Abstract
Online reviews of hotels are important for the business reputation. This paper discusses how “the guests’ comments” influence on labor of Japanese female workers at hotels in Malaysia by referring to the triangular relationship of the labor process in interactive service work. In this study, I quantitatively analyzed the text of online reviews of three hotels in Malaysia, then compared the analysis with the interviews of the Japanese staff of the hotels to examine how their labor in interactive service work is related to those reviews. I argue that “the guests’ comments” intensify their labor because the management demands that their staff be attentive to the reviews. The paper illuminates while the management is relying on the guests’ contributions for free to build their reputation in the internet, those customer-generated contents precisely intensify the labor of the workers on-site to meet the expectations of Japanese customers.
