Sales floor trajectories

This article considers experiences of social change and downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large, state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions. Sales clerks did so by calling forth the waning symbolic capital of state socialism and translating it into a form of postsocialist, working-class nostalgia. In an effort to appeal to a downwardly-mobile, working-class clientele in a reconfigured marketplace, sales clerks simultaneously traced the downward social trajectory of China’s diminished urban proletariat.