UC Irvine

For generations, Disneyland has occupied a distinctive place in American culture, attracting workers known as “cast members” who often enter employment enchanted by Disney. These cast members arrive from different social backgrounds, carrying different expectations for their work and levels of emotional attachment to Disney. This raises a puzzle: Why do workers from different social backgrounds come to want the same entry-level service job at Disney, yet experience and respond to it so differently? Using Disneyland Resort as a case of the experience economy, this dissertation asks how socioeconomic inequality is reproduced and contested in the workplace and how workers’ socioeconomic conditions shape the processes through which they experience, interpret, and respond to entry-level service work. This dissertation draws on 55 semi-structured interviews with current and former Disneyland cast members conducted between 2021 and 2024, including 20 entertainment workers, alongside participant observation and archival research. I focus on workers who entered Disney employment during early adulthood. First, I examine how workers’ social backgrounds and early life experiences shaped the expectations they carried into Disney employment. Second, I show how workers’ expectations and attachment to Disney were related to how they interpreted workplace experiences that challenged those expectations. Third, I explain how entertainment workers responded to dissatisfaction and why collective action succeeded in 2024 after earlier organizing efforts had failed. The analysis shows that socioeconomic inequality can be reproduced across the employment relationship. This occurs through the interaction between workplace conditions and the socially patterned expectations, attachments, and resources workers bring into employment. Among Disneyland entertainment workers, accumulated dissatisfaction became the basis for successful collective action when workers developed the internal capacity to organize, gained support from the broader labor movement, and did so during an unprecedented period of labor activism and worker organizing. Understanding workers’ responses to dissatisfaction therefore requires examining not only the choices available to them but also the opportunities and constraints that structure those choices.