an extensive review of relevant social science literature, in-depth interviews with salon owners, and my own 20 years of experience as a cosmetologist in the state of Florida. In other terms, this is ethnography of the beauty salon as a workplace.

In pursuing this ethnographic study, I expected my “insider” status to prepare me for the scope of the task before me, as if I could filter the literature more critically because of my decades of participant observation. If anything, I have had to be especially vigilant against assumptions regarding shared knowledge; that is, I learned just how specialized and even arcane much of my knowledge was to outsiders and that many such things had become paradigmatic for me as a hairdresser that are quite alien to those outside my industry.

Equally unexpected was the centrality that the economic and legal literature would exert on the execution of my research design. In retrospect, however, the surprise on my part seems to be another symptom of my participant-observer status. Yet I have found this part of the project to be exceptionally rewarding, for the drafting and passage of laws reflect social and economic realities as well as beliefs and attitudes. The previous

80 years have witnessed a shift in the economic landscape in which jobs that once

required little more than health and the ability and willingness to learn on the job now require degrees, certifications and licenses. Such regulation has often benefitted workers within the licensed professions, but questions over the constitutionality and economic consequences of this trend have weighed on legal scholars and courts from the beginning

(Barron 1966; Benham 1980; Butzner 1940; Gellhorn 1976; Maurizi 1980; Metzger

1987; Wilensky 1964).

The topic that triggered this study, the leasing of salon space to tenants by landlord-salon-owners, is a relatively arcane subject, but it is one that illuminates the evolving culture of the beauty salon. Whether banning booth rental serves the public good or whether it in fact does little more than protect salon owners from increased competition is a conclusion beyond the scope of this project. However, it is possible to gain inductive evidence about another stated goal of increased regulation: the professionalization of the industry. Thus, exploration of the shared goals and differences between salon owners and stylists engaging in landlord-tenant contracts and salon owners who employ their staffs outright deserves further study. This study aims to redress this paucity of data and to contextualize the organizational practices within the larger experience of service work.

My research took me into salons throughout Northwest Florida where I found prospective informants to be aloof and suspicious or intrigued by the purpose of my research. It was important for me to assure them that I would take appropriate steps to protect their confidentiality and to conduct my research in a way that would be at least neutral if not beneficial to them and to the industry overall (Appendixes A, B and C).

Those who consented to talk to me varied greatly in their personal histories and insights, even as they all shared a common pride in their own work and their profession overall.2

I did not expect to identify with or be in as much awe of my informants as I was; the opportunity to speak with other cosmetologists as a researcher allowed for a sharing of ideas I would not have sought out otherwise. As a result, informants were able to share their perspectives on the beauty industry and their respective places within it as businesspersons and workers.3 Informants shared with me their reasons for running their respective businesses the way they did, and why they rejected other options. As a result, I have been able to find continuities and differences between my own data and that of other scholars who have studied one or more aspects of the cosmetology industry.

Relevance of the Study

Regulation has been part of an effort by members of many skilled trades to protect their own fellow tradespersons and negotiate power and place in society.

Consequently it has attracted the interests of legal scholars, economists, historians and sociologists. The processes by which cosmetologists in particular manipulate both metaphors and positions of power as strategies for gaining respect, negotiating class and power, and defining their personal and professional identities are also appropriate topics of study for anthropologists, who have long studied parallel structures in other areas of complex societies as well as in traditional ones. The fact that hair itself is a mutable

2 I understand that at some level, the term “profession” remains problematic; I will address “professionalism” later in the thesis. That said, cosmetology in Florida is regulated by the Board of Cosmetology, which operates within the Board of Professional Regulation. In this context, my use of the words “profession” and “professional” reflects increasingly common usage in its inclusion of skilled trades in which a worker owns at least some of the means of production. 3 All informants materially participated in their respective enterprises. In an earlier epoch, all would have been identified as “owner-operators” as opposed to employees who were merely “operators” or non- hairdresser proprietors who were in fact owners but not “operators.” 9

identity marker makes the study of those who work on hair even more relevant to the discipline.

I have been able to determine not only that the past and present of tenant-landlord salons have been a relatively recent and popular phenomenon but have been able to gain insight into how and why this practice may change. If business structures and laws can affect how a trade or profession operates in a cultural context, it also influences the

“culture of the workplace”; it constrains the type and number of prospective practitioners of any given profession and thus the makeup of the workforce and the overall direction of the profession.

At the same time, cultural values concerning both informal and formal areas of public behavior will exert their own pressures on workplace dynamics (Barreto 1990;

Furman 1997; Gimlin 1993; Hammermesh and Biddle 1994; Hochschild 1983, 1997;

Jacobs-Huey 1993a, 2003, 2007; Kang 2003; Lawson 2003; Oldenburg 1989; Weitz

2005; Yi and Jeon 2003). By looking at the hair salon as public, regulated workplace and as a purveyor of skilled personal service work, it is possible to better understand the major variables on which the future relevance and prosperity of hair salons in the U.S. are contingent.

Methodology

This study provides original data in the forms of the interviews and from the perspective of the author. In terms of broader social science analysis, this thesis offers a unique contribution to the social study of the workplace through its multi-disciplinary approach. In order to exposit the importance of landlord-tenant relationships in North

American beauty salons, I have drawn from the wells of popular culture, labor history, 10

economic theory, and legal writings. I have also drawn on my own experiences as a cosmetologist.

I have been both an employee and a booth-renter. I have worked for managers blessed with even tempers and seemingly natural, effective business sense as well as for managers and owners blessed with great vision and artistry but neither sufficient aptitude nor passion for the everyday challenges of managing a business. As I will show, there are strong advantages to the traditional employer-employee model that can either create dynamic, profitable work spaces or mismanaged salons that have poor chances of survival.

As a booth renter, I have seen how the fact that the owner is my landlord and not my supervisor or employer matters little insofar as we are colleagues, with the significance that I pay to work there instead of receiving pay, and that my time and business are in every sense my own. Yet there must be some measure of shared knowledge and values between tenant and landlord for this arrangement to work. The landlord who fails to approach his or her enterprise without a good grasp of income and expenses will fail in this enterprise just as surely as in a restaurant or gift shop. Tenants who can afford to pay for more amenities or well-maintained facilities are willing to do so if it makes their operations more profitable. A place that is run-down and neglected risks repulsing both actual and potential clients; landlords sometimes work very hard for the rent they collect.

I have long known of the benefits and costs of the behavioral self control required in many kinds of service work before I discovered the literature devoted to the study of what Arlie Hochschild (1983, 1997) calls “emotional labor.” I have done what

Hochschild calls “deep acting” for years. The discovery of this literature only showed me that I was in far more company than I could ever have imagined. Hochschild’s seminal research on flight attendants and collections agents echoes, often with proper acknowledgement, through much of the social science literature on service workers.

Sociologist Kristina Abiala (1999) builds on Hochschild’s work through her own original research and fresh insights. Abiala has studied the effects of emotional labor on different types of service workers. Her survey includes salespeople, travel agents, tour guides, receptionists, mechanics, jewelers, hairdressers, waiters and representatives from other customer-service oriented fields of work.

Hairdresser responses to Abiala’s survey stood out on several counts. 84% completely with the statement, “I have a greater understanding for different kinds of people,” while 16% partially agreed with the claim. Ninty-five percent agreed completely that “I have learned to handle people,” with five percent agreeing in part.

Forty-seven percent of hairdressers agreed somewhat with the statement “Sometimes I am so tired of people that I want to be alone after work.” Another 47% agreed completely with this statement. Only six percent disagreed with it (Abiala 1999:217, table 5).

This pattern suggests a strong correlation between the intensity of social interaction in the beauty salon and the social strain resulting from the frequency and duration of service worker-customer interactions in the salon. Despite the lower inferential and inductive weight of her 19 person sample, Abiala recognizes the capacity for burnout with this quote from a hairdresser informant:

You want it to be quiet when you come home. I never listen to music at

home. I can’t even watch cable TV, it flickers too much, and too much

music. The brain is too tired when you come home. When you’re young

you can take it. You can call it an occupational hazard. You change as a

person. We have a very noisy environment. So you are not very social

when you come home. [Abiala 1999:218]

There may be some mutual acknowledgement of the intense emotion work requirement, as hairdressers were among the least likely to be contacted after hours by customers (Abiala 1999:214). Elsewhere, it seems that these informants all took the cultivation of a seemingly genuine and likable personality seriously, with no exceptions

(Abiala 1999:215, table 4, 216, table 5).

As I read through the sociological and ethnographic literature of hairdressers and beauty salons, I began to appreciate how much of my professional identity required the assumption of a distinct public identity; I also began to reassess just how much the learning and application of “feeling rules” had shaped that identity.

As an insider, I have also felt and thought through the normative issues concerning work quality, time management, and other expressions of “professionalism.”

It is in the field that I began to analyze the relation of professionalism to what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld (1985) refers to as “performative excellence.” Later, when I returned to school full-time, I began to question the need to “perform” altogether4, only to realize that “deep acting” works well as a survival strategy in emotionally awkward situations and is unexpectedly difficult to unlearn once mastered.

Cosmetology is one of the more creative and entrepreneurial of the service trades.

Such distinction often makes it difficult to compare with other service occupations,

4 For an argument for blunt emotional honesty as true kindness, see Theodore I. Rubin, Compassion and Self-Hate (1997). 13

regardless of the skills or levels of education required. My recent research has done much to set forth the reasons for this and has shed new light on many old recollections. I have thus become an informant in my own research.5

My external informants for the formal research in this project were owners of cosmetology salons or the friends, colleagues or mentors of current salon owners at the time of the interviews. They inhabit a space that I have never occupied; they have managed and leased to or employed other cosmetologists as salon owners. I have never owned a free-standing salon or employed others. Consequently, the question of whether to lease salon space or to employ staff has never been mine to answer, a choice that I have never had to rationalize or defend. The informants in this study have made their respective choices and have been gracious enough to share their reasons and their respective business philosophies with me. I remain forever in their debt.

My interest in the stated relation between booth-rental and professional ideals goes back to the beginning of my cosmetology career. I have known salon owners who decried the practice of booth-rental because they thought it undermined the ability of owners to control their business. Other owners embraced it as a more secure form of revenue than hiring help. I have witnessed salon owners and stylists alike be happy under one or both of these organizational schemes, and have seen those who were not going to be happy either way. Similarly, the question of whether stylists need to be managed closely or needed to be given considerable autonomy was a fluid fact; arguments for and against were mediated by beliefs about the nature and purpose of licensure, schooling and

5 The uniqueness of hairdressing even among other kinds of service work and skilled labor is in part related to the fact that it requires both considerable emotional and technical labor, whereas other jobs seem to require much more of one than the other. 14

continuing education, to say nothing of the temperaments that underpinned the personal business philosophies of individual managers and business owners. I learned early on that management styles and business philosophies were highly variable in the cosmetology industry.

I also learned that this diversity reflected a current of uncertainty within the industry. The question was “Uncertainty over what?” I have since concluded that the coexistence of booth rental with salons that paid employed staff by commission, hourly wage, salary, or any combination of the above were symptomatic of something more abstract, yet fundamental. Today, I would characterize it as the process of negotiating a collective professional identity.

When I was new to the industry, I did not know enough about the differences of opinion to stake out my own position about whether booth rental was harmful to the industry as a whole or not; yet I remained intrigued by the arguments for and against booth rental. They were in the trade journals I read at work and occasionally on the lips of vendors and business experts at trade shows. Over the years, the initial sense that some sectors of the cosmetology industry stayed silent or openly supported booth rental as a valid form of salon ownership and management while others seemed quietly, yet deeply hostile to it has been an enduring constant in a field of work characterized by style cycles, innovations, and restless change. I have since found that sense to be accurate in the main, and it is the objective of this thesis to explore and discuss this debate as one of professional identity and, as such, a narratological matter in which hairdressers are individually and collectively striving to situate themselves within their local and national

cultural contexts. It is the larger issue of negotiating professional identity that seeks and gains expression in debates over booth rental.

Values of Autonomy and Creativity

In addition to monetary considerations, other factors influenced whether cosmetologists sought employment or tenancy, and whether salon owners hired staff or leased workstations. One consideration was happiness. Happiness came up in conversations as a salient cultural value, what Morris Edward Opler (1945) would define as a cultural theme. According to Opler, group behavior expresses what is important to group members, and the number of expressions a value finds as well as formality of those expressions can provide good indices of what is important within the group.

If an idea has high value, it tends to find codification into oral or written law. The more fundamental a principle is to a community or larger unit, the more numerous and severe the penalties are for violations of that principle. If penalties are light, seldom enforced, few and hard to find, and seldom represented in art, speech, or other media, the tendency to indirect, informal expressions suggest that the value may exist more in theory than in practice.

Within the context of aesthetics, Opler’s framework is a useful tool for analysis.

However, I wish to apply his model to a workplace analysis. Within this context, I believe it is possible to uncover at least some of the values that underpin the culture of many independent beauty salons.

I will argue here that creating spaces in which the performance of emotional labor and the fulfillment of expectations associated with the hairdresser’s sociological role as skilled service worker may not be codified in law, but is nonetheless an important goal of 16

salon ownership and management. The creation of harmonious workspaces in which stylists, owners and clients all get along creates an environment to which clients are willing to return for service, and in which hairdressers feel themselves able to provide the desired service in a financially and emotionally sustainable fashion.

I postulate that this consideration has more to do with why an owner chooses to lease to tenants or employ staff than the concerns of large companies, finer points of law, or values that may be more operative for actors in large corporations that just happen to be involved with hairdressing. When it comes to running a salon, happiness matters a great deal, and the behaviors that contribute to good working relationships in independent hair salons exerts force on the owner’s decision to have tenants or employees.

Within this framework, the theme, “happiness matters” appears in informal expressions rather than formal ones. However, the fact that existing formal expressions such as laws and regulations allow most cosmetology salons and their operators great discretion with respect to such issues as décor, hours of operation, and individual schedules shows that the absence of more onerous formal restrictions on business practice and the considerable variation among types of beauty salons still show a respect for individualism within the occupation. The exceptions are the chain salons, especially those that are directly controlled by large companies and not individually owned franchises.6

The direct work of pleasing customers was considered demanding and physically difficult enough without managing a recalcitrant or inadequately professionalized staff.

To many salon owners, renting space brought a fixed and hence reliable source of income and also put the onus of attendance and production on the tenants instead of on

6 For more on chain salons, especially unisex and “family hair salon” franchises, see Barreto 1990 and Lawson 2003. 17

themselves. While salon owners who lease space forfeit creative control over staff, they also put a downward limit on their earnings. Indeed, as Ken Lange has pointed out, the tenant-landlord relationship can even turn the traditional employer-employee dynamic on its head, as the profit margins of tenants vary proportionally to their gross receipts, while the more productive tenant can potentially undermine a landlord’s earnings through greater-than-expected consumption of “included amenities” such as water and electricity

(Lange 2005). As Lange astutely observes, there are advantages to the landlord whose tenants pay rent on time but rarely come into work.

Qualitatively speaking, though, a mostly empty salon may not create the atmosphere the owner and her customer desire, and this may counteract any benefits gained from under-productive tenants. As I will show, this is where the preservation of a traditional salon appearance and the traditionally normative environment of competence, caring and trust that their salon clients can relate to still operate as expressions of the importance of a pleasant environment to the salon experience.

For cosmetologists who desired greater control over their time, creativity and money, leasing space held many attractions as well. Established stylists could pay rent, taxes and other expenses and still net a higher percentage of their service receipts if they treated their businesses seriously. Additionally, while they could be sued by dissatisfied clients directly and, in the event of contract breach, by a landlord as well, they could avoid lawsuits relating to violation of “no-compete” clauses through either greater freedom of movement or the exercise of personal choice in such matters as product use,

scheduling and areas of specialization.7 As an example, a cosmetologist with a strong need to balance work and family duties could create a schedule that accommodated both since booth-renters are legally defined as small-business owners because they are self- employed.

As self-employed, booth-renters are responsible for how they practice the art and science of cosmetology; as long as it falls within the boundaries of law and the conventions that define performance of contract between stylist and client, autonomy is considerable. The autonomy of tenant stylists is distressing to those who stand to benefit from uniform salon practices, but may be highly valued by those who approach the use of chemical and cosmetic preparations from a more constructivist perspective.

In my own life and in my interviews, freedom to choose a line of hair coloring or keep using one’s favorite brand of hairspray are but two of the numerous expressions of this autonomy. It is the artist’s assertion that he or she knows what tools work best in a given situation, and the creative freedom to exercise that knowledge is important. Owners of booth-rental salons avoid potentially heated exchanges about which products may be used in the salon, as they forfeit responsibility when they give up the legal authority and creative control of an employer. Such owners may lose marketing opportunities, but they also avoid the work of ordering supplies for employees as well as other administrative responsibilities. In my field interviews, two of my informants specifically cited creative control with respect to supply use as one of the reasons their booth rental salons were harmonious workplaces.

7 I do not know of “no-compete” clauses in tenancy contracts, but salons that employ staff do use them. I myself worked under a one-mile radius clause for one employer for nearly three years. The distribution of this practice within the cosmetology industry is a paper topic in its own right. For a broader discussion of this and related topics, see Christopher T. Wonnell, “The Contractual Disempowerment of Employees” (1993). 19

The arguments against booth rental often argue that creative control should ultimately reside with the owner or manager. Opponents of booth rental postulate that a profession full of empowered, protected salon owners can lead their profession forward and prevent cosmetologists from becoming irrelevant in a nation in which many hair services are done by non-professionals at home. In order to compete, experienced salon owners and other cosmetologists should mentor newly licensed cosmetologists, instead of forswearing all sense of obligation toward them. Since booth rental is most attractive to cosmetologists that have, or can quickly establish a following of regular customers, the accusation is that booth rental is to blame for the failure of independent salons.

An important cultural value emerges in this discourse: professionalism.

Professionalism as the possession and exercise of specialized knowledge and skills within the context of job performance is a problematic idea within legal and economic theory, as this broad definition makes nearly every kind of work a real or possible “profession.” At the same time, it has come to represent a conscientious work ethic, a reverence for one’s means of earning a living. In the West this professionalism sensu lato calls forth nothing if not the Protestant Work Ethic (Weber 2002), and more pointedly, the doctrine of work as a calling, or worthy end in itself. In keeping with this ideal that still persists into our own time, personal happiness is a small price to pay in order to achieve the desired much valorized status of “professional” (Hochschild 1997).

Within such a discourse of professionalism and the sacredness of work life, those who attempt to work less in order to accommodate other needs come under suspicion in many fields (Hochschild 1997; Hesse-Biber and Carter 2000). Similarly, small producers who “worked to live’ rather than the other way around have struggled during the 20th

century in the face of larger producers with more centralized leadership. In the West, independent hair salons have had to compete against an increasing numbers of chain locations. Given these conditions, it has only followed that independent salon owners have felt increased pressure to think more like business owners and less like artisans.

The theme of professionalism also finds expression in practices such as

“departmentalization,” a practice in which salons have separate departments dedicated to styling, coloring, and texture services and so on. By having specialists in each department, the creation of a hairstyle becomes less the expression of a single artisan’s work than a collaborative effort between specialists. The effect is to mirror other complex organizations that use expert teams to accomplish complex tasks, such as hospitals, law offices or accounting firms. The focus shifts from one stylist who performs all of the services to the “salon team” that co-operates to create a total look for the client.

Such specialization need not have the effect of branding the salon at the expense of the individual specialist, although this is more likely to occur in salons that departmentalize services. A standout or “star” hairdresser will draw a loyal following regardless. The alternative is to cultivate a team ethos and suppress excess individualism, that is, expression of individuality that conflicts with the mission of the salon.

Small salons are usually unable to specialize. Yet most clients do not mind, in my experience. The one-to-one experience with a single stylist provides a feeling of continuity that may be missing in the collaborative, departmentalized approach. The smaller independent salons require that owners and operators multi-task to varying degrees. Some owners deal solely with business and do not work on hair or in other related field of service work; however, this is not common.

In many small salons, both those I have worked in and those I have visited, salon owners reject the notion of being either businesspersons or creative, skilled technicians; they are both. Particularly in the salons I visited in which the owners rented station space, their identification with their trade came through their technical and artistic knowledge, their pride in a head of hair beautifully and suitably turned out, in a good reputation, and in their love of the trade. This is another discourse of professionalism, the discourse of small producers whose definition of creative control seems to extend less to the production of others and more to optimizing their own work environments.

Are professionalism and autonomy in the hair salon diametrically opposed? Has booth rental really affected the practice of cosmetology as adversely as some of its detractors claim, or are such effects secondary, epiphenomenal? If epiphenomenal, what is the root of the matter?

As I set out on writing this thesis, I have done my best to keep an open mind, despite whatever bias my experience as an insider might bring to this project. This project has been multidisciplinary in part as a check against any such bias. The absence of similar research on hair salons or other service work industries has brought me to conclude that the themes of professionalism and autonomy that appear generally in cosmetology and specifically around the issue of booth rental warrant examination from a social science perspective, especially an anthropological perspective.

My background in anthropology has inclined me to take a holistic approach to complex research questions. Consequently, I have drawn from cosmetology, sociology, law, economics and history as well as from all fields of anthropology in my research. In

doing so, I have been able to set forth some examples of how individual and social values influence work practices and business models of hair salons in the present-day U.S.

CHAPTER II

THE HAIRDRESSER AS ARTISAN

Edmund Leach (1958) points out that hairstyles as markers of life stage or status may or may not have magical connotations, but will often operate within a binary oppositional model that can vary between cultures. Shaving the hair can symbolize the stripping away of individual differences, as it does for men in the U.S. Armed Forces shortly following induction into service; punishment, as it did in the witch trials of medieval and early modern Europe (Frazer 1993:769-770; Leach 1958); or express any number of changes in status, as in the acceptance of monastic vows or as one of the rites of widowhood among Brahmin widows in southern India (Hancock 1999; Leach 1958).

It may also be part of initiation rituals (Frazer 1993:690, 693) or votive offerings (Frazer

1993:313).

Among the Qemant of northwestern Ethiopia, hairstyles have traditionally varied throughout the life-cycle to denote age and condition. Long hair was once common among both sexes, but by the 1960s, life-stage-related hairstyles were more varied and numerous for females than for males. The observations of anthropologist Frederick C.

Gamst (1969) suggests that changes in hairstyle throughout a woman’s life were linked in part to changes in her eligibility for marriage and childbirth. Gamst observed that grieving widows, and older women wore their hair very closely cropped, and young girls retain a shaved spot at the crown of the head until after they have been married for

several years. Given the early age of Qemant girls at marriage, the abandonment of the shaved spot would coincide with the onset of puberty and the eventual consummation of her marriage (Gamst 1969:106, 110-111). Whether the filling-in period precedes, coincides with or antecedes the first pregnancy is unclear. The hairstyle change as an icon of sexual maturity, however, is a sign visible to all. A fully grown-in head of hair seems to symbolize the fecundity of a young, but sexually mature, wife and mother; cropped hair, even the shaved spot retained throughout girlhood, thus seems to suggest any condition in which it would be impossible, unlikely, or inauspicious for a woman to conceive (Gamst 1969:105-106).

In contrast, the practice of allowing the hair to mat, while often associated with

Rastafarianism in the West (Byrd and Tharps 2001), does not have the same religious and political connotations in India, where it is another way of expressing renunciation of the world in Hindi communities. As Gananath Obeyesekere shows in his essay Medusa’s

Hair (1981), the shaved head of the Buddhist monk and the Roman Catholic monk’s tonsure pale as symbols of worldly renunciation alongside the tangled matted locks of the

Hindu ecstatic. Shaving is a form of grooming; allowing hair to mat on its own (as opposed to getting one’s hair professionally “locked”) requires an abstention from grooming practices.

The above cases illustrate the cultural uses of hairstyles as indices of life stage and condition. All meanings are context-dependent, and a hairstyle that loses its original context either picks up new and different meanings or falls out of use. As Edmund Leach

(1958) explains, although the correlation between long hair and fecundity is modal, it need not be universal. Hairstyles, like clothes, buildings and other artifacts, are capable

of communicating ideas, emotions and values. Wherever hairdressers are part of the maintenance of this port of the social persona, they help express the norms and values of the societies they inhabit. Even where hair is considered dangerous and ritually polluting, hairdressing and barbering offer specialized and gainful work for those who excel at it

(Barth 1965:17-18, 20).

Thus, biological adaptations such as sun protection and thermoregulation aside, human beings manipulate head hair as a symbol, and a mutable symbol at that, for hair is a variable but generally strong fiber to work with. Hairdressing tasks can vary from the simple to the elaborate. Simple acts of grooming and arrangement are within the scope of self-care or are possible with non-specialized assistance. However, more specialized tasks may take longer to learn, and may be within the capacity of only a few individuals within a given group. Even within egalitarian bands, mastery of such tasks as braiding, twisting, combing, cutting or shaving may vary differentially, with one person’s skills standing out amidst those of his or her peers.

Thus, to some extent, hairdressing has been part of human societies from the beginning, and specialized custodians of human appearance probably antedate any written or artistic evidence available to us. As I will show, the written and archaeological data available show that ritual hairdressing has deep roots, and that complaining about the natural property of one’s own hair and seeking improvement through alteration of the hair or wearing artificial hair to conceal one’s own are all time honored tradition. It also shows that hairdressers have been culturally mediating these complaints for millennia.

Hairdressing as service work in complex societies goes back at least to the ancient

Egyptians (Westermann1914b, 1917; Robins 1993), if not before. Barbers in ancient

Egypt shaved the heads of both men and women, as well as men’s facial hair; wig makers created artistic symbols of beauty and status that have often survived into the present. Hairstyles marked the age, gender and status of the wearer, and some of the earliest attempts at permanently altering the natural color and texture of hair date from this period. Even when the wigs themselves do not survive the representations in statuary, paintings and bas-reliefs attest to an early flourishing of the hairdresser’s art.

The social importance of hairstyles is well-known from Greco-Roman antiquity as well. Although the participation of women in public life and their overall status varied both across time and space, archaeological remains allow for scholars not only to reconstruct where and how people lived and what they wore, but also to reconstruct social values both independently of and in conjunction with written sources. With respect to hairstyles, both approaches are useful.

In “Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment” (2001) Elizabeth

Bartman analyzes not only the social meanings of hair in ancient Rome, but also the archaeological corroborations between seemingly contradictory claims made by contemporary authors. In particular, she notes the controlled nature of the Flavian Period and representations of style and modesty rather than extravagance and sensuality

(Bartman 2001:5-8). She observes that unconfined disheveled hair was only publicly displayed by grown women of status as a sign of mourning (Bartman 2001:6-7), a practice that ethnographers have noticed in cultures as diverse as the Siberian Khanty and

Mansi (Czaplicka 1969:163, 164-5; Holmberg 1964), and the Mende of Sierra Leone

(Byrd and Tharps 2001; Boone 1986). For example, among Mende women, as in other contexts, the abandonment of normally scrupulous grooming practices signifies grief and

disorientation. Outside of mourning, it suggests loose morals as well as a more general slovenliness (Boone 1986).

Bartman’s interpretations of Flavian Period art draw strong parallels to Sylvia

Ardyn Boone’s exposition of Mende feminine aesthetics (Bartman 2001). Boone (1986) likewise observes that neatness, cleanliness, and resilience are desirable character traits in

Mende women, and that the neat, controlled hairstyles for which they are famous are aesthetic, outwardly visible symbols of these valued inner qualities. In these two examples, far removed in time and space, the hairdresser’s art communicates both aesthetic ideals and the social values that underpin them.

Art historians and archaeologists alike have looked to the arts of a people in the quest to understand what extinct cultures are like. In diachronic analyses, artifacts can help reconstruct changes in social organization, demography, and values. In his article

“Hairdressing among the Ancient Greeks,” A. Koester (1908) noticed how the depicted hairstyles of both men and women reflected aesthetic changes and continuities in ancient

Greek society. Both Koester and Bartman observe that hairstyles communicate status, age, and gender. They also note that the evolution of women’s styles became quite complex in the Hellenistic Period, unlike the simple styles of Archaic and early classical

Greece (Bartman 2001; Demand 1994; Koester 1908:352, 357-358). 8

The hairstyles studied by Koester (1908), Bartman (2001) and others are the work of skilled artisans. As such, they bespeak the organizational complexity of the societies in which such trade specialization was possible. From the beginning, advanced hairdressing was taught by master artisans to apprentices, and the goal of every task was the

8 Bartman’s interpretations are exceptional in their integration of historical, ethnographic, sociological and archaeological approaches. 28

satisfaction of the recipient, who was also often the employer. As with other artisanal products and services, competence alone was not always sufficient for success in one’s trade, but it was almost always necessary.

As early as the Hellenistic Period, hairdressing was already unusual among the service trades in that the training of aspiring hairdressers was apparently taken very seriously. In his paper “The Education and Training of Slaves in Antiquity,” Clarence A.

Forbes (1955) found two years to be a common period for hairdressing apprenticeships in ancient Rome. Like many skilled occupations such as weaving, pottery, carpentry or medicine, hairdressing could be learned by free persons or within the context of slavery or indentured servitude.

Indeed, with respect to the cosmetologists who hold up the medical profession as emblematic of the respect they desire for their own profession (Jacobs-Huey 1993b), the frequent occurrence of long and intensive apprenticeships for barbers and hairdressers in antiquity as evidence of the ritual and social significance of hair in ancient times.

It is a well-known fact that barbers often worked as surgeons and were thus entrusted with the very lives of men. However, the value of an exquisitely arranged wig or head of hair ensured that male and female hairdressers for hire were in such demand that those who learned hairdressing in captivity could live by it upon manumission.

In other words, the options in life open to hairdressers in Roman Antiquity were much like those open to other skilled laborers. In his essay “Apprentice Contracts and the

Apprentice System in Roman Egypt,” W. L. Westermann (1914a) notes that some apprenticeships in the Roman period were as long as three years. Training for hairdressers, therefore, could be as long as or exceed those of physicians during the

Roman Period (Forbes 1955; Westermann 1914a; 1914b). As I will show later, the metaphors and similes of modern medicine that hairdressers appeal to in order to assert their professionalism and expertise appear richly ironic when superimposed upon the respective occupational histories of these two lines of work.

From the beginning, hairdressers have been at least as subject to their respective clients or patrons as to any other superior. In some ways, little has changed over the millennia. Even in classical antiquity, hairdressers operated outside of royal courts and temple precincts (Forbes 1955). These served those commoners who could afford their services, and often operated as traveling artisans or set up free-standing places of business. These appear to have occurred with some frequency until late antiquity, when ascetic movements in Christianity discouraged bodily indulgence generally and lavish self-adornment specifically (Clark 1993). Simpler hairstyles were often concealed beneath head coverings by Jews, Christians, and later, by Muslims. However, even during this period, hair remained a vehicle for self-expression and the negotiation of identity within a given group, as the art of the Middle Ages attests (Signori 2005).

With the advent of the Modern Period, wigmakers, barbers, and increasingly hairdressers began to find growing markets for their skilled services as fashions became increasingly dynamic and hairstyles became both symbols of self-expression and indices of social status. In Spanish colonial Louisiana, the infamous “tignon laws” required free women of color to cover their hair with a kerchief, or tignon, and forbade them the wearing of masks, hats, wigs, or their own uncovered hair in public (Gehman 1994:44).

Women of modest means in both Europe and colonial North America tended to keep hairstyles simple, confined, and often hidden beneath modest hats, bonnets, or scarves.

Yet there were still formal occasions, such as weddings and special celebrations for which even women of moderate means sought to accessorize a special outfit with a more elegant and intricate hairstyle. Affluent women often hired professional hairdressers to call on them at home (Peiss 1998:62-63). For a talented hairdresser and emancipated slave named Mary Williams, hairdressing was her passport to prosperity, as she became the owner of her own salon in 1872 and went on to either own or manage several others

(Peiss 1998:62). Thus, the use of hair as a class and status marker dates from the founding years of the U.S., and the skills of hairdressers have been part of the negotiation of identity and status by individuals and groups alike.

By the 1860s, precursors of the modern beauty salon were becoming common in the cities of Europe and North America. These were gendered spaces, with women receiving services in a private environment that contrasted with the more public, male- defined realm of the barbershop (Hesse-Biber and Carter 2000; Lawson 2003; Battle-

Walters 2004; Weitz 2005). As with most skilled trades, the owner of a hairdressing establishment owned the property or leased it from a landlord. Aspiring hairdressers in cities learned their trade as the apprentices of experienced ones, much as their occupational predecessors had done in antiquity.

The beginnings of the modern hair salon coincide with the overall social changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Innovations in transportation such as the steamboat, the railroad, and eventually the automobile and new telecommunications technologies such as the telegraph, radio, teletype, and later the telephone facilitated the movement of large numbers of people and their ideas over increasingly vast geographical spaces, and more and more women engaged in public life. Beauty salons began to proliferate as the

feminine image began to reflect the changing ideal role of woman from “lady of the house” to a more public role (Brownmiller 1984; Chapkis 1986; Furman 1997; Peiss

1998; Hesse-Biber and Carter 2000; Weitz 2005).

These sociological changes were complemented by innovations in cosmetic preparations. In Europe, Karl Nessler developed one of the earliest permanent-waving systems (Halal 2002:189). Compared to later methods, it was dangerous and variable in its results. However, it was a significant innovation that drew thousands of women to the beauty salon, and by extension, it served to fuel demand for the services of hairdressers trained in the new technology. Even with the best aptitude and training, the risks of permanent skin and scalp harm ranged from heat, steam or chemical burns to significant damage.9 Performing these new services required hairdressers who not only had the nimble fingers, strong legs and trained eyes of traditional hairdressers, but a command of and respect for the risks inherent to these potentially dangerous new procedures.

In France, while the founder of L’Oreal developed relatively safe modern hair dyes (Griffin 1991:46), the founder of Wella moved from making human-hair wigs that were exceptionally durable and water-resistant to making significant improvements on

Nessler’s machine wave process (Sachse 1991). The Wella process gained renown for its more naturally wavy look. It would remain popular until the advent of the thioglycolic- acid based waves that would eventually banish permanent-waving machines into the past

(Sachse 1991; Halal 2002:189). 10

9 As I shall seek to demonstrate, the volatility of many of these compounds pose real and sometimes serious hazards to both the person performing the chemical service and its recipient. However, hindsight means that with proper training and precautions, the majority of these dangers are avoidable. 10 These include the alkaline or “cold’ waves that hit market in 1941, the milder “acid waves” that offered softer, shinier results and the Exothermic or “self-heating” waves that became popular in the 1980s for those who wanted the control provided by acid waves with the comfortable processing and firm texture 32

Among African-American women, Annie Turnbo Malone and Sarah Breedlove

Walker transformed the history of hair care not only through the creation of hair care products and hair straightening devices, but through their empowerment of several generations of African American businesswomen (Rooks 1996; Peiss 1998; Willett 2000;

Byrd and Tharps 2001).

The latter of these two, better known as Madam C. J. Walker, promoted weekly hair regimens when monthly cleansings were typical for black and white women alike

(Weitz 2005). Although Walker had worked briefly as an agent for Annie Malone’s Poro

Company (Rooks 1996; Peiss 1998:69; Byrd and Tharps 2001:34; Blackwelder 2003:21-

22), her ability to improve on Malone’s “Wonderful Hair Grower” and her adaptation and popularization of the heated pressing comb, or “hot comb,” helped give her pride of place in the history books as America’s first female millionaire, black or white (Harris and

Johnson 2002:9-10; Rooks 1996; Willett 2000:19; Byrd and Tharps 2001:25,34-35;

Blackwelder 2003).

However, it may be Madam Walker’s marketing strategies that proved her to be in step with the rapidly changing times. Walker restricted sale of her products to trained, certified agents. She established salons and schools for the training of “Walker Agents”

(Peiss 1998:90-92; Blackwelder 2003). This standardization of training enhanced

Walker’s reputation and earnings as well as those of her agents. She had taken black hair care out of the private realm and into the public. As such, Walker was a prime mover in the transition of hairdressing as an artisanal trade to a highly regulated one; she made

of traditional cold waves. Although “thio-free” permanents have been available since the 1990s, these and “ammonia-free’ perms use salts based on thioglycolic acid (see Halal 2002:190-192; Willett 2000). 33

profound and early contributions to the “professionalization” of hairdressing and the emergence of modern cosmetology.

By the 1930s, both barbershops and beauty salons were subject to state or at least municipal regulation on public health and safety grounds. Some of these statutes withstood legal challenges based on demonstrable correlation between the stated goals of the legislation and the evidence. Other laws placed requirements on prospective and practicing hairdressers and barbers that courts would judge unconstitutional, mostly because these laws conflicted with the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment against the right to work.

Nonetheless, as cosmetic empires grew, hair services diversified and improved in quality, and hair salons proliferated, the trend toward increasing regulation of the increasingly technical trade of cosmetology continued. Laws to regulate the curricula and operating guidelines of vocational schools and the operating conditions of beauty salons and barbershops became wider in applicability and more restrictive during this time.

Hairdressers were practitioners of an occupation in transition. As with nursing, another occupation associated with personal care and technical skill, cosmetology was on its way to becoming a regulated trade. What was once a skilled trade learned either informally or by apprenticeship now required a degree of formal education once rare outside of the learned professions of theology, medicine and law (Wilensky 1964;

Metzger 1987; Gellhorn 1976).

Regulation and licensure have thus become markers of status, and at the least, an accepted part of the cost of business for cosmetologists in the U.S. Whether a salon is a single-operator salon (also known as a salon isolé in France, see Zdatny 1984, 1990), a

large establishment, or one of a chain of salons owned by a large corporation, it must comply with state regulations and its workers must be duly licensed.

CHAPTER III

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE STUDY OF THE SKILLED TRADES

My question is how the presence or absence of booth rental affects the culture of hairdressing. I hope to show that the emergence of booth rental is a function of its history as a skilled trade, as will be its diffusion, contraction or disappearance in beauty salons. I will summarize this history briefly here.

Hairdressing in the West has a long history, but its recent history as a regulated skilled trade is only about a century old. There has always been training for those who made their living washing, combing and arranging hair and adorning it with wigs and other forms of false hair. Historically, it has always been considered personal service work, even when and where complex skill sets and lengthy periods of training have been common requirements.

Like many modern professions, hairdressing was learned as a basic skill in the private sphere of the home or family workshop. In ancient Rome and Egypt, slaves learned many skilled trades, and some practiced their trade publicly for profit upon manumission. This was the case for everything from hairdressing to medicine. In times when only women of the nobility tended to display elaborate hairstyles, the need for hairdressers seems less fully attested. When hair has functioned as a highly visible fashion accessory, the demand has been higher. Thus, the existence of hairdressing as a viable way of earning a living has always been highly contingent on aesthetic and

economic factors as well as the cultural values that drive shifts in fashion and other vehicles for the expression of individual and collective identity.

At present, hairstyles have been highly visible parts of one’s “total look” in the

West. It may be exposed or unexposed, present or absent, long, short or in-between. The diversity that C. R. Hallpike marvels at in “Social Hair” (1969) or drew the attention of

Edmund Leach in his essay “Magical Hair” (1958) has proliferated rather than contracted. What one does with one’s hair and how much time and money those choices involve can serve as icons and indices of a person’s identity within an organization, an age-grade, a society, a religion or an ethnic group.

As many feminists and women of color attest, hairstyle choices are politically charged. Indeed, as bell hooks (2002:116) confesses in “Straightening our Hair,” she has disallowed herself a measure of self-expression by refusing to straighten her hair lest her act of self-expression should appear to be an act of self-hatred, a denial of blackness.

More painfully, hooks finds she must differentiate between the positive memories of getting her hair hot-combed as an initiation and subsequent ritual of womanhood and her understanding of hairstyles as political statements.

While all hairstyles may have potential as representations of identity within a group, the political dimension of embracing one’s own hair texture has been most saliently exposited by African American women such as Alice Walker (2002), Jewelle

Gomez (2002), and others. Walker has famously exposited her journey from chemically straightened hair to braids to dreadlocks, as has Gomez. Gloria Wade-Gayles (Byrd and

Tharpes 2001:58) has referred to a black woman activist with straightened hair as “a contradiction.”

In the study Hair Matters, Ingrid Banks (2000) has added a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of attitudes toward hair and its styling among African American girls and women of different ages, occupations, education levels and levels of income.

She adds to the voices of activists, celebrities and scholars the voices of ordinary women who often shape their responses to this politically-charged topic in more pragmatic and personal ways than those mentioned above. Banks’ study is insightful as a qualitative study by a researcher who has personal knowledge of her topic as a black woman, yet remains removed to some extent from her informants precisely because of her researcher status.

The forces advertising and the myth of unattainable beauty ideals have certainly operated differentially between cultures and ethnic groups, but they have not caused grief to black women alone. White women scholars such as Susan Brownmiller (1984), Helene

M. Lawson (2003), and Rose Weitz (2005) have also spoken of the tension between the dictates of fashion, the limits of technology and the desire to make peace with their respective natural hair textures. Even within what is often loosely termed “white society,” the ideal of a certain kind of look can feel cruel to anyone whose looks fall far short of the ideal. Lawson’s brief exposition of her own experience with hair salons contrasts against those of her husband, son and daughter; while they have navigated the numerous choices available to them and found their respective “salon homes,” Lawson reports that

“Mostly I hate having my hair done no matter who does it or where or when it’s done” and she “felt alienated in salons” (Lawson 2003:370). Like many people with hair that is neither straight nor curly, but somewhere in between, Lawson is aware that being fashionable can be hard work.

Susan Brownmiller reports similar ambivalences about hair that she describes as thick and naturally wavy, hair that might have been considered difficult in the decades leading up to the writing of Femininity (1984). Her frustration during the 50s and 60s, when many women only shampooed and styled their hair once a week, is palpable. She laments her texture as unruly and unfashionable, yet does not consider that these apparent

“curses” may become blessings when she gets older.11 Weitz (2005), in contrast, recounts that even though she once hated her dark wavy hair, she later made peace with it and even learned to admire her hair’s own distinct characteristics.

Thus, the symbolic importance of hair remains relevant to many areas of social science research. Hair as identity marker is especially relevant in women’s studies and particularly in African American studies, but it also remains relevant to the study of social space and of social and psychological attitudes toward the body.

The Hairdresser in Recent History

Steven Zdatny (1984, 1990, 1997) defines the artisan class as historically lying between the lowest classes of “unskilled” workers and the middle classes. Artisans possessed specialized knowledge and tended to identify strongly with their work. In his works on the French artisanat of the early and middle 20th century, Zdatny characterizes most artisans as conservative, proud workers who took pride in their work but also extolled the ideology of the family.

11 Coarse, wavy hair tends to resist elaborate styles in many cases. However, as men and women age, and hair decreases in both density and in diameter of individual hairs, the hair of a woman with such hair may be more manageable than that of her once-envied peers. More recently, hairstyles that work with naturally wavy texture have gained popularity, so that, for a change, women with naturally wavy hair feel less of a need to choose between a simple hairstyle and a fashionable one. 39

Among these trades, hair salons grew as acceptable professions for women, requiring relatively little start-up capital and not too much training. As I will point out later, the parallels between hairdressers in France during the early 1900s and those in the

U.S. are salient. As a profession, the training was briefer than in other lines of work; it was attractive to those who could not or did not wish to undergo extensive education in order to find work.

With partial ownership of their means of production and a job that was too highly skilled for the untrained laborer and too easily learned to command true middle-class job security, all but the most talented and productive hairdressers lived on modest wages.

Zdatny (1984, 1990, 1997) effectively captures and communicates the marginality and liminality of artisanal professions in early 20th century France as they seek a place squarely within the French middle-class, and not just at its edges.

Despite the efforts of artisans to gain influence through labor and political organizations, they did not attain these goals to any great degree. As Zdatny (1990) narrates the struggle of artisanal trades to gain social standing, he shows how in the end, many of the artisanal trades either lost much of what had made them distinctive trades or they risked slipping into irrelevance.

Zdatny (1990) evokes a sense of how so many trades, such as coopers, boatwrights, and yes, hairdressers struggled to remain viable throughout the last century.

Today, skill, creativity and interpersonal trust keep many cosmetologists in demand, and their licensure is merely part of the foundations on which they have built businesses and reputations.

In parallel to Zdatny’s historical account, modern cosmetologists enter the field with different aspirations and motivations. For some, the artisanal model still serves as a good analog for how they see themselves and their work. For others, they have seen the future, and for them it is more about being a competent entrepreneur and administrator than anything else. The entrepreneur may have disappeared from macroeconomic theory

(Barreto 1989), but the beauty industry requires the entrepreneurs ability to bring people and ideas together in a common undertaking.

Many skilled trades have become industrialized, standardized, and often de- skilled and mechanized. Hairdressing occasionally flirts with this process, but for the most part, it remains rare among the skilled trades in that the cosmetologist performs a service from start to finish, and the praise or blame for the final product is mostly his or her own. It seems to attract workers who wish to identify with their work as more than a means to a paycheck. As I will show, such workers also tend to take more readily to the emotional demands of the trade, and cosmetologists often find themselves balancing fiscal concerns against the aesthetic and emotional demands that determine customer loyalty (Yi and Jeon 2003). This close connection between cosmetologist, client, and production problematizes efforts to treat it similar to any other line of work.12

12 Zdatny (1984, 1990, 1997) found that hairdressing statistics in the period he studied (c.1920-1950) reflected unique dynamics that correlated weakly with the other skilled trades he analyzed. Since in other artisanal trades, the antiquity and familial dynamics were rooted in a common history, the fact that hairdressing responded to the more dynamic stimuli of fashion media, which itself was evolving rapidly during this time, is ultimately explicable through a semiotic of early 20th century women’s roles. Hairdressing in the 20th century also seems consistently unusual in the way that it has demanded business acumen, technical ability as well as self-control; this seems especially salient where class inequality between stylist and client is more pronounced. 41

The Role of Occupational Licensure

I have explained the importance of autonomy and professionalism as themes in cosmetology and other trades of artisanal origin. In order to understand how these themes continue to influence the culture of hairdressing, a little time is necessary to look at how the profession has organized itself in the past, and how it looks to the future.

The progress of cosmetology from an unlicensed or at least weakly regulated trade into a rather heavily regulated profession is no accident. For all the rhetoric from within the industry and regulatory bodies about the protection of the public, the underlying motives reflect the self-interest of the artisans more than any concern for public safety.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were few trade schools or academies devoted to the styling of hair. A man or woman with great natural talent and a knack for business could learn quickly, and many of the requisite skills would have been learned in the context of an apprenticeship or learned as a servant or slave. Barbering too was yet to be as strongly regulated as it would later become in the U.S.

The fact that formal training and licensure were not required for either hairdressers or barbers was typical of most skilled trades, and to some extent, many of the so-called “learned professions” (Gellhorn 1976:7). Walter P. Metzger (1987:11) characterizes medicine, law and the clergy as “the learned professions of hoary pedigree” in contrast to more recently professionalized fields such as architecture, accounting and engineering as modeling their regulated status on that of the older three. Metzger in particular reminds us that there were far fewer barriers to becoming a physician or attorney in 1900 than to becoming a licensed practical nurse in 1970.

Walter Gellhorn (1976:7) lists the three “learned professions” as “theology, law, and medicine.” He clarifies that the status of each several profession varies by antiquity and process of professionalization, and thus indicates that the evolution of law and medicine as profession has been dynamic, and at times rapid:

The American legal profession has been regarded as unassailably "learned" since

the early immigrants set foot on Plymouth Rock more than 350 years ago. In

actuality, the expounders of law in those distant times were small farmers and

craftsmen who acted upon vagrant memories of local customs believed to have

been enforced in England by some anonymous magistrate, coupled with notions

of propriety derived from the Bible. When the colonists in 1636 codified their

laws, their compilation was, as the late Julius Goebel has said, a "crude imitation

of inaccurately remembered things." The same characterization can fairly be

applied to legal developments throughout the colonies, but the crude imitators and

inaccurate rememberers nevertheless maintained their status as learned. [Gellhorn

1976:7]

The contrast between the popular concept of the modern lawyer as highly educated practitioner of a complex and highly regulated profession and the first lawyers of colonial North America is stark, and Gellhorn’s description calls forth the very beginnings of a profession in which the skills of strong literacy and persuasive public speaking ability could suffice, especially in a time when literacy levels were lower than they would later be. Indeed, the perception of the attorney as the legal scholar whose training requires access to a familiarity with an extensive legal literature is a recent one; it

does not even apply to lawyers in the 19th century, as the following insight from Walter

Gellhorn reveals:

A 1771 American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England

had 840 subscribers. While popular, the pursuit of legal learning was not

particularly taxing. Fifty-five years after the Blackstone edition, James Kent,

Columbia's first law professor, began publishing his comprehensive

Commentaries on American Law-which ran to four volumes. In 1858 Abraham

Lincoln recommended the reading of five named books (not including Kent's) as

"the best way" to enter the learned profession of the law—though he did

graciously add that no serious damage would be done if one were to continue

reading after having begun practicing. Sustained and supervised study was

certainly not deemed to be prerequisite to becoming learned, for as late as 1900

one could be admitted to the bar in every state without earning a law degree or

even an undergraduate college degree.

Columbia's School of Law was launched in 1858, the year in which Mr.

Lincoln offered his personal prescription. Columbia's law library, supplemented

by a whole shelf of books from the estate of a recently deceased practitioner, went

far beyond Lincoln's Big Five. Years later, when the school moved to more

spacious quarters, it still housed its library in a single room, with one long table

surrounded by twenty chairs. [Gellhorn 1976:7-8]

Gellhorn goes on to point out that the medical profession has also changed dramatically throughout the 19th and 20th century. Given the legal focus of this article, he does not address scientific and technological leaps such as the emergence of germ

theory. He shows that even at the beginning of the 20th century, one need not have been wealthy or extensively educated to enter medical school, but only literate and capable of learning the skills of the physicians’ trade (Gellhorn 1976:9). Yet Gellhorn reminds his readers that this, too, is typical of the status of an emerging profession. He concedes that there is much to know in both medicine and law and that the public has derived benefit from this knowledge.

Yet, for all that, Gellhorn makes a point that is salient not only for medicine and law as two of the “learned professions,” but for all those trades and vocations that aspire to professional status: professionalism as formally ascribed status and professionalism as excellence in the performance of occupational duties are two different qualities. Just because the medical and legal professions were not as structured and formally regulated as they are today does not mean that there were no excellent physicians or lawyers at the dawn of the 20th century or that the formalized education, training and licensure of doctors and lawyers guarantees excellence among all who attain licensure.

In this spirit, what Gellhorn writes of the lawyers and physicians of a century ago is an argument that may extend to other trades and professions as well:

These animadversions upon the unlearned past of professions indubitably

accepted as learned should serve as a reminder that learning is an individual

quality. It is not a quality inexorably possessed by everyone who obtains

professional status. Many learned persons may exist within a group that is far

from learned. Before recorded learning reached its present bulk, respected lawyers

and physicians earned high marks for the quality of their thinking even though

they had not read books descriptive of other people's thinking; today, some who

have crammed themselves full of what passes for learning have neglected to

develop the sound judgment without which learning cannot successfully be

utilized. . . . In truth, possessing wisdom as well as erudition is what entitles a

person to be characterized as learned, and a calling becomes a learned profession

in more than name only when it is pursued preponderantly by persons who are

both well educated and wise. [Gellhorn 1976:9-10]

What emerges from Gellhorn’s historical analysis is a critique of licensure as an anti-competitive strategy by which trades and professions restrict entry into their respective fields by inflating technical and educational requirements, passing legislation that requires investments of time and money that effectively limit the pool of applicants and practitioners within a given occupation. Although the public good is the putative impetus behind increasingly restrictive licensure practices, evidence of sufficient need for the degree of restrictiveness seems harder to quantify than the alleged side effects of reduced competition within occupations. Gellhorn (1976:10) describes the extension of the principle of licensure as “the idea that licensing should serve primarily as an instrument of social control to protect the public against unfit or unscrupulous practitioners.” Such extension to “aspiring bee keepers, embalmers, lightning rod salesmen, septic tank cleaners, taxidermists, and tree surgeons” (Gellhorn 1976:6) may give comfort and a sense of dignity and purpose to practitioners of these lines of work, and may indeed inspire them to practice conscientiously. However, the main goal is that of restricting access to a line of work and protecting the interests of those already working in it. Thus Gellhorn determines that

Licensing, imposed ostensibly to protect the public, almost always impedes only

those who desire to enter the occupation or "profession”; those already in practice

remain entrenched without a demonstration of fitness or probity. The self-

interested proponents of a new licensing law generally constitute a more effective

political force than the citizens who, if aware of the matter at all, have no special

interest which moves them to organize in opposition. [Gellhorn 1976:11-12]

In one of the starker assessments of the effects of this practice, Gellhorn singles out cosmetology and barbering as emblematic of this inappropriate extension of licensure into skilled trades that, despite their requirement of proficiency and the mastery of a battery of specialized skills, do not approach medicine, law, accounting, or engineering in the degree of specialization required. By the time I undertook my cosmetology training in 1987, any discussion of human osteology was cursory at best (Gellhorn 1976:12).

Certainly, there seemed to be almost as much concern given to passing the licensure exam as to the acquisition of hairdressing skills.

On the other hand, other curricular items which he describes as arcane addenda to the training of barbers, such as dermatology, chemistry of hair and nails, sanitation, and bacteriology were much more intensively taught. Given that some chemicals and machines used by both modern barbers and cosmetologists are capable of skin and scalp burns, damage to hair and nails that can vary from mild to severe to irreparable, and even severe allergic reactions, the case for licensure has bases and reality that are arguably more evident to practitioners than to clients. Questions regarding the regulation or deregulation of cosmetology would have to address how well within a viable definition of

“common sense” this knowledge lays and whether the public is put at unfair risk of

significant harm through the unregulated actions of incompetent or unscrupulous practitioners.

Protection of the public is a goal of occupational licensure; however, legal scholars maintain that the protection of the public good must impose as few restrictions on market competition and the right to work as possible. Unfair restriction of the right to work has been central to Walter Gellhorn’s critique. However, the role of occupational licensure as it applies to cosmetology requires a consideration of factors that outweigh competition and the right to work in favor of the greater good.

While none of the authors I cite here call for complete or even drastic deregulation of professions and industries, many attempt to differentiate between regulations that protect the public interests, and those that build legal, cultural, societal, and monetary barriers in order to limit the number of entrants into a given trade or profession. The examples that follow serve to illustrate both kinds of regulation and will also reveal how increased regulation of cosmetology works as an exclusionary structure that seeks to improve the image of cosmetology as a profession through the cultivation of a more exclusive, professionalized image.

In “Business and Professional Licensing: California, A Representative Example,”

J. F. Barron (1966) differentiates between cases in which licensing programs serve the public good by extending critical protections to all market participants and those that benefit members of a given business or profession to the detriment of buyers. Barron argues that in most market situations, buyers and sellers alike have the option to engage in transactions with each other or to seek alternative transaction partners. Likewise, in most cases, both parties are aware of their options. In these cases, “general law’ such as

the federal regulations that govern fuel emissions safety standards in automobiles and food safety in both perishable and non-perishable foodstuffs give sufficient protections to all market participants.

However, in some cases, general law gives insufficient protection to market participants, and state governments may establish regulatory boards and other offices in order to provide the needed protection or “police power.”13 Barron contrasts the condemnation of anticompetitive business practices at state and federal levels against the efforts of industries and businesses to limit competition and consumer choice through increasingly stringent state regulation of their own trade.

Barron cites the two legal precedents that authorize police power at the state level; they are what Barron calls “natural monopolies” and the “case of no second chance.” In both cases, buyer choices are already greatly constrained by factors that they, as mere consumers, cannot control; unlike most market situations, these are two cases in which real and potential buyers have little or no recourse should a transaction go seriously wrong.

Examples of natural monopolies do not abound, but where they exist, they tend to follow the following pattern:

Conceptually, there are industries in which the nature of the resources that are

used in production is such that one producer can supply the entire market for the

product at a lower real cost (use fewer resources) than can several producers. In

13 Barron’s use of the term “police power” denotes the policing of practices by regulatory bodies and in no way connotes a negative bias toward state regulation per se, although Barron’s assessment of contemporary applications of police power is critical, and he indeed makes a case that excessive and inappropriate use of regulations is harmful to all participants, especially to buyers. Additionally, Barron’s initial mention of the Cartwright Act of 1959 as well as federal antimonopoly laws also points out to the tension between California’s enforcement of the Cartwright Act and the anticompetitive effects of regulations that unfairly favor business and industry insiders (Barron 1966:640). 49

this natural monopoly situation the existence of more than one producer will have

one or both of the same effects: (1) Each seller will have excess capacity, and

such capacity, together with low or declining costs to using it, will lead to

successive price reductions until the price of the product declines to the level of

out-of-pocket costs. Eventually, only one seller will survive, and the consumer

will be faced with a true monopoly. (2) While this “ruinous” competition

continues, firms, in an effort to cut costs, may reduce the quality of the product to

the detriment of the buyer.

Where this condition is thought to exist, the police power may be used to

grant monopolistic production of the product by means of a public utility

“license.” The price and output of the public utility are regulated by the public in

an effort to secure production of the product at nonmonopolistic prices. [Barron

1966:642]

In this instance, the public good is at stake, for the individual consumer has little alternative if the holder of a monopoly chooses to raise its rates exorbitantly. With regional or statewide monopolies on commodities such as electrical power or water services, the state steps in to protect the public against discrimination, price-gouging or other possible abuses resulting from a natural monopoly.

The second case for police power, the law of “no second chance,” can also protect the public good. Food and drug safety are obvious examples in which death or serious harm may result. While opponents of regulation may wish to put responsibility with the consumer in all cases, there are limits to the applicability of caveat emptor. These include

cases in which the public cannot be expected to be aware of all possible risks involved with a given transaction. Therefore, Barron concedes,

It is in this area that the state uses the police power to set itself between ignorant

buyers and unscrupulous or incompetent sellers. It is believed that general laws

governing such areas such as sanitation, purity of foods, and industrial safety are

not sufficient to protect ignorant buyers. Thus general laws are reinforced by laws

which license sellers, thereby insuring that buyers can exercise choices only

among sellers who meet some minimum standard of competence. [Barron

1966:642]

“No second chance” regulation is a principle that upholds the right of the public to seek work under reasonably safe conditions and to receive a certain standard level of care in hospitals and clinics. As Barron (1966) points out, these are instances in which the first time something goes wrong for the buyer may also be the last.

There are many cases for applying regulation based on the law of “no second chance.” In medicine, despite the requirements of the Medical Doctor (M.D.) and Doctor of Osteopathy (D.O.) degrees, there are still no guarantees that physicians will apply their skill and knowledge to the utmost benefit of their patients. Regulation of medical practitioners may or may not be indicators of a physician’s competency, but it does provide patients (or their estates) legal recourse above that provided for by general law.

While initial impetus for training and regulation may have been for the benefit of doctors, many of the laws and regulations on the books are not the initiatives of medical industry lobbies, but of consumers. According to Barron (1966), this is a fair use of police power since the public cannot expect to have enough medical knowledge to make informed

decisions about every aspect of health care but is to some extent dependent on those who have a “corner” on that amount of specialized knowledge.

The example of medicine contrasts against many other regulated professions, such as architects, funeral directors, barbers and cosmetologists. While the emergence of natural monopolies is at least possible in theory for any of these professions, the less parsimonious rationales will be arguments based on the case of no second chance. There are certainly arguments that in each of these cases, there is little or no need to regulate, and that the best providers will survive and flourish and the least capable will fail in the presence of alternatives. That said, there are also grounds for at least some measure of regulation in the cause of the public good. On architects, I cannot evaluate the argument well except to say that regulation is appropriate insofar it may result in superior design and execution of structures and prevent deaths and injuries from building collapses and other architectural failures.

As for funeral homes, barber shops and hair salons, a few health concerns do require legislation above general law. All three industries deal with bodily secretions of skin, sweat, hair, and sometimes blood. The potential for public health dangers based on concentrations of infectious human waste in these forms is more than an abstraction.

Education about germs, safety and sanitation may seem excessive to those who think that

“common sense” covers all that practitioners need to know.

Regulations regarding environmental conditions and the safety of chemical products protect both workers and clients from effects that can be serious, costly, and in some cases irreversible (Halal 2002; Hardy et al. 1999; Jiménez-Alonso et al. 2002;

Milady Publishing Company 2000:288-290, 307).

Although extreme allergic reactions to aniline derivative dyes can occur, allergies to certain preservatives, drug and cosmetic (direct) dyes and hydrogen peroxide as well as irritation, sores and scalp burns resulting from scalp irritation can cause blistering, scarring and hair loss. Acute respiratory distress may also occur as a result of sensitization or allergic reaction to aniline derivative tint (Halal 2002:173-174; Jimènez-

Alonso et al. 2002). Contact dermatitis and loss of sight are also real dangers to cosmetologists and their clients alike. For the cosmetologist, constant exposure of his or her hands to the extreme pH values of many chemical products and constant immersion in water make contact dermatitis an occupational hazard (Genuis and Genuis 2004; Halal

2002:43-47; Lind et.al. 2007; O’Connell and Hedges 1997; Tiwary 1998). Occupational asthma is not a risk shared by clients, but is a hazard of dust, resin and fume inhalation over long periods of time (Halal 2002:155, 173-174; Blainey et al. 1986). In my own experience, clients tended to regard the fact that I was certified and licensed in the State of Florida as a necessary, if not self-sufficient marker of competence.

The potential of some chemicals to cause rashes, burns, hair loss, severe allergic reaction or even blindness suggests that some minimum standard of competence in the use of reactive cosmetics upholds the public good, and that to some extent at least, the law of no second chance has been rightfully invoked by regulatory boards. The wide range of services and the potential for long-standing or even irreversible damage to the skin and hair make some schooling in the structure and growth of human hair and at least some basic practical chemistry a relevant component of a cosmetologist’s training.

Likewise, some basic training to teach students the differences between viral diseases such as Influenza and the common cold, fungal conditions such as Tinea

(ringworm) and Lichen planus, bacterial diseases such as strep throat, and parasitic conditions such as lice serve the public good inasmuch as operators recognize infectious diseases and can respond appropriately with respect to infected customers (Halal 2002;

Lind et.al. 2007; Milady Publishing Company 2000:34-46, 75-79).

Personally, I like the fact that state regulations tell me exactly what I must and must not do when a customer comes in with a lice infestation on his or her person (do not service; dispense appropriate treatment advice; expel from premises; launder all washable items in hot water; disinfect everything). As for “common sense,” not everyone seems to know that working in a high-touch environment with a highly communicable infectious disease is unethical because it spreads that disease to others. For some things, it appears that “common sense” and general law are enough.

Health and safety regulations do educate workers and business owners about health hazards and infection prevention methods. Moreover, they create feelings of trust between providers and consumers. Good sanitation puts the minds of customers at rest, at least concerning the cleanliness of the establishment. It also can protect businesses from hygiene-related lawsuits.

I interpret these examples to fall outside of naked protectionism. Regardless of the original intent of these regulations, my sense from within the cosmetology field is that they have at least a mild level of support within the field. If nothing else, when the occasional lice-infested customer walks through the door, knowledge of normative infection control is empowerment as well as evidence of professional knowledge.

However, there is little doubt that the culture of the cosmetology salon has experienced the effects of regulation, and that many individuals with natural talent may have been

dissuaded from entering the field, to the benefit of those who may be less gifted yet duly licensed.

Despite some concerns about unjustified hindrances to the pursuit of employment discussed by Gellhorn, Rottenberg and Barron, there seems to be both legal and at least some popular support for licensing cosmetologists based on the case of no second chance.

However, the remaining question, and the one most relevant to the topic of professionalism and autonomy in the salon, is whether the regulation or abolition of booth rental is indeed protectionism, and thus an abuse of licensure; or can regulation in this case be an appropriate use of police power that has the interests of the general public at heart?

CHAPTER IV

LAW AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

IN MODERN COSMETOLOGY

As the previous chapter has shown, the use of occupational licensure in skilled trades has raised concerns of protectionism and of inappropriate appeals to the public’s need for protection from unlicensed, and thus presumably incompetent or unscrupulous purveyors of goods and services. I have also shown that there is some basis for this where the use of chemicals and thermal appliances are concerned, although any future rulings on the continued need for such regulation lie with state legislators. It is enough to note that any person wishing to pursue a career in cosmetology in the U.S. is likely to pay dearly for the opportunity.

Once a hairdresser has gained licensure, the state may regulate activity of his or her workplace in matters that extend beyond those that clearly address matters of public health and safety. Depending on the time and place, restrictions on cosmetology salons have been as onerous as those placed on their historically older and traditionally more male-oriented counterparts, barber shops.

Walter Gellhorn has already noted that the requirements for both barbers and cosmetologists have risen steeply during the last century. He notices that regulatory codes vary between the states, and singles out California for special criticism. Yet California, despite some of the strictest licensing requirements in the country, has not always laid the

nation’s most onerous restrictions on the practice of these service occupations among those already trained and duly licensed. For restrictions on the lawful operation of beauty salons and barber shops, some of the starkest examples lie east of the Mississippi.

Restricting hours of operation in the name of the public good is nothing new, but the practice was especially common in the eastern portions of the U. S. during the first half of the 20th century. Debates over occupational licensure and its real and potential abuses also date from this time; the two issues are in fact closely related.

In “Barbershop and Beauty Parlor Legislation: Constitutionality,” John D.

Butzner, Jr. (1940) takes a very supportive stance toward regulation that demonstrably protects the public from incompetent barbers and unhygienic business practices. In this spirit, he recognizes an extension of what J. F. Barron (1966) calls the case of “no second chance” in state Supreme Court rulings that upheld municipal licensing requirements in large towns and cities in the absence of state regulation. Butzner argues that the conventional wisdom regarding the relative anonymity of large cities and the consequent vulnerability of urban areas to disease epidemics is valid and that the legislatures of

Alabama, Oklahoma and Georgia were within reason as well as within their constitutional rights to allow such legislation to vary between counties and municipalities

(Butzner 1940:930-931, 931 nn.16-17).

However, Butzner sides with the decision of the courts in Maryland that struck down that state’s educational and apprenticeship requirements for barbers on constitutional grounds, while expressing bewilderment at an Illinois court’s decision to uphold that state’s even more extensive requirements as reasonable in the 1918 case of

People v. Logan (Butzner 1940:932, 932 n.24). In the 1936 decision on the Maryland

case of Schneider v. Duer, the courts found that the requirement of an 8th grade education and a two-year apprenticeship had no relevant bearing on public health and unjustly hindered prospective barbers from entering the trade and pursuing a living from it (Butzner 1940:93; 931 n.19).

Yet in the state of Illinois, the state failed to see anything unreasonable about requiring barbers to serve a three-year apprenticeship, and upheld the law as relevant to the protection of public health (Butzner 1940:932, 932 n.24). Butzner extends this discussion to the licensure of cosmetologists and how competition between beauty parlors and barbershops has played out in a number of state courts (1940:933-934). An exhaustive treatment of each case merits a paper of its own; however, the attempts by legislatures to regulate the manner in which beauty salons and barber shops conducted their several enterprises remains central to a discussion of the structure and culture of cosmetology salons. It is to these real and attempted restrictions we turn to next.

In discussing attempts to regulate hours and prices in barber shops and beauty salons, Butzner opens with a portrayal of the conditions faced by barbers in the 1930s.

The description evokes the tough conditions that faced barbers in much of the U.S. Since

Steven Zdatny (1984; 1990) finds evidence of similar attempted legislation in French barbershops and beauty salons during the same period, the parallels are hard to ignore.

What emerges is a picture of the struggle of the skilled worker-as-businessperson who strives to get ahead financially and socially or at least keep in a state of relative balance:

In considering legislation fixing the time during which barber shops can

operate, it is essential to recognize that most of the shops have only one or

two chairs, and that the owner of the shop often works alone. Competition

is keen, often cut-throat. Thus, long hours of labor result, and attempts to

regulate the hours by fixing a maximum for employees fail because most

shops do not have employees; the owner is the barber; he is his own

employer. [Butzner, 1940:935]

Butzner notes that attempts to get barber shops to close early in the evening or on

Sundays were often disadvantageous, if not disastrous for barbers (1940:936-938) When courts have upheld the laws, they were on grounds of public health and safety, grounds that have failed to hold up in many cases. States have upheld restrictions on operating hours for establishments such as auctions, pool halls and bars, but they have tended to treat barber shops and beauty salons according to the conventions governing retail stores and grocery stores (Butzner 1940:938-939). Likewise, the decision to uphold restriction on the overnight operation of commercial laundries in certain parts of San Francisco in the 1885 case of Barbier v. Connolly also failed (Butzner 1940:939 n.72).

This fact that lawyers even resorted to citing Barbier v. Connolly in the early 20th century is telling, for litigants have invoked this case as late as 1939, when the ruling would no longer have applied in most of the areas of San Francisco it was meant to protect (Butzner 1940:939 n.74-75). Since rules restricting the use of flammable exterior materials in building after the fire and earthquake of 1906 would have made this decision largely inapplicable by the 1930s, the attempts of legislators to invoke Barbier v.

Connolly as a precedent in the restriction of barbershop hours were not only spurious but anachronistic by 1940. As for price regulations, it suffices that none of the cases mentioned by Butzner (1940:939-941) were true minimum-wage statutes and, consequently, do not appear to have been taken too seriously.

For all the wealth of precedent and insight provided by the foregoing legal brief, two states seems to have followed more in the steps of the 1918 Illinois ruling in People v. Logan than those of Maryland in its 1936 ruling on Schneider v. Duer. These are the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (New Jersey Division of Consumer Affair: New

Jersey State Board of Cosmetology and Hairstyling 2007; New Jersey Office of the

Attorney General, Division of Consumer Affairs 2005; Pennsylvania Bureau of

Professional and Occupational Affairs, Board of Cosmetology 2008; Pennsylvania Code

2007). These two states have made sweeping statutes regarding the circumstances under which a cosmetology salon may function. These laws again invoke the public good, yet on closer inspection, raise questions about whether stricter regulation offers real protection to consumers or whether the greatest protections are instead to business owners who benefit from a reduced number of competitors.

Barreto rightly points out attempts to outlaw booth rental as reactionary interventions by salon owners concerned about too much competition as well as by lack of creative control. Elsewhere he is right in pointing out that the small business owner in many ways harks back to older historical models of business practice, in which creativity, good management abilities, social connections and capital all needed to meet in the person of the entrepreneur. Implicit in Barreto’s work is the possibility that the early capitalist model is not only something lacking in historical precedent, but also is more likely to become a historical anomaly than a template for the future. The entrepreneur has left the room but has not disappeared permanently.

Another model that was once considered a relic of the past has surfaced in new and varied forms during the 20th century. Trade organizations now perform increasingly

as artisan guilds did in late medieval Europe. They protect those within their ranks not only by mutual support, but also protect earnings by restricting guild membership as well as pushing legislation that allows only properly trained and licensed individuals to practice certain trades. Opposition to booth rental has the effect of reducing the number of cosmetologists that are able or willing to function as either employees or as owners of free-standing salons, even salons isolées (Rottenberg 1980).

In light of these insights, it is evident that the language in the cosmetology statutes of the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania dissimulate any appearance of protectionism by stressing the public benefit of well-managed, wisely regulated hair salons. The implied argument is that booth renters do not regulate themselves, whether it is in bookkeeping, keeping abreast of licensure requirements, or something that directly or indirectly threatens the public good.

What Rottenberg and his colleagues suggest is, however, consonant with

Barreto’s critique of classical economic theory and with Steven Zdatny’s (1997) account of hairdressers in Vichy France. The protection of the public from under qualified practitioners is not the real issue at hand, but a “red herring.” Licensure can and does offer real protection, and hair salons have a real need for regulation, as serious harm can arise from misuse of chemicals and cosmetics and even more serious public harm can arise through neglect of good sanitation practices. However, the spirit of these statutes

“protest too much,” and thus belie their protectionist origins.

Concerns about protectionist motivations have a long history in the west, and the concerns that both Zdatny (1990) and Rottenberg (1980) approach from their respective disciplines has a long history within 20th century legal theory as well. While none of the

authors I cite here call for complete or even drastic deregulation of professions and industries, many attempt to differentiate between regulations that protect the public interests, and those that build legal, cultural, societal, and monetary barriers in order to limit the number of entrants into a given trade or profession. The examples that follow serve to illustrate both kinds of regulation and will also reveal how increased regulation of cosmetology works as an exclusionary structure that seeks to improve the image of cosmetology as a profession through the cultivation of a more exclusive, professionalized image. Indeed, the examples that follow call to mind Zdatny’s evaluation of the political misadventures of the French artisanat in that they suggest a struggle against real or expected irrelevance.

In view of the different pathways to self-regulation and the corresponding differences in attitudes among regulated trades and professions towards their respective statuses, it is both possible and useful to situate cosmetology within a continuum that ranges from the natural monopolies and the industries subject to regulation based on the law of “no second chance” at one end, and those whose active pursuit of increasing tight regulation “protest too much” about the need to protect consumers. It is my position that while the position of most state and national professional organizations is pro-regulation, the attitudes of some stakeholding businesses are more complex. If anything, ambivalent or tentative attitudes toward increased regulation was higher at the level of the small business owner and more sharply divided in the business community.

In short, I, like Barreto’s (1990) unnamed beauty-industry informant, have found the national trade organizations mostly hostile toward booth rental, but open enough to it that they address legal and practical matters in their publications so that tenants and

landlords are aware of booth rental laws and the consequences of noncompliance.

However, even these articles are nested within a narrative framework that promotes the benefits of an employer-employee arrangement.

Industries that provide equipment and other supplies have a mixed record. Insofar as it is more efficient to work with larger salons that employ their staff and require that the entire staff use the same products, large, high-volume salons are the retailer’s ideal customer. However, this bias must be weighed against the downside of relying solely on large accounts. When a profitable account drops a supplier for any reason, the drop in revenue is often correspondingly sharp. An analysis of the sources of vendor revenues would illumine their respective relationships with independent and chain salons, but is unfortunately outside the scope of this thesis. Therefore, further research into the sources of salon wholesale vendors is necessary to more fully understand the role of these industries in the shaping of cosmetology regulation.

The salon-level attitudes vary between the high-volume salons and the smaller independent shops. At very high-end establishments, some leasing of space may occur, but the high rents and more complex rental agreements tend to weed out all but the most astute entrepreneurial types. Chain salons, as Barreto (1990) notes, have responded to both the “commission wars” and to booth rental by building loyalty to the salon instead of to any individual operator. Building brand loyalty requires the presentation of the individual stylist as “one among many,” and practices such as standardized in-house training in cosmetology praxis, especially customer service, haircutting, and retail strategies, create the impression that all stylists within an establishment meet or exceed a certain standard of competence. Dress codes or uniforms may also deflect emphasis away

from individual stylists and toward the salon brand. Since these strategies are at least partially in response to the rise of the independent booth rental salon, such salons cannot be considered particularly friendly toward a rival movement.

At the level of independent salons the philosophical differences are most salient.

With independent operation one expects to see differences in outlook both between salons that hire their staff and those that lease space to tenants. In addition, one expects to find variation within salons of each type. Such variations have become evident in the course of my interviews and associated fieldwork.

CHAPTER V

BEAUTY SHOP AND OTHER CELLULOID BEAUTY SALONS

In the feature film Beauty Shop (Woodruff 2005), Gina (Queen Latifah), leaves the upscale hair salon where she has been employed by a pretentious, overbearing boss

(Kevin Bacon) and looks for a place of her own. She is short on money but is able to purchase a struggling salon whose owner has recently died. Her first job is to restore her new salon to profitability. Gina faces several challenges in achieving her goal. Her tenants are, like Gina herself, strapped for cash and, in most cases, weighed down by personal and family obligations. They are also concerned about the changes a new owner will bring. They have cause to be, for they have become used to the space functioning in a certain way; uncertainty, as in many other life situations, gives rise to many negative emotions, especially fear.

In this section, I will look at Gina’s salon as one of several cinematic representations of beauty salons in the U.S. and will show how the themes of autonomy, creativity and professionalism typical of most skilled labor jobs manifest themselves in movies and television shows. I will examine and discuss the power dynamics of these

“celluloid beauty salons” and compare the messages inherent in these representations against ethnographic examples and related data. The challenges to success faced by the character of Gina in the romantic comedy feature film Beauty Shop provide a suitable

starting point for exploring these themes and their effect on attitudes toward booth rental in the U.S.

Gina sets to reorganizing and renovating the space as much as her limited means permit her to. She also works at encouraging the stylists to affect a more professional attitude, that is, to take the job seriously. Some stylists choose to leave rather than to follow Gina’s advice. Others remain, and decide to give Gina a chance. Gina agrees to keep weekly rents down, but expects a greater say in how the stylists present themselves.

She even convinces them to wear matching vests, in order to stress their similarities and their identification with the salon, as well as to project what Gina hopes is a more professional image. In the film, the stylists who remain benefit from Gina’s inspirational leadership and her business dealings. Gina eventually restores the salon to profitability; by the end of the film, both her professional and personal life are much happier than at the beginning.

Gina’s role as a landlord and as a leader is presented matter-of-factly, as if it were common knowledge. Her actions, though, present a paradox. Why is Gina trying to tell her stylists what to wear? You might think, “Well, why not? It’s her place; she can tell her employees how to dress and how to do their jobs. In fact, it’s her job to do so!”

Not so fast. She is not their employer, but their landlord. If she collects rent from them, her stylists are self-employed, and they are her tenants and not her employees.

While tenants might choose to follow their landlords advice, and Gina can be said to have exerted a measure of indirect, informal or “soft” power in convincing her tenants to behave a certain way, Gina has little or no formalized legal or “hard” authority wherewith to enforce her will on these matters.

Gina is one of several cinematic representations of hair salon owners that illustrate the range of possible dynamics between owners and their tenants or employees.

Beauty Shop makes more pointed reference to the business contract between parties than most. Gina does not employ the cosmetologists under her roof, and there is no evidence that her tenants wish to become her employees. Yet Gina needs her salon to be busy so her tenants can afford to pay enough rent to keep the doors open and provide some income for her as well. Her dilemma is that she cannot tell her tenants what to wear or when to work, even though it matters to her how they conduct business.

Gina’s dilemma is emblematic of a debate within cosmetology or hairdressing within the U.S. The debate is whether the owners of cosmetology salons ought to be permitted to rent chair space to stylists instead of employing them outright. Detractors of booth rental, as it is most commonly known, decry the putatively lax work ethics of owners and renters alike, the perceived lack of leadership, and the relative ease with which booth renters can establish themselves as small businesses within a shop with relatively few of the responsibilities of a traditional salon owner. Supporters contend that there is no detriment to the profession, that booth rental practiced properly is as ethical as any other business arrangement, and that it can free salon owners as well as tenants from unwelcome financial obligations, such that the arrangements are often symbiotic in practice.

Gina has a dilemma if she employs staff outright. If she pays them a salary, she loses money unless her staff performs a sufficient volume in services and sales. This is also true if she pays a commission. However, if she sets the rent at a fixed amount, she is entitled to that every week that her tenant works there, regardless of that stylist’s

performance. Even if it is a meager sum, it is a meager sum that she can build a budget around, a sum she can depend on. However, if her rents are far lower than her expenses, she falls into debt without making up the shortfall in her own earnings. Likewise, if her tenants generate high levels of services and sales, she will need to raise rents to cover the expenses generated by the use of her space or she will lose money. In short, there is no way she can guarantee herself a comfortable life based on the choice of organizational structure alone.

Since the 1970s, hair salons have diversified in many ways. They may be private, one-of-a-kind places, or belong to any of a growing number of beauty salon chains. They may be inexpensive, very expensive, or in-between. The ambience may vary from the spa-like, to the intimate, to the impersonal. Their respective market niches may be heterogeneous or nearly homogeneous. Some specialize in cutting, others in formal hairstyling, while others present themselves as thoroughly accomplished all-around. In short, there are salons for nearly any and every kind of customer.

Within these salons, individual stylists have their own unique abilities and passions. These unique interests constrain and guide the kinds of salons they seek out as workplaces and the market niches they tend to establish themselves in. Thus, even within individual salons, stylists and their respective customer followings, or clientele, may vary considerably. There are many kinds of customers as well as many kinds of stylists, and when a cosmetologist and customer “match up,” it can be a very satisfying work relationship for both parties, as years of participant observation have shown me.

The one-to-one relationship between the cosmetologist and the customer is the modal one; without it, there is no revenue for the salon. Customers or clients may vary

greatly in age, income, beliefs, aesthetic ideals and educational background. A cosmetologist may not be able to please everyone within a demographic, but must be able to communicate clearly with a large cross-section of the public in order to provide a level of service that ensures repeat business, new referrals and the attendant increase in earnings. The work is certainly of a “high-touch” variety, not only because of the frequency of physical contact, but also because of what sociologists call “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983; Abiala 1999; Hesse-Biber and Carter 2000; Kang 2003). The relationship between the two parties must be sufficiently comfortable for stylist and client to agree on the nature and price of a service. The freedom of these two parties to negotiate this relationship within the context of the salon is important to both the customer’s overall satisfaction with the services received and to the cosmetologist’s ability to anticipate and respond to the customer’s needs and retain needed business.

The uniqueness of every cosmetologist-client dyad mirrors the importance of self- expression in the West. While many occupations require dress-codes, including the confining of hair beneath headgear and the wearing of uniforms, hair is frequently uncovered in the West. Consequently, hair is frequently treated as a fashion accessory, and changes in hair fashions serve to keep the adaptable hairdresser in business. Hair in the U.S. may not necessarily make loud and clear statements about the owner in every case, but it is rarely altogether mute either. For these reasons, it is understandable that technical abilities and interpersonal skills are both key components of the hairdresser’s art.

The distinction between “beauty salons” and barbershops has never been totally hard and fast, as Butzner (1940) makes abundantly clear. Yet the range of services

offered by modern barber shops and cosmetology salons overlap greatly; there are very few services that remain exclusive to either profession anymore. Both can cut, color, style, and chemically alter the texture of hair if they wish to do so. Barbers alone can use a straight razor to shave with; cosmetologists have license to perform manicures and pedicures, services not allowed with a barber’s license.

As Helene M. Lawson points out, the unisex salon caters to both sexes, but attracts mostly men, who appear to like the “fast service and economy” offered by these walk-in friendly establishments (Lawson 2003:391). An increasingly popular variant of the unisex salon is the “family hair salon,” which still stresses the benefits of accessibility, convenience and economy, but often markets traditional beauty salon services such as perms and color services as well as cutting. Like the unisex salons studied by Lawson, they lack the intimate setting of the traditional barbershop or beauty salon. Unlike the locations that Lawson researched, these salons market hair care products visibly and actively.

Despite a position that comes nearer to that of the traditional beauty salon, family- style establishments remain slightly more popular with men than women. To understand visually what is missing from unisex and family hair salons, it may be instructive to compare and contrast these against traditional models of the salon and barbershop respectively. Again, examples from film, literature and television illustrate these differences clearly.

In Beauty Shop, Gina leaves an upscale, uptown salon and an unbearable pompous boss behind, and purchases a neighborhood salon in an African-American, inner-city area. The salon was once a community hub, as beauty salons in general, and

African American salons in particular tend to be. Yet the salon has fallen on hard times and must reinvent itself. To see a small beauty salon functioning as a vital community hub, the film Steel Magnolias (Ross 1989) offers and calls to mind the intimate neighborhood salon studied by Frida Kerner Furman (1997) in Facing the Mirror: Older

Women and Beauty Shop Culture. In Facing the Mirror, Furman describes and analyzes the friendly associations between clients and stylists, and the sense of place that emerges out of the business relationships that have evolved within a given physical space over a temporal span of years or decades.

A similar dynamic informs the local beauty shop in Robert Harling’s play Steel

Magnolias (1988) insofar as both Furman’s ethnography and this film operate as representations of a mid-20th century model of North American beauty culture. In director Herbert Ross’s film adaptation (1989), the idea of the beauty salon as a feminine bastion of informal public life (Oldenburg 1989; 2001) translates powerfully from stage to big screen. In Steel Magnolias, Truvy (Dolly Parton) appears to take a more maternal, mentoring role toward those under her roof. She is a friendly confidant and advice-giver to her own clients and to others in the salon. She is part of the community in which she lives and a mentor to her employees.

The fact that Annelle is new to the field as well as the strong central role that

Truvy takes in daily operations suggests that she is an employer, but that is not a major subplot of the film by any stretch; Truvy’s salon is more important for its social function as a community fixture than anything else. The locus of Truvy’s power is largely within her person; she can usually rely on soft power and back it up with whatever hard power her status affords her, should that ever be necessary.

In Beauty Shop, Gina takes in an assistant from her former place of work. The context is not clear in the film, but the assistant (Alicia Silverstone) may actually be an employee. She has no following to rely on for revenue, and therefore no means to pay rent when she enters the salon. What is clear is that the social and economic cooperation that makes a salon a cohesive social unit is present in both Steel Magnolias and in Beauty

Shop, as well as in Furman’s work. To this extent, the modal relationship between cosmetologist and client and the overall tone set by the proprietor come across as crucial to the success of each respective salon. In both films, the salon becomes more than the sum of its actors by focusing on the customer experience. One might say that each salon becomes a brand unto itself and acquires a loyal following. Additionally, the spaces represented as typical of a private beauty salon are as present as they are missing in the unisex salons researched by Helene Lawson (2003:391).14

In these representations, an African American booth rental salon and a European

American commission salon have more traits in common than one might expect. Both are private, personal spaces that ground workers and clients alike while addressing the hairstyling needs of the clients. These cinematic representations have counterparts in real life as well, as ethnographic, and in my own case, auto-ethnographic evidence bears out.

14 When researching unisex salons, Lawson remarked on the stark, exposed special layout of the salons she visited, implicitly contrasting them against the aforementioned barbershops and beauty salons. She observes, The ambiance and décor in these salons were different from those of barbershops and beauty salons. Three salons had large photographs of young romantic white couples holding hands or riding bicycles and Caucasian parents with young children. There were no drapes, sculpture, paintings, animal trophies, jewelry, or hair ribbons displayed. Customers waiting for appointments sat in straight-backed chairs where everyone who passed by could see them . . . The atmosphere was not private, warm cozy or inviting in any of the shops I visited. Yet the unisex trend has taken hold across the country, where its driving economic force is apparent. [Lawson 2003:389-390] 72

In Bam-Bam and Celeste (Machado 2005), the young cosmetologist Bam-Bam

(Bruce Daniels) appears to be working in a small “family-style” salon that specializes in haircuts more than in higher-end services. He is dissatisfied with this lot and hopes for more creative license and better pay. He leaves his small hometown in the Midwest for the opportunities of New York City with his best friend Celeste. He ends up working as an assistant for a woman, who used to mock him in high school, but now runs an upscale salon in New York City and needs an experienced braider.

The contrast between the images of salon owner called forth by Truvy in Steel

Magnolias and Gina in Beauty Shop is stark. Here, the employer-employee relationship is explicit; Jackie, the owner exerts considerable control over every aspect of daily operations. Her word is law; her contempt for her employees mirrors that of Gina’s former boss for his workers in Beauty Shop. Bam-Bam soon leaves his famous and prosperous employer and gets a lucky break by making over his best friend, Celeste

(Margaret Cho) on a TV show where his Jackie is a frequent guest expert. His transformation of the eccentrically dressed, under-confident Celeste into an understated, yet striking beauty makes his ex-boss’s work look stodgy and ill-executed by contrast. At the end, Bam-Bam and Celeste are announcing their intention to open their own place to an enthusiastic studio crowd. Among the many implications of the film’s ending is that however Bam-Bam chooses to realize the role of salon owner, he will want to balance the needs of the customer with his own and will not short-change one party for the gain of the other.

In both Steel Magnolias and in Bam-Bam and Celeste, the leadership of the salon owners sets a strong tone at the top that affects the morale and performance of their

respective organizations. In Steel Magnolias, the tone is familiar, supportive, nurturing; the owner is a beneficent manager. In the latter case, two images, one neutral and the other negative contrast against the maternal, friendly atmosphere of Truvy’s salon. Bam-

Bam’s small-town workplace is generic, not especially friendly and devoid of charm. His big-city employer has more upscale, modern fixtures and a faster pace, and the customer base to go with it. However, the attitude of the owner toward the customer verges on the adversarial, and the workplace is apparently an unhappy one.

The above examples represent examples of how hairdressers or cosmetologists are represented in modern media. Salon owners may be mentors and guides, landlords who encourage their tenants toward self-betterment, or profit-driven taskmasters. The hairdressers may be either employees or tenants, with varying degrees of autonomy. They may be the kind that “works hard and plays hard” or may hardly work at all. What binds them in common is the nature of their work, which focuses on making their customers happier with one aspect of their bodies: their hair. In all of these cinematic examples both the owners and those they work with are actively engaged in the cleansing, cutting and arranging of human hair for both profit and creative self-expression. They perform services publicly that have long been performed in private homes or in communal spaces as specialists, and, in the U.S. and many other countries, as licensed practitioners of a regulated profession.

What is hairdressing? Is it an art, a science, or a business? To some extent it is all three; yet it is unlike other kinds of art or science, and as a business, it is unlike most other businesses. In many lands, arranging the hair of others is an act of caring performed between friends or family members. Elsewhere, it is a paid or bartered service. In the

U.S. and much of the developed world, it is a regulated trade, and licensed hairdressers or cosmetologists, undergo a modicum of vocational training and examination in order to receive licensure.

It may be semi-private, as in many hair salons in the U.S., quasi-public, as it is in

“family hair salons” and barbershops in the U.S. as well as more generally in much of

Latin America, or intensely private, as in many parts of the Middle East and in traditional societies where spheres of interaction are segregated by gender. Thus, the social aspects of hair and hairdressing vary significantly within and among cultures.

In the U.S., where licensed professional hairdressing is known as cosmetology and licensees are called cosmetologists, regulation occurs at the state level, not at the federal or national level. Thus, licensure and regulation need not occur in every state of the Union, but has arisen in large part as a result of shared attitudes, that is, by convention. Laws regulate cosmetology school curricula, licensure examination, business licensure, sanitation, minimum space requirements and other aspects of business practice.

Some states regulate how salon owners run their salons. Laws may dictate whether the salon owner must be a cosmetologist and whether salon owners must employ all staff outright or may lease space to self-employed cosmetologists on a station-rental basis.

In the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the leasing of salon space to self- employed persons is against the law (Barreto 1990; New Jersey Office of the Attorney

General, Division of Consumer Affairs 2005; Pennsylvania Bureau of Professional and

Occupational Affairs, Board of Cosmetology 2008). Elsewhere, this practice requires those who lease their space within a salon to apply for a special license. Such leasing, known as booth rental, chair-rental, station-leasing, and other names, puts salon owners

in landlord-tenant relationships with the stylists under their roofs rather than in the historic employer-employee dynamic (Barreto 1990). Booth rental has divided many actors within the U.S. cosmetology profession, and the bans in Pennsylvania and New

Jersey passed in part because of anti-booth rental pressure from several sectors of the beauty industry.

It is due to these “facts on the ground” that legal matters are so operative in the shaping of beauty salon culture. Beauty salons are part of the informal public spaces that

Oldenburg (1989) calls “third places.” As in Sheila’s Shop (Battle-Walters 2004) or the upscale salons described by Helene Lawson (2003) or the Midwestern salon studied by

Frida Kerner Furman (1997), they contain are semi-private spaces that are yet closer to the public sphere than to the private. The beauty salon is at once just another business and a business unlike any other.

These structural paradoxes are thus emblematic of hairdressing. Cosmetologists need a certain amount of freedom in which to balance the intellectual, physical, temporal and emotional demands of their roles. At the same time, they work with instruments and cosmetics that can potentially cause grave physical harm to others and thus benefit from regulation.

Also reflected in the unique structures of salon work is a deeper cultural historical tension between the artisanal past of hairdressing in Western civilization and a desire for greater wealth and prestige by cosmetologists who wish to preserve the art and science of their trade in the face of ever-acceleration social and cultural change.

I have already discussed some of the tensions within the cosmetology industry with respect to regulation, training, and the issue of booth rental as compatible with an

evolving profession. It is a phenomenon that I have observed from both the standpoint of the cosmetologist and that of the anthropologist. It is to these perspectives I now turn in my effort to examine the themes of autonomy and professional identity “from the salon floor.”

CHAPTER VI

AUTONOMY, PROFESSIONALISM AND BOOTH RENTAL:

PERSPECTIVES FROM WORKING COSMETOLOGISTS

As a cosmetologist, I have long had mixed feelings regarding booth rental as a practice. I like the freedom of not having to go “all out” into a separate physical location in order to exercise the creative and fiscal autonomy of a sole proprietor. If I find a product or technique that is superior to one I have used previously for a given hair service, I can use it. I have always felt that doing a job well required the right equipment as well as the technical ability, energy and attitude to do it right. My own experiences have taught me that not everybody likes the same brands of tools or cosmetics, and that personal belief in the quality of one’s services often has at least something to do with a belief in the quality of supplies at hand.

On the other hand, I realize that, as the saying goes, freedom is not free, and that the fiscal health of a booth rental salon depends on the ability of the salon owner to collect adequate rents that cover her operating expenses and still leave her some residual net income.

Thus, a dynamic equilibrium needs to exist in which the tenants, clients, and owner or owners are able to reach their respective financial goals. If an owner, can make a profit as another entity’s tenant or employee, but is not making a profit as a salon

owner, there is more incentive to close the salon and liquidate any remaining assets than to continue as an owner.

In either kind of salon, the decision to close a salon is disruptive to everyone involved in its operation, including the customers. Employees lose a place of employment; tenants lose a tax home and the benefits of any lease agreement. Customers have to decide whether to follow their stylists to a new workplace or to change hairdressers.

Tenants and employees thus have incentive to produce revenue at or above a threshold of sustainability. If tenants do not earn enough revenue, they cannot pay their rents. If they do not make the rent, they lose their leases. They either need to charge enough per service to work as little as they want, or work enough at lower prices to generate the repeat business receipts necessary to pay rent consistently. Variability in earnings from week to week is tenable if and only if tenants earn enough on average to make the rent.

For salon owners who employ their staff, they must have enough money after commissions and expenses to support themselves. They have to manage costs so that they do not undermine profit excessively, while maintaining customer satisfaction and building sustainable income through the cultivation of customer loyalty and positive word-of mouth. Consequently, this means mediating conflicts of interest between themselves, their customers, their employees, and regulatory entities.

To summarize, the autonomy that comes from owning one’s own salon or from leasing space in a salon grants not only freedom of choice, but also the burdens of decision-making. The self-employed cosmetologist must decide how he or she is going to

operate and what kind of business goals to pursue. Personal values and beliefs about work influence salon owners in their decision processes, as I learned during my interviews. I found that the salon owners I spoke with in the field enjoyed their work, and worked hard to negotiate the stress factors noted above so that they could continue to enjoy it. It is to these experts that I will now turn.

Although the salons I visited were all independent salons, they ranged in size from one or two stylists to between six and eight. They would all correspond best to

Helene Lawson’s category of “private salon.”

I asked my informants about opposition to booth rental and elicited their opinions, the responses ranged from agreement to puzzlement to sharp disagreement. Their own constructions of professionalism as they applied to salon management and the proper regulation informed their attitudes, as their responses show.

When I asked Lynn, the salon owner who employs her staff outright, the narrative-prompt question about banning booth rental, she said that she would sign a petition to pass legislation similar to that passed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Lynn pointed to the fact that each person who rents space is their own boss and is thus competing with every other tenant. If the sole authority lies with an employer or manager instead, the customer gets better service, and the need for competition between stylists can be minimized.

Within Lynn’s conceptualization of the hair salon as a cohesive unit, or, in her words, “like a family,” she has postulated a reciprocal model in which the customers, the cosmetologists and the salon owner all benefit. Lynn’s position also expresses the

importance of professionalism as a guiding value in her business philosophy. Professional service should be consistent and impartial in its excellence.

The familial and professional models both stress the importance of a greater good, such as the collective success of the salon, over individual goals and successes. There is still opportunity for individual stylists to excel according to their respective interests and abilities, but the salon as an organization assumes greater symbolic importance than in the landlord-tenant salons I visited.

The theme of collaboration for the good of the salon extends to Lynn herself.

Lynn’s decision to employ her staff signifies her willingness to take on additional responsibility for the well-being and to assume the duties of an engaged manager. To

Lynn, if both staff and management are truly collaborating, the employer model works well and is thus normative for her.

Gayle, a former art major and talented artist who owns a salon in an established residential area, had a rather nuanced take on whether it is better to employ staff or have tenants. “If I’d been smarter, I would have employed them outright. I would have made more money that way.” she says. However, she cites the happiness and cooperative spirit of her tenants as evidence that leasing stations can also work well. For her, as for Lynn, the familial metaphor is also operative. Yet unlike Lynn, she has found that the choice to lease stations has not increased tensions, but mostly obviated them. The concerns expressed by Lynn about individual competition did not seem to exist for Gayle, or at least not to any significant degree.

Gloria, who operates out of a historic building in a historic neighborhood, says she will hire recently licensed cosmetologists on commission, but prefers to lease station

space. Happiness was a concern for her as well. Gloria was the first to bring up the freedom of product choice as a major benefit of the landlord-tenant model. It does not matter whether she agrees with a tenant’s choice of hair products, as long as the work looks good and the tenant’s reputation reflects favorably on the salon. Additionally, since each tenant must order his or her own supplies, Gloria can focus more of her time and energy doing what she likes best: cutting hair.

Like Gayle, Gloria emphasized the importance of attitude in the workplace. If the cosmetologists come into work ready to do business, it makes for a more pleasant work environment. Whereas Lynn framed the ideal of the harmonious workplace in terms of the family, with herself in charge, and thus responsible for the greater good of the salon,

Gayle and Gloria postulate a more collegial model, in which each stylist has the autonomy, authority and responsibility to make a positive contribution to the overall work environment.

Alice opened a salon because she and her colleagues needed a place to work after their former workplace changed hands. Alice leases space to her former colleagues, many of whom have been with her for over two decades. Alice’s reason to choose booth rental as a remunerative framework reflect the conditions under which she became a business owner; she did not want to become “boss” to her colleagues. Therefore she says,

“Basically I was forced into it.” When the salon where she and her co-workers were working got sold, they all faced a dilemma. She explained, “So, we either had to go to work for somebody else, or one of us had to open up a place. Two of us had had a place before, and neither (of them) wanted to do it again.”

Alice and her husband decided to resolve the dilemma by opening a salon nearby.

However, it was not easy. Even though she had acted as manager in her former place, where she “did everything but pay the bills,” ownership brought added responsibilities.

Alice recalls, “I shook in my shoes the whole first year.” She applied her management experience and accounting skills, reinvested her earnings in the business, and created a clean, spacious friendly salon. She relied on the rental income for recurring monthly expenses but relied on her earnings for personal income.

Alice acknowledged that high end salons might benefit from more direct management, including the direct employment of staff. She also noted that this was the norm in chain salons as well. However, for a “straight middle-class” salon such as hers it was not necessarily better. Of her core customer demographic, she said, “Location is number one, and once they find a hairdresser who can communicate with them, they’re loyal forever.”

When I asked Alice about the seminar speaker who passed around the anti-booth rental petition, she disagreed with his rationale:

The guy’s an idiot, because you have no responsibility other than power and

water. You do not have to deal with their [the tenant’s] customers. It’s just a

whole lot less work for the owner. It’s easy income, if you want to put it bluntly.

For Alice, catering to her “bread and butter” clients means having the autonomy and discretion to know what they like and adjusting her business model accordingly. Each hairdresser in Alice’s salon has a personal responsibility for learning what makes their clients happy and providing it. She clearly wants the option of landlord-tenant salon

ownership to remain open to her. Concluding this interview was the following brief exchange that reinforces this desire:

Tom: Happy?

Alice; Absolutely!

Tom: Why?

Alice: I answer to no-one but the tax-man. You’re free to do your own thing. I get

to choose my own products and set my own hours.

Despite years of secretarial, accounting and management experience, Alice has chosen a collegial model that happened to involve becoming a landlord. Also, like Gayle and Gloria, Alice comes close to eschewing a managerial role beyond that of a colleague and landlord.

Nora does not employ the cosmetologists in her sleek, modern downtown salon, and she does not rent booths either. She actually rents private rooms, thus giving her tenants and their clients more privacy than most salon situations allow.

Nora is also different in that she’s a skin care-specialist. She is licensed as both an esthetician and a salon owner by the state. That makes her no less astute in evaluating the products and services her salon offers. If anything, Nora looks to attract the best tenants, and seeks professionalism in her landlord-tenant dealings. For her, it is important that her tenants enjoy their work. Her experience with booth renters suggests that many booth renters value autonomy such that it motivates many of them to learn and follow what might be considered “best practices” such as frequent regular continuing education and training, strong customer service orientation and the willingness to work hard:

Nora: Three-fifths of the stylists (the good ones) that I know were booth renters.

They were more educated, motivated, and able to attend continuing education.

Some may not have been booth renters, but they were motivated too. I gravitate

toward those who are motivated; I tend not to go to those who don’t educate

themselves. I think it’s crazy that someone would want to ban booth rental; I

don’t see the justification.

Nora also found that the state regulations seemed to ensure that the public good was sufficiently protected but that banning booth rental would not increase protection significantly.

Guy, a retired salon owner, worked alongside Lucia, an up-and-coming hairdresser in a commission salon. Guy has befriended and mentored Lucia since they began working together. When they decided that they could not go on working in the same place, Lucia decided to open her own place. In exchange for a favorable rental agreement and assistance in running the salon, Guy is Lucia’s tenant. In this case, once again, the landlord—tenant model appears to have carried fewer connotations of hierarchy than a direct-employment model.

In the above cases, the cohesiveness of the salon as a social and economic unit was important to each of the salon owners involved, regardless of whether the owners employed staff or leased to tenants. In a field of work known for its emotional and technical demands, good rapport between colleagues becomes an important strategy for financial and emotional survival.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSIONS

I entered into this research project with the perspective of a hairdresser who wanted to learn how culture mediated the workplace of beauty salons and the beauty industry in which they function. I have found that culture mediates the work of hairdressers not only in direct ways such as changes in fashion, technology and larger trends of consumer culture, but in less direct, yet very profound ways. The relationship between economics and law was one I had anticipated in principle, but not in actuality.

Laws reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the actors involved as well as empirical factors.

The interpretation of facts influences cultural beliefs and attitudes and ultimately may find expression in law if part of a larger pattern of shared values.

When groups compete for limited resources, one strategy is to find means of excluding or limiting access to desired commodities. In hairdressing, as in all trades, revenue sources are finite and valued; they are worth competing for. Attitudes concerning when, how or whether to regulate a line of work vary greatly within and between academic disciplines. Actors within the fields of law, biology and economics influence public attitudes. They shape what many of us believe about the public good, the worth of a service, or whether a special degree or license is necessary to work in a given trade.

Of all arguments for and against regulation of trade, Barron’s criteria operate most powerfully, for the research questions they call forth can be applied to any line of 86

work. By testing the applicability of the natural monopoly criterion, it becomes clear that there is little to gain in having the state exert unbounded regulatory power, much less allowing licensure boards unlimited self-regulatory power. There would be, if anything, negative savings to the average consumer.

With the criterion of the law of “no second chance,” on the other hand, it is clear that state police power can serve the public good by banning the use of chemical compounds that endanger public well-being. The average consumer cannot be expected to know whether a nail product is safe or not, for instance. In an age in which information and misinformation travel rapidly through television, radio and the Internet, there is also considerable public support for some regulation.

Additionally, the visibility of most heads of hair in the U.S. means that a mishap that causes damage or hair loss, even temporarily, can negatively affect self-image, and worse the perceptions of others regarding a person with an inadvertently unkempt image.

The risk for more serious skin, hair and eye damage from certain chemicals such as sodium and calcium hydroxide are even more cause for a degree of regulation and a licensure standard.

The debate over booth rental in hair salons emerges from many concerns. What

Beauty Shop, Steel Magnolias, and the considerable literature have illustrated is the difficulty in negotiating working conditions in what has been historically an artisanal field. Cosmetologists have been variously described as artists, craftsmen, and professionals, but the most inclusive term, and most true to the larger history of hairdressing as a profession is “artisan.” So, you may ask what exactly is an artisan, and what defines a line of work as artisanal?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an artisan as “1: a worker who practices a trade or handicraft: craftsperson 2: one that produces something (as cheese or wine) in limited quantities often using traditional methods” (Merriam Webster’s Online 1993a). It is a broad definition, but if an artisan is a skilled laborer who owns at least some of the means of his or her own production and also materially participates in his or her respective trade (Zdatny 1990), then barbers, hairdressers, cobblers, blacksmiths and weavers all fit this definition.

This definition definitely applies to hairdressers; they are trained workers, and they cannot mass produce hairstyles on an industrial scale. Hairdressing has often been treated as a licensed trade historically, and the socio-economic status of paid hairdressers is also typical of those who work in the trades and crafts; they are often at the lower edges of the middle class. Their attempts to negotiate a more favorable place in exchanges with their clients can go from the nearly futile, as appears to be the case for

Debra Gimlin’s informants, to a gentler inequality such as Furman (1997), Weitz (2005) and Lawson (2003) observed, to something more confrontational, if always gloved within a discourse of high-touch caring and secret knowledge (Jacobs-Huey 1993b, 2003, 2007;

Kang 2003).

The cosmetologists I spoke with cared about their financial well-being, and thought of themselves as small businesspeople, but they sometimes chose autonomy and a sense of safety and continuity over profitability. When law professor Peter Schuck

(1980) questions a commonly-held argument that professional licensure often has greed at its root, he arrives at a theme that is commonly linked to that of autonomy: the value of feeling safe, that is, to be left in peace.

This aspect of professional autonomy is perhaps the strongest factor behind the success of booth rental and may explain why banning it has done so little to change the face of the occupation in the two states that have pursued the ban.

While Schuck emphasizes resistance to change stemming from either traditionalism or sloth, I do not believe that Schuck’s model extends to hairdressers in quite the same way. It can and does explain the behaviors of many hairdressers and of workers in many other licensed occupations. As a consumer of a wide array of goods and services, I have met my share of people who have done their jobs the same way for years, and they do not mind the monotony one bit. Certainly most regulations allow workers to stay put up to an extent, unless the public good demands that members of a regulated trade or profession periodically upgrade or review their knowledge and skills.

However, the theme of “stability is good” finds other expressions in hairdressing practice. Tenant cosmetologists and their landlords do attend trade shows and require authorization from nobody when they wish to sample a new product line, learn a new service, or purchase a new piece of equipment. As sole proprietors or corporations, they can choose how and what to change in their respective enterprises and when to do it.

Even though many may feel constrained against exercising this freedom too widely, I can attest personally that it is empowering to have the choice. Instead of being a license to stagnate, autonomy can alternately provide an added measure of safety against unwanted or unneeded change, and permit cosmetologists to identify with their work more intimately than when they are working under an employer’s directives.

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100

APPENDIXES

101

Appendix A

Informed Consent Form

102

INFORMED CONSENT FORM

Title of Research: Professional and Personal Identity Themes Influencing the Future of Booth Rentals and Independent Cosmetologist Autonomy

I. Federal and university regulations require us to obtain signed consent for participation in research involving human participants. After reading and understanding the statements in sections II through IV, please indicate your consent by signing and dating this form.

II. Statement of Procedure: Thank you for your interest in this student research project being conducted by graduate students and staff at the University of West Florida. The research being conducted at this stage consists of a series of questions related to cosmetology and some of the issues that relate to the regulation and practice of cosmetology. In particular, this study studies beliefs and attitudes of cosmetologists about what their profession is to them, and what they think it should be. Topics include regulation, booth rental, and continuing education requirements. You will find a summary of the major aspects, along with descriptions of the risks and benefits of participation the following sections. If you wish to participate in this study, please indicate your consent by signing your name and writing the date. Any information you provide will be kept in strict confidence. If you have any questions or concerns about the project, please contact Dr. Robert Philen or Dr. Terry Prewitt in the Department of Anthropology at the University of West Florida at (850) 474-2797, or email me at [email protected].

I understand that: (1) I will be asked about my employment status including the way that I get paid for the work I do. (2) I will be asked about any education and training that relates to performance of job duties. (3) I will be asked my opinions about certain aspects of the salon workplace, my own and also in general. Some of these topics are controversial, and therefore my answers will be kept confidential. (4) If an answer is self-incriminating, I have the right to refuse the question. (5) Interviews will take between 30 and 60 minutes, but will generally take about 45 minutes. (6) This research will be seen in its original form by the investigator. The final results of the project may be published by the University of West Florida for academic and research purposes. (7) My identity will be kept in confidence in the written reports and any published material, in order to protect my privacy. (8) I may discontinue this study at any time without penalty. 103

III. Potential Risks of the Study: (1) If you confess to any illegal behavior during the interview, the confidentiality of such information cannot be guaranteed by law. (2) In the event of publication, your words may be recognizable to others. However, protection of your identity makes this risk extremely low.

IV. Potential Benefits of the Study: (1) Information gathered from this study may be helpful to present and future cosmetology salon owners in developing their business plans. (2) Information from this study may help both salon owners and operators to reflect on what matters most in the workplace, and what makes a workplace ideal. (3) The study offers a chance for active cosmetologists to offer their thoughts on issues pertaining to work life.

V. Statement of Consent: I certify that I have read and fully understand the Statement of Procedure given above and consent to participate in the research project described therein. I give this consent freely, without coercion or undue influence. I understand that I may discontinue participation in this survey at any time without penalty or loss of any benefit to which I may otherwise be entitled. I will be provided a copy of this consent form for my records.

______

Participant’s Name (Please Print)

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Participant’s Signature Date

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Appendix B

Narrative Interview Prompts

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Tomas J. Lopez University of West Florida Department of Anthropology September 7, 2007

Narrative Interview Prompts

Note to informant:

I want to tell you about a couple of incidents that have happened to me that really made me think about where the cosmetology profession is headed. I’m going to tell you one of these incidents, and I’d like you to respond to it, that is, to tell me what you make of it.

1st incident: I went to a hair show a few years ago. I went to a lot of business seminars. I found one to be especially interesting. When I learned that the presenter of this particular seminar would be presenting an in-depth workshop the next day, I signed up. I wanted to learn more about running a business from this expert’s point of view, because I thought that this successful salon owner had some valuable knowledge to share. I paid the money, I showed up, and listened to his opening presentation. Within an hour or so, he produced this petition, passed it around the room, and requested that everybody sign it. He said that it was important to back petitions like this, because they protected true professional hairdressers. It was a petition to outlaw booth rental. What do you make of this event?

2nd incident: I met a lovely couple that was part of an exclusive hairdressing guild in the elevator of a hotel where I was staying for a weekend getaway. I found out that they were in town in guild business. I learned about their business and divulged that I rented a chair at my workplace. The couple warned that I should not announce that to people in their guild, for they looked down on the practice of booth rental. They said it was considered unprofessional, and undercut the mission of groups such as theirs that were trying to improve the status, wealth and image of hairdressers everywhere. “We believe that going to the salon should be exactly like going to the doctor; we are professionals.” Please respond to this story.

3rd incident: In the same workshop, the same expert stated that no applicant to his salon ever cut hair according to his standards; they all required retraining in the proper method. Later, he stated that cutting hair was the easy part of the business. What do you make of this? Is cutting hair the easy part of cosmetology?

Thank you for your time and providing your perspective on these questions.

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Appendix C

IRB Approval Form

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