Beneath their neat exterior, the “white collars of commerce” often receive irregular incomes. In her book, Lise Bernard looks more specifically at how real estate agents deal with this financial uncertainty with varying degrees of success.
How does income insecurity shape the daily lives and recruitment of a section of the “middle classes” (p. 22): the “white-collar workers of commerce” (p. 17)? This question provides the framework for White-collar job insecuritythe product of a survey of real estate agents in France in the mid-2000s. From brokers to press officers to restaurant waiters, the broad category of white-collar workers in commerce proposed by Lise Bernard brings together workers, whether self-employed or employees, whose activities, in addition to putting them in contact with customers, place the construction of their remuneration at their heart: if these activities only require a small amount of professional assets, they provide irregular, but possibly high, income.
In the majority of cases (p. 74), the income of a real estate agent depends on the apartment sales in which he participates. The distance between the repetition of “months at zero”, which can lead to a cessation of activity, and obtaining comfortable income, which conversely encourages the continuation of activity, is only due to the conclusion of a few deals. The notion of “white-collar precariousness” thus encompasses the “indeterminacy of the future” (p. 13) of these commercial workers and the “neat appearance” (p. 14) that their precariousness displays, due to the autonomy they enjoy as well as the high incomes that they receive, for some, and hope, for many.
L. Bernard finely analyzes the workings of this quest for income by showing how it establishes the daily activities of real estate agents and innervates their relationship with the social world. To account for the varied outcomes of this quest, the book places the focus on the agents’ unequal dispositions to trade.
The daily life of a “lucrative logic”
Fifteen months (spread over almost three years) of participant observation within a Parisian agency provided L. Bernard with rich and rare material to describe the commercial work of real estate agents and the relationships in which it is embedded.
The book shows that obtaining mandates (i.e. the agreement received from homeowners to market their properties) is based on repeated canvassing and the long-term construction of an extensive network of relationships, including both owners and “informants”, such as concierges and shopkeepers, who are quick to inform when a property is put up for sale. To find a buyer once the mandate has been obtained, real estate agents select potential buyers based on their financial capacity – priority is given in particular to buyers who are already homeowners elsewhere – and their “motivation” (p. 120) to buy – those who are hesitant are screened out based on a series of questions passed between agents or learned during training organized by agency networks. L. Bernard emphasizes that a major challenge for agents is to keep their commission when estimating properties as well as during negotiations with the owner and the buyer once a match has been initiated, two activities which contribute to defining housing prices.
The turnover achieved by each person is described in this respect as a daily concern, maintained by different mechanisms, as much as a “mode of relations within the agencies” (p. 135): the negotiators engage in fierce competition for the capture of commissions to the detriment of their colleagues, despite the injunctions to work together formulated by the agency directors.
More broadly, the book shows how a “lucrative logic” (p. 18) structures the experience of the social world of real estate agents. The varied relationships to independence, in contrast to stable employment, are thus based for some of the respondents on the valuation of uncertain income, and for others on the fear of this uncertainty. The “prestige” (p. 250) conferred on certain consumption practices similarly attests to an attention to money, its possession and its lack. The large expenditure on clothing that agents are encouraged to consent to also support the neat appearance of a precarious condition.
Provisions for trade
How can we explain the more or less happy outcomes of this shared quest for remuneration? Faced with the disparity in income received and the frequent changes to other activities after a few months or years, maintaining a career as a real estate agent is one of the enigmas that the book aims to shed light on. Noting that agency directors “give a fair number of individuals a chance” (p. 163), L. Bernard sees this as an opportunity given to the “neophyte (to show) whether or not he has the necessary skills to succeed in earning a living in the profession” (p. 163).
The book then finely analyzes these ways of being that prove useful for occupying an intermediary position on real estate transaction markets and that find roots in the agents’ trajectories. Two sets of behaviors are distinguished: “aplomb” (p. 163) — the ability to maintain and bring the interaction to a successful conclusion in the desired direction despite the resistance of the interlocutor — and the ability to gain the “trust of the client” (p. 193). It is his proximity to the “world of commerce” (p. 171) that accounts for the aplomb of Guillaume Saunier, the central case of the book, a graduate of a BTS commercial action and whose father-in-law was a business manager. In addition to these trajectories of socialization in commerce, the book emphasizes the advantage provided by coming from privileged backgrounds or having attended higher education in order to master both the language and the tastes and expectations of the clientele of the agency studied. In contrast, a low return on investment with this clientele is attributed in particular to the “linguistic skills of young people from working-class neighborhoods” (p. 208) working as an agent.
In doing so, White-collar job insecurity sheds light, based on the case of real estate agents, on certain social anchors of commercial practices. By approaching the workers studied from generic variables of origin and social position, the work applies to the ethnographic cases the perspective suggested by the statistical data from which real estate agents are described in terms of distribution by sex, age, diploma, income, father’s profession and marital alliance. By this choice of focus, L. Bernard relegates to the background other possible anchors of commercial practices. This is the case for the forms of organization and collective claims of real estate agents, the mechanisms for building careers or even the moments of acquisition of knowledge relating to real estate transactions. Taking into account these classic objects of the sociology of professions would provide support to consolidate the description of the ways of dealing with the imperative of constructing one’s income, that of the power relations between agents, or that of the contexts where the shared categories of perception of the social world exposed in the work mature. In short, this would allow us to better account for the “professional dimension” of the object, a dimension whose conclusion calls for a better understanding in a renovated sociology of social stratification (p. 294).
Beyond this suggestion for further study, let us note that the stimulating proposal to include the study of real estate agents in a sociology of socio-professional structures in contemporary France is weakened in places by the fact that its conceptual tools are left implicit. This concerns central notions of reasoning, such as that of “high background”, a euphemism rarely encountered in sociology applied here to income as well as to qualifications and socio-professional categories, and other more common ones such as that of “disposition”, which is the subject of a literature as dense as it is varied, that of “uncertainty” of income, a notion that is recurrent here and to which in-depth developments have been offered in particular in the study of artistic work, or those of “social esteem” and “prestige”.
These avenues of discussion echo the ambition that drives the work: to place real estate agents in large structures to understand their practices and to approach, from the description of these practices, a heterogeneous and growing group, the “white collars of commerce”. The great interest of the survey is to underline how the irregularity of income structures the daily life of workers and is more or less successfully part of their social trajectory. More broadly, L. Bernard indicates in the background the interest of revising and completing the tools for analyzing socio-professional dynamics to understand a mixed set of work situations, commerce, hitherto studied with other lenses.