Eli R Wilson

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of New Mexico

Tips constitute a growing form of income for roughly three million American workers today. While existing scholarship on tipping focuses on worker‐customer dynamics, it neglects the implications of gratuities beyond the service counter. Drawing on the case of restaurant workers in Los Angeles, this study analyzes tip work, the bundle of social rela...

Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view. In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson show...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Having or “finding” passion for work has become an increasingly common cultural logic of work today, one that workers use to justify career choices and managers use to make hiring decisions. However, scholars have yet to articulate how workers enact this cultural logic of work in ways that may ultimately contribute to social inequality in modern wo...

A growing number of workers today are drawn to jobs that offer symbolic and cultural rewards but not necessarily stable employment or livable wages. Existing literature posits the exploitative nature of this labor arrangement, where workers must weigh the 'cool' aspects of their jobs against other less desirable aspects. Yet what happens when both...

Unpacks the problems and privileges of pursuing a career of passion by exploring work inside craft breweries. As workers attempt new modes of employment in the era of the Great Resignation, they face a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and stubbornly unequal. With Handcrafted Careers, sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson dives headfirs...

What do work career dynamics in contemporary labor settings tell us about how racism operates in ways that go beyond the explicitly exclusionary actions of management? Building on theories of racialized organizations, this research offers a ground-level examination of the career pathways of craft beer workers in the United States. Drawing on 107 in...

Drawing on research on chefs and aspiring chefs in commercial kitchens, this article typologises workers’ strategic responses to violence and illustrates how these responses are shaped by occupational status and work experience, as well as industry structures. While previous scholarship indicates that workers actively avoid or resist violence in th...

To critical observers, the growth and professionalization of the US craft beer industry over the last few decades has meant the expansion of yet another kind of workplace replete with standards of whiteness and masculinity. Yet the first-hand experiences of workers in this setting-one that values authenticity and features growing support for social...

Research shows that people who face stigmatized work identities attempt to reconfigure their employment more positively, such as by concealing their involvement with their jobs or reframing the value of it. Yet, in an era of rising nonstandard work, how might managing work identities also involve managing multiple jobs across fluid employment conte...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object...

Recent scholarship on ethnoracial identity formation documents the growth of panethnic and regionalised identities in the United States, which individuals express in response to both external racialisation processes as well as meta-group identity assertions by multiple ethnic groups. Yet how are panethnic identities shaped by organisational context...

This chapter compares instances of worker mobility and marginalization in the workplace. Wilson examines the mechanisms by which some Latino workers have been able to access better-quality jobs while others have not. Specifically, he argues that later-generation Latinos leverage their “in-betweenness” to gain more prominent roles in a socially and...

This chapter turns to the back of the house, where many first- and second-generation Latino workers work long hours that they view with a complex mixture of loyalty to mentors, masculinity, and an ethos of craftsmanship. While back-of-the-house and support workers endure more structurally marginalized work conditions than their front-of-the-house c...

This chapter shows how management structures a socially divided workplace from the back office. Chefs and dining room supervisors at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood channel workers into distinct types of service jobs based on socially coded ideals, and subject each group of workers to divergent supervisory practices. I argue that management’s...

The conclusion summarizes the key arguments of this book while also emphasizing the key theoretical advances that it makes related to the production of service brands, racialized group boundaries, and in-betweenness. Additionally, Wilson describes several emerging trends in the restaurant industry, such as the movement to eliminate tips, that will...

This chapter brings readers further into the workplace by examining how coworker dynamics reinforce the extant social organization of higher-end restaurants, and ultimately how workers themselves understand their differences. The author details how educated white servers and working-class Latino cooks enact symbolic boundaries against the other tha...

This chapter examines the respective worlds of work in the front and back of the house through the perspectives of those who inhabit each space. Engendered by divergent social memberships and structurally unequal job conditions, the two asymmetrical work cultures in restaurants are explicated in this chapter. Wilson describes how many of the men an...

book review

Tips now constitute a prominent earning stream for over five million U.S. workers, a number that has steadily increased over the past few decades. While the bulk of scholarship on tipping focuses on the factors that affect tipping behavior in customer service transactions, many other workers are employed in tipped workplaces but do not personally r...

This study examines how Japanese and Chinese American workers enact "Local" identity in a white-collar workplace in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Based on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research, I find that this process of group boundary-making fosters a sense of solidarity and shared cultural connection among workers while also reinforce existing divi...

The unstable, even precarious labor conditions of many frontline service jobs in the United States should render them undesirable to upwardly mobile young workers. Yet for many, these types of jobs complement, rather than infringe upon, their broader lifestyles. Drawing on six years of ethnographic research in upscale Los Angeles restaurants, I sho...

Restaurants and other interactive service workplaces in the United States serve as labor niches for two very different kinds of workers doing different tasks. Immigrant Latinos primarily work “back-of-the-house” jobs doing manual tasks, while class-privileged whites work “front-of-the-house” jobs performing customer-facing tasks. How do these socia...

Awareness, anticipation, physical conditioning . . . these are just some of the qualities a goaltender needs to bring onto the ice at game time. Excellence requires practice, consistency, and understanding—of the position, the situation, and your talents. No one knows this better than Eli Wilson does. Widely recognized as the leading authority on g...

The disproportionate number of Latinos employed in unskilled US service industries appears to exemplify the bleak labour market prospects and inter-generational immobility facing this population. Yet as the children of immigrants enter “bad” service and retail jobs alongside the first generation, how might they be faring differently? Drawing on ove...

In high-end interactive service work settings, asymmetries between workers and customers are typically reflected in the service interaction. Workers must carefully control their emotional and aesthetic displays towards customers by relying on protocol provided by management. Customers, in turn, need not reciprocate such acts. By contrast, this pape...