Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work
Abstract
Kitchens takes us into the robust, overheated, backstage world of the contemporary restaurant. In this rich, often surprising portrait of the real lives of kitchen workers, Gary Alan Fine brings their experiences, challenges, and satisfactions to colorful life. A new preface updates this riveting exploration of how restaurants actually work, both individually and as part of a larger culinary culture.
... From this point of view, flexibility is not primarily a matter of individual choice but rather a matter of how social and temporal factors configure the lives of the users. The temporal dimensions that create these societal social rhythms are tempo, duration, sequencing, synchronicity, and periodicity (Fine, 1996). ...
... Tempo refers to the pacing of an activity, whereas duration describes its length (e.g., minutes, hours, days) (Adam, 2000;Fine, 1996;Southerton, 2006). Sequence pertains to the order in which activities must take place. ...
... Synchronicity describes whether the activity is dependent on other parallel activities, and whether it requires the cooperation and presence of other people (Blue et al., 2020;Southerton, 2006;Walker, 2014). Lastly, periodicity pertains to the intervals at which the activity occurs, whether daily, weekly, or monthly (Blue et al., 2020;Fine, 1996;Walker, 2014). It is the configuration of these intricate connections that ultimately decides the extent to which activities are flexible (Blue, 2018). ...
The pending ecological crisis has ushered in a need to rethink how electricity is produced and consumed, which in turn will require new ways of maintaining system balance. One solution that has gained traction over the past decade is the idea of user flexibility. User flexibility is by some deemed integral to the transition towards a low-carbon society and to the decarbonization agenda, and its integration is commonly motivated by economic, systemic, and environmental arguments. However, user flexibility has also received critique for potentially contributing to energy injustices, and the way in which user flexibility will be implemented may or may not result in an unjust energy transition.
This thesis aims to understand the potential energy justice pitfalls of user flexibility by looking at the ways in which it affects certain aspects of everyday life. This is done in part by a conceptualization that draws on existing literature for understanding flexibility capacity, but also by adding empirical rigour to the understanding of how user flexibility affects certain aspects of everyday life as well as how various stakeholders (public news media, industry experts, electric vehicle users) characterize key themes associated with user flexibility.
This thesis applies the concept of flexibility capital as a theoretical framework for analysis, which is a concept that understands the capacity to be flexible in the use of electricity as the outcome of a set of material, social, and temporal factors. Overall, the findings display a discrepancy between how user flexibility is characterized publicly (by the media, industry experts, and electric vehicle users) and how it is characterized by the energy justice literature. User flexibility is commonly associated with decarbonization and sustainability in the media, and industry experts and electric vehicle owners tend to characterize user flexibility as a means of increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix, a more economical option for building new infrastructure, a means of facilitating more efficient uses of the existing infrastructure and for balancing the system, and a more democratic form of electricity consumption. Concurrently, analysing user flexibility from an energy justice perspective, this thesis identifies several potential energy justice implications. User flexibility based on market principles may cause 1) an unequal redistribution of wealth, 2) a redistribution of economic responsibility to the end- users, 3) unequal terms of participation, 4) already affluent users to benefit, 5) increased complexity in a manner that is particularly disadvantageous for non-involved users, and 6) diluted transparency and accountability. The gap between the depiction of user flexibility among stakeholders vis-à-vis the scientific literature on energy justice provides further evidence for how energy policies are primarily informed by economics and technology.
In conclusion, the findings of this thesis showcase the need for integrating more social perspectives in energy policy in order to avoid potential energy justice pitfalls. The findings also underline the benefits of exploring non-financial and non-market-based incentives for facilitating user flexibility.
... It is documented that women must navigate sexual objectification and the consequences of the incessant male gaze (Szymanski & Feltman, 2014) and that people of colour often find themselves battling systemic industry-imposed barriers which segregate the workforce and impose hierarchical structures and inequality amongst wage-earning staff members (Revelle & Wilson, 2020). Wage-earning restaurant staff members work under heavy constraints and feel an immense lack of autonomy which often leads to occupational dissatisfaction (Fine, 2008). Employees often work long and ambiguous hours during both weekends and holidays while others are out engaging in enjoyable activities (Fine, 2008). ...
... Wage-earning restaurant staff members work under heavy constraints and feel an immense lack of autonomy which often leads to occupational dissatisfaction (Fine, 2008). Employees often work long and ambiguous hours during both weekends and holidays while others are out engaging in enjoyable activities (Fine, 2008). It is extremely common for restaurant workers to sacrifice time with friends, family, and their community for the sake of their occupation (Fine, 2008). ...
... Employees often work long and ambiguous hours during both weekends and holidays while others are out engaging in enjoyable activities (Fine, 2008). It is extremely common for restaurant workers to sacrifice time with friends, family, and their community for the sake of their occupation (Fine, 2008). ...
Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, restauranteurs and wage-earning restaurant staff found themselves positioned as the focus of an immense amount of mainstream media attention. Never has the restaurant industry been the recipient of such frequent and consistent mainstream coverage, yet scholars have yet to critically engage with the available media discourse. This research explores the mainstream media depiction of the restaurant industry and challenges journalistic practices which prioritize the voices and ideological perspectives of those atop the restaurant industry hierarchy. To demonstrate this phenomenon, I engaged in a critical discourse analysis of 55 published online news articles through the theoretical lens proposed by Gayatri Spivak. The sample was examined to demonstrate who was afforded the discursive space to utilize their voice and share their ideological disposition as well as the ways in which the discursive voice found within the sample shaped a representation of wage-earning restaurant staff. The primary findings of this paper reveal that wage-earning restaurant staff, within the selected sample, were discursively silenced and not provided with an adequate opportunity to share their experience of working in a customer-facing position throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Wage-earning restaurant staff were rarely afforded the opportunity to speak, however, they were spoken for. I argue throughout this paper that the voice of wage-earning restaurant staff is discursively crafted by those atop the restaurant industry hierarchy and that this phenomenon serves to validate traditional restaurant industry hierarchical structures and reinforce hegemonic ideological perspectives. This study emphasizes the need for journalists to embrace the theoretical disposition of a standpoint theorist and strive to ensure that members of subordinated populations are not subject to the imposition of an inauthentic voice.
... (p. 6) Dornenburg and Page's (1996) excerpt implies that the controversy of the "artist" label lies in misrepresentation, potentially romanticizing the profession as an elite line of work. Take Fine's (1992Fine's ( , 1996aFine's ( , 1996b ethnographic work on restaurant cooks for example. Fine suggests that the everyday work of a culinarian is nuanced and tensioned in such that while a culinarian may perceive one's work as artistic and potentially aesthetic during certain periods of the day, the trade is also riddled with themes of laboriousness and constraints that hinder the aesthetic from manifesting. ...
... In addition, Lee's (2021b) personal narrative on his identity as a culinarian suggests similar views, implying that the culinary trade is not all artistry alone, but one filled with operational intricacies requiring one to think on one's feet as both a technician and tactician to persevere in a career behind kitchen doors. Fine (1992Fine ( , 1996aFine ( , 1996b and Lee (2021b) echo similar notions to Dornenburg and Page's (1996) assertion, suggesting that although artistry is inherently tied to the profession, the threat of declaring one a culinary artist can in itself generate a romanticized and elitist misrepresentation of the culinary trade. ...
... Take for example, a heated "rush" during operational peak hours, such environments could turn foodmaking into a pressured, and at times, unforgiving experience (Fine, 1990;Gill & Burrow, 2018;Lee & Ruck, 2022). Not to mention, the repetitive nature of culinary prep-work and its inherent mundanities may render one's reach into the aesthetic difficult (Fine, 1992(Fine, , 1996a(Fine, , 1996b. The same can be said to the domestic cook tending to a pot on the stove while listening more attentively to a podcast: one merely executes without perceiving the encounter, as there are neither rhythm nor paucity to reflect, passion nor immersion, immediacy nor absorption in tending to the senses. ...
Tourism and gastronomy scholars often mobilize the term “culinary aesthetics” as a mere metaphorical descriptor paralleling a culinarian's work the likes of painters and sculptors without explaining its theoretical underpinning. In this study, the author turns to John Dewey's theory on art and experience to offer a theory that delineates the aesthetic relation among the culinary artist, culinary artwork, and culinary audience as a world-traveling phenomenon. The author puts forward the idea that when a taster engages with a culinary artwork, one potentially dialogues with the culinary artist's expressive self, hence transforming the culinary encounter into a dialogue of different culinary worlds. In other words, one can world-travel into a world of another when engaging with culinary arts.
... Second, there is an increased recognition that intellectual contributions arise from informal networks and emotional labor which enables the formally acknowledged author to sustain her work. For example, Fine (1996) labels kitchen culture in restaurants as an antecedent that is relatively very influential in determining the success or failure of innovative inputs among employees in such service environments. This analogy extends to academia, where researchers have acquired their knowledge through coaching, peer review, and psychosocial support but are rarely recognized and only featured in thin acknowledgement pages if they are remembered at all (Moser, 2020). ...
... This exacerbates gender, race, and class inequalities, as marginalized groups are more likely to occupy roles that contribute to creative work in unrecognized ways. Fine (1996) outlines the ethical commitment involved in reclaiming emotional and social labor systematically feminized and devalued within the academy, as much as the creative industries do; thus, unveiling already constructed definitions of authorship because they are rooted in practices that avoid offering serious credit to what constitutes a product. It reinforces the hierarchy and observes the privilege of what are highly visible or direct inputs over invisible yet necessary collaboration and support. ...
Aims: The paper tries to rethink and highlight the importance of intangible contributions to authorship, such as idea generation, emotional labor, inspiration, or conceptual input, widening the otherwise narrow traditional boundary that checks authorship in the creative field.
Study Design: Qualitative research using in-depth interviews which was thematically analyzed.
Place and Duration of Study: Conducted in Jamshedpur (Jharkhand, India) over a three-month period (Approx).
Methodology: The study was conducted through in-depth interviews, with 20 participants including authors, researchers, and filmmakers, reached through institutional contacts and LinkedIn. All participants were interviewed via telephone or in a face-to-face manner after ethical clearance. The data collected was manually coded and undergoes thematic analysis and creation of related figures using Adobe InDesign. The qualitative approach was selected to give proper justice to the emotional connotations of creative contribution that might be lost in survey approaches.
Results: Analysis of data exposes a major gap in acknowledging intangible authorship contributions. Some participants indicated that emotional and intellectual support actually constitute one of the heaviest forces behind the creative outputs, though they are rarely acknowledged formally. Failing to recognize such support is reinforcing current hierarchies while avoiding true collaborative engagement.
Conclusion: Existing authorship models mainly recognize visible contributions: Those less visible yet somehow equally important contributions are neglected. Hence this study argues for the expansion of the concept of authorship to embrace inclusivity within academia and the creative field. Acknowledging emotional and conceptual support implies an ethical consciousness that will facilitate the right attribution of intellectual products.
... We look forward to a date we have put on our calendar, imagine the fun we will have playing video games after work, or discuss happy hour with a colleague hours before work ends. This anticipation drives us to prepare because preparation feels good for many people (Fine 1996;Sennett 2008). Let us say the date was for an expensive steak dinner. ...
... Each of these affective motives build a motivational causal chain that sidesteps the necessity or importance of the liking stage, linking wanting and learning together in an often institutionalized process. Consider, for instance, a slew of ethnographies on craftspersons (Ocejo 2017;Sennett 2008), chefs (Fine 1996;Leschziner 2015), chess players (Fine 2015), Olympians (Chambliss 1989), and academics (Merton 1979), each of which underscores the sort of pleasure that pursuit and exhibition of mastery delivers contra extrinsic rewards, such as money or fame. Often, mastery requires or demands discipline of the body and mind, although the two are independent of each other. ...
A central issue in sociology concerns motivation. Generally, sociologists have followed Mills’s lead in emphasizing motive-talk, or post hoc explanations, over the “springs” of action themselves. Drawing from the interdisciplinary science of motivation, this article argues that we can tease motives apart from motive-talk by incorporating the affective disposition to seek into a theory of motivation. Seeking involves three dissociable phases—wanting, liking, and learning—each of which is intrinsically pleasurable. This suggests three things. First, mundane activities related to anticipation or learning are affective in nature. Second, not only does each phase of seeking involve different motives, but also, any given phase contains sequences of activities, likely indicating mixed motives. And third, people commit to routines and roles not because of their habits or automatic cognition but because of the affective urgency and expectation they feel in their bodies. Implications for the sociological literature on pleasure and for a sociology of motivation are discussed.
... Researchers have for some years employed this methodology to build knowledge around gastronomy. Such studies have provided 'insider stories' from varying perspectives (Fine, 1996;Lane, 2014;Leschziner, 2015;Pearlman, 2013). Some have focused on emotional experiences of unrest in the relationships between managers and employees in restaurants (Gatta, 2002) and of the 'occupational stigma' attached to restaurant work (Shigihara, 2018). ...
... Popular media often emphasises the singular, auteur-like brilliance of the head chef and the formation of a house style from one figure operating top down. What TH, JE, and some others (like Tan, 2020) have observed, meanwhile, is something quite different: the creative process seems to involve at least as much bubbling up from multiple idiosyncratic creators working in a quite decentralised process of loosely co-ordinated exploration, compared with the relatively strict hierarchy and rigour of service kitchens (Tan 2020;Fine 1996). This insight, furthermore, was only possible for TH to notice by attending to the specific practices of individual people, and then only after identifying and dismantling the assumption that everyone should be working similarly. ...
... Craftsmanship in the restaurant industry is no exception. The restaurant industry is often viewed as an industry characterised by low requirements of prior knowledge and low wages (Fine [1996(Fine [ ] 20092009;Lainpelto & Lainpelto 2012;Lainpelto 2018). Meal-design performed by waiters is not only for pleasure; it can also have social and political goals, as discussed by Lugosi (2008), who points out that meetings will seldom be arranged without offering food or drink. ...
... Craftsmanship in the restaurant industry is no exception. The restaurant industry is often viewed as an industry characterised by low requirements of prior knowledge and low wages (Fine [1996(Fine [ ] 20092009;Lainpelto & Lainpelto 2012;Lainpelto 2018). Meal-design performed by waiters is not only for pleasure; it can also have social and political goals, as discussed by Lugosi (2008), who points out that meetings will seldom be arranged without offering food or drink. ...
The field of ‘Craft Sciences’ refers to research conducted across and within different craft subjects and academic contexts. This anthology aims to expose the breadth of topics, source material, methods, perspectives, and results that reside in this field, and to explore what unites the research in such diverse contexts as, for example, the arts, conservation, or vocational craft education. The common thread between each of the chapters in the present book is the augmented attention given to methods—the craft research methods—and to the relationship between the field of inquiry and the field of practice. A common feature is that practice plays an instrumental role in the research found within the chapters, and that the researchers in this publication are also practitioners. The authors are researchers but they are also potters, waiters, carpenters, gardeners, textile artists, boat builders, smiths, building conservators, painting restorers, furniture designers, illustrators, and media designers. The researchers contribute from different research fields, like craft education, meal sciences, and conservation crafts, and from particular craft subjects, like boat-building and weaving. The main contribution of this book is that it collects together a number of related case studies and presents a reflection on concepts, perspectives, and methods in the general fields of craft research from the point of view of craft practitioners. It adds to the existing academic discussion of crafts through its wider acknowledgement of craftsmanship and extends its borders and its discourse outside the arts and crafts context. This book provides a platform from which to develop context-appropriate research strategies and to associate with the Craft Sciences beyond the borders of faculties and disciplines.
... The qualitative study funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), 'Participation in Residential Childcare' (project no: 419403819) (Equit, 2024a), investigates how participation and complaints processes of young people in residential care groups are arranged in everyday life, what role the legally mandatory formal participation and complaints procedures take in this, and whether the protection of young people in the facilities is guaranteed through complaints processes, as is currently presupposed, for example, by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN-CRC) and in the implementation of protection concepts in German child welfare. The study analyzed the reconstructed organisational culture for each residential group (Equit et al., 2024;Fine, 1996). Against the background of the definition of organisation by Fine, idiocultures in residential care are defined 'as a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer and that serve as the basis for future interaction' (Fine, 1996, p. 129). ...
... Warde et al., 1999;Warde & Martens, 1998, 2000, and the restaurant workers (eg. Fine, 1996Fine, , 2008Harris & Giuffre, 2010a, 2010bMeriot, 2006). Geographers, on the other hand, have explored the industry through celebrity chefs as well as the discourses around food and celebrity (see, for instance, Barnes, 2017;Bell & Hollows, 2011;Goodman & Barnes, 2011;Slocum et al., 2011). ...
Professional kitchens are both producers and consumers of food and many operate through unsustainable practices which have significant social and ecological impacts. Socially, they are spaces of low paid, high-pressured work, where gendered occupational discrimination is common. Ecologically, food production in these spaces contributes significantly to the demand for unethical meat production and the commodification of nature globally. The main aim of this article is to reimagine professional kitchens as spaces of sustainable and equitable foodwork. To this end, this research combines an empirical analysis of the relation between gender, power, and sustainability in professional kitchens in Glasgow with a theoretical examination of ecofeminist scholarship. In Glasgow, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with both male and female head chefs on the everyday (un)sustainable practices and norms of professional chefs and the ways they intertwine with gender. This research found that kitchens are organised in ways that normalize toxic masculinity , disempower women, and seriously harm non-human others. Furthermore, the absence of ecological literacy in professional
... Sembolik güç ve kimlik siyaseti üzerindeki etkileri düşünüldüğünde ulusu oluşturan bireylerin tüketim alışkanlıkları, yiyecekler ve kültürel geçmişleri, aile ortamları, dini kimlik bağları ve örgütsel kimlik bağları milletçiliğin hayatın her alanında uygulandığının bir göstergesidir (Gabaccia, 1998;DeVault, 1991;Ray, 2004;Fine, 1996;Maurer, 2002). ...
... As Fine argues, 'the ultimate organizational variable is the meaning that the environment has for the organizational member' (Fine 1984, 243). In his book Kitchens that centers the everyday lives and occupational cultures of restaurant workers, Fine (2008) shows that the physical space of kitchens influences workers' experiences, moods, and relationships that develop between cooks, servers, and other restaurant workers such as dishwashers. He argues, 'Every activity is set within a physical space that constrains, channels, or encourages it' (Fine 2008, 80). ...
... Food education involves learning to distinguish and value experiences relating to all the senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch (Fine, 2008). Since these processes entail learning what one finds pleasurable and not, they inherently include aesthetics. ...
Food is a part of everyday life, and formal food education is included in compulsory education in many countries, for example through the subject Home and Consumer Studies (HCS). While food education is often underpinned by public health concerns such as preventing non-communicable diseases and promoting cooking skills, there has been little focus on aesthetic aspects of teaching and learning about food. This study therefore aims to gain understanding of aesthetic values as a part of HCS food educational practices. Aesthetic values are here regarded as socially and culturally shared, and related to notions of pleasure and taste. As this study uses a pragmatist approach, aesthetic values are seen as constituted in encounters, encompassing experiencing individual(s), artifacts, and context. By thematically analyzing empirical data from an exploratory case study, including classroom observations, student focus groups, and teacher interviews, we show how values are constituted as culinary, production, and bodily aesthetics. Culinary aesthetics involved cooking processes, cooking skills, and presentation of food and meals. Production aesthetics involved foods’ origin and degree of pre-processing, whereas bodily aesthetics related to bodily consequences of eating. Aesthetic values were vital features of the educational practices studied and played a key role in bringing the practices forward. They also indicated what counted as valid, or desired, outcomes and thereby steered events in certain directions. The study highlights the significance of aesthetic values and argues in favor of acknowledging aesthetics in planning, undertaking, and evaluating HCS food education.
... Food then is granted new meanings within the social and cultural context where it appears. This is particularly relevant in the reproduction of food at restaurants as these places have become sources for innovation through the introduction of new dishes and presentation of labour intensive yet artistic-oriented cuisine (Fine, 1996;Mennell et al., 1992). ...
... Appreciating the craft of craft work often involves personal investments of time, energy, and resources (Rodgers and Taves 2017). Workers gain this knowledge through interacting with people and institutions that already possess this knowledge: as workers develop their skills and become generally more socialized into the trade, they garner recognition within a larger community (Fine 1996). For these reasons, craft workers tend to be devoted to their work and committed to honing their specialized skills (Bozkurt and Cohen 2019;Sennett 2008). ...
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 workplaces. On the basis of 115 in-depth interviews and two years of ethnographic fieldwork in U.S. craft breweries, the author shows how brewery workers express a heightened relationship to their jobs, which the author calls pure passion, in ways that encompass labor, consumption, and lifestyle practices. Yet because these enactments of pure passion are predicated on privileged social attributes with respect to race, class, and gender, this cultural logic of work ends up reinforcing the dominant position of white, middle-class men in this industry while simultaneously marginalizing the experiences of women and people of color.
... In these "face-to-face" interactions, individuals experience rich sensory and emotional regimes that foster the emergence and sustenance of feelings of togetherness. 1 Zhao (2003, 447) considers this corporeal co-presence: "a form of human colocation in which both individuals are present in-person at their sites as well as in each other's physical proximity." Sociological studies of everyday foodways have also foregrounded co-presence, focusing on corporeal exchanges in kitchens, restaurants, and other dining spaces (Demetry 2013;Fine 1996;Finkelstein 1989). Physical closeness is central to this scholarship, showing how everyday eating across a communal table sustains relationships while also setting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (Douglas 1984;Julier 2013;Kerner et al. 2015). ...
Sociology’s focus on sociality and co-presence has long oriented studies of commensality—the social dimension of eating together. This literature commonly prioritizes face-to-face interactions and takes physical proximity for granted. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 largely halted in-person gatherings and altered everyday foodways. Consequently, many people turned to digital commensality, cooking and eating together through video-call technology such as Zoom and FaceTime. We explore the implications of these new foodways and ask: has digital commensality helped cultivate co-presence amidst pandemic-induced physical separation? If so, how? To address these questions, we analyze two forms of qualitative data collected by the first author: interviews with individuals who cooked and ate together at a distance since March 2020 and digital ethnography during different groups’ online food events (e.g., happy hours, dinners, holiday gatherings, and birthday celebrations). Digital commensality helps foster a sense of co-presence and social connectedness at a distance. Specifically, participants use three temporally oriented strategies to create or maintain co-presence: they draw on pre-pandemic pasts and reinvent culinary traditions to meet new circumstances; they creatively adapt novel digital foodways through online dining; and they actively imagine post-pandemic futures where physically proximate commensality is again possible.
... The environment of restaurant kitchens is harsh and arduous, notably in Michelin-starred restaurants. Additionally, professional kitchens are somewhat competitive and challenging (Fine 2008). The working conditions are demanding, as kitchens are usually hot, dirty, and tiny. ...
Purpose – This paper aims to examine the critical elements for female chefs in overcoming the
glass ceiling in a relevant sector of the hospitality industry: haute cuisine.
Design – It is based on an empirical study. We surveyed 202 cooks and chefs from France, the US
and Spain.
Methodology – The data were analysed using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).
The fsQCA identifies patterns or combinations of causal conditions that lead to an outcome to
evaluate the variety of conditions that produce high career expectations among female professional
chefs.
Approach – Although the status of women in the hospitality industry has received academic
attention, there is still a gap in research on gender discrimination in haute cuisine, specifically
regarding the factors that enable for women’s advancement to chef.
Findings – Six variables were identified that impact female chefs’ career advancement
(entrepreneurial attitude, mentoring, career expectations, workplace environment, skills learned
on the job, and their perception of a glass ceiling). The results show that entrepreneurial attitude
is a critical enabler for the career advancement of female chefs. This factor is moderated by
incumbents’ skills acquired in the workplace, combined with adequate mentoring, which facilitates
the absence of a harsh environment perception by female chefs.
Originality of the research – The theoretical framework developed for this study contributes to the
literature on female entrepreneurship in haute cuisine and its contribution to overcoming gender
barriers to advancement in the sector.
... (1979: 734) Fine has conducted a number of fascinating studies of idiocultures, including those in little league baseball teams (ibid.), fantasy role-playing communities (Fine 2002), meteorologists (Fine 2007) and restaurant workers (Fine 2008). The study on Chicago-based meteorologists, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction (Fine 2007), is especially relevant in the context of this study on climate modelers. ...
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 led to a dramatic increase in energy prices in the United Kingdom. Chefs interviewed in North East England were found already struggling with post-lockdown re-opening, now huge energy bills and food shortages as a result of war, and then the conditions of a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of that year. This article conceptualises these experiences as a crisis of energy: the re-routing of desire through a consumerist system that is open-ended with war and the production of heat – and that is now collapsing. It is argued that the professional kitchen is situated at the intersection of flows of energy – consumer desire, bellicosity, electricity, the logistical kinesis of commodities – that underpin the everyday practices of the chef but that are now organised in a system of unproductive capitalism that is marked by shocks that disrupt those same practices. In response to the strain of crises, this system has a tendency to perpetuate itself through a retrenchment in consumerist homogeneity and an abandonment of the care and attention required for a convivial and sustainable future – for the food service sector or more broadly.
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag diskutiert auf der Grundlage des DFG-Projekts „Partizipation in Organisationskulturen der Heimerziehung“ Einblicke in die Funktionsweisen von Beteiligungs- und Beschwerdeverfahren in stationären Wohngruppen. Es zeigt sich, dass Fachkräfte Handlungsspielräume in der Umsetzung von formalen Beteiligungs- und Beschwerdeverfahren besitzen, sodass letztlich sie es sind, die bestimmen, ob sie formale Beteiligungs- und Beschwerdeverfahren zur Umsetzung der Kinderrechte im Alltag der Adressat_innen nutzen oder aber eine Form von „displaying children’s rights“ betreiben, in der formale Beteiligungs- und Beschwerdeverfahren genutzt werden, um junge Menschen zum Schweigen zu bringen. Die Krise ist hier zweifach verortet: einerseits bei jungen Menschen, deren Rechte in einigen Wohngruppen häufig verletzt werden, während sich die Organisation formal als die Kinderrechte anerkennend ausweist, andererseits bei der Jugendhilfereform und Politiken, die auf formale Konzepte wie Beschwerdeverfahren zur Sicherung der Kinderrechte fokussiert sind.
This study analyzes the methodological implications of organizational ethnography in organizations. It is theoretically assumed that background expectations from a historical approach and methodological proposals of reflexive and interpretive organizational ethnography lead to inferred and providing new analytical tools in contexts for the study of organizational and managerial studies. The method employed in this study is the meta-analytical and reflexive based on the conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature. It is concluded that their organizational ethnography offers new qualitative research tools for the study of managerial and organizational studies.
İş yaşamında bireyler demografik, sosyo-kültürel, fiziksel, psikolojik vb. gibi pek çok nedenlerle alkol tüketimine yönelebilmektedir. İşyerinde aşırı alkol tüketimi iş kazaları, performans kaybı, işe geç gelme ya da gelmeme, sözlü ve/veya fiziksel saldırganlıklar gibi olumsuz birtakım sonuçlar meydana getirmektedir. Bu araştırma aşçıların mutfakta alkol tüketim durumlarını tespit etmek amacıyla gerçekleştirilmiştir. Veri toplamada nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden birisi olan yarı yapılandırılmış görüşme tekniği kullanılmıştır. Araştırmanın evrenini Ankara’da çalışan/çalışmış olan aşçılar oluşturmaktadır. Maksimum çeşitleme ve kartopu örnekleme teknikleriyle dokuz erkek ve altı kadın olmak üzere toplamda 15 katılımcıya ulaşılmıştır. Araştırmadan elde edilen bulgulara göre; katılımcılar, mutfakta alkol tüketiminin bulunduğunu (%38) düşünmektedir. Ancak katılımcılar, %53 oranıyla alkol tüketiminin mutfağın örgüt kültüründe yer almadığını belirmişlerdir. Aşçıların alkol tüketiminde etkili olan ilk nedenin stres faktörü (%18) olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Araştırmada aşçıların demografik özellikleri (%73), dini inanışları (%71) ve kişilik özellikleriyle (%100) alkol tüketimleri arasında bir ilişki olduğunu algıladıkları saptanmıştır. Aynı zamanda stres (%80), mutfağın fiziksel özellikleri (%71), çalışma günleri, saatleri, zaman baskısı, ücret ve benzeri faktörlerle (%86) aşçının alkol tüketimi arasında bir ilişki algılandığı tespit edilmiştir. Alkolün mutfaklarda erişebilir (%72) olmasıyla aşçıların alkol tüketimi arasında bir ilişki algılandığı da saptanmıştır. Tespit edilen bu ilişkilerin aşçıları alkole yönlendirmede etkili olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Mutfakta yaşanılan mobbing ve taciz gibi etkenlerle (%60) aşçıların alkol tüketimi arasında bir ilişki olduğuna yönelik bulgu elde edilmemiştir. Araştırma sonucunda; işletmecilere, aşçılara ve diğer araştırmacılara yönelik çeşitli öneriler geliştirilmiştir. Aşçıların sigara vb. zararlı madde kullanımı üzerine araştırmalar yapılması, alkol tüketen aşçılar psikolojik yardım hizmeti sunulması, mutfak içerisinde alkol tüketen aşçılara ise disiplin cezası verilmesi bu önerilerden birkaçıdır.
This chapter will begin by discussing two precursors of symbolic interactionism, Cooley and Mead. After discussing the role of the Chicago school in field research, the chapter will explore Blumer’s theory and Goffman’s dramaturgical approach.
A section on how to do ethnographic research will help better understand Blumer’s symbolic interactionism and Goffman’s dramaturgic approach. Soon after, the text will examine Banfield’s research on amoral familism at “Montegrano.”
Goffman’s theoretical book, Frame Analysis, and its impact on Snow and Benford’s social movement theory will be investigated.
The last section will be dedicated to Randall Collins. To clarify Collins’s theory, the author will talk about his research on the adrenaline flowing in the bodies of terrorists while they kill their victims in face-to-face interactions
This article is based on four months that I spent working as a chef at an Israeli restaurant in London. I first explore how restaurants craft nationalist narratives through food and then interrogate the political consequences of those narratives. My argument unfolds over the course of a meal, in which each dish comes to represent different aspects of Israeli identity. Each section begins with the “script” that chefs and waiters recite as they present dishes to diners. This article explores the curiosities and silences embedded in the restaurant’s de-politicized version of Israeli identity based on a fantasy of the country that erases war and the occupation of the Palestinian people from the narrative. I argue that there is a harm by omission to this recasting of Israeli history and current reality on the ground, and expose how food, specifically in highly stylized restaurants, can be used to create national narratives, particularly in diaspora.
Bu çalışma 6 Şubat 2023’te 10 farklı ilde gerçekleşen büyük depremin ilk haftasında Hatay’ın Belen ilçesinde kurulmuş sahra mutfağında, 4-11 Mart 2023 tarihleri arasında gönüllü olarak katılımcı olduğum saha verilerine dayanmaktadır. Doğal ya da doğal olmayan afetlerde, kriz durumlarında arama kurtarma faaliyetlerinden sonra ilk ortaya çıkan ihtiyaç sağlık ve beslenmeye ilişkindir. Sahra hastaneleri kadar sahra mutfakları da afet sonrası kriz durumlarında hayati öneme sahiptir. İşte bu nedenle deprem sonrası ilk birkaç gün içinde gerek hazır gerekse sahada üretilmiş gıda temini oldukça kritiktir. Deprem felaketinde yaşanan ulaşım, altyapı ve lojistik sorunlar nedeniyle gıdanın temini zaman almıştır. İşte bu nedenle afet koordinasyonu, afet öncesi planlamalar ve senaryolar olası sahra mutfaklarını da kapsamalıdır. Anadolu Üniversitesi’nin himayesine aldığı, gönüllü desteği ile altı aylık bir süreç içinde destek vermeyi planladığı, akabinde Anadolu Mutfağı olarak adlandırdığı sahra mutfağındaki bir haftalık gönüllülük deneyimim, araştırmacı kimliğimle bulunmamama karşın katılımcı gözlem pratiklerim ve saha notlarım bu değerlendirmeyi özgün kılmaktadır. Otoetnografik öğeler barındıran değerlendirmelerimde öznel olduğu kadar araştırmacı kimliğimle nesnel birtakım tespitlerde bulunmaya çalışacağım. Olağan koşullarda mutfak etnografisi üzerine girişimleri olan bir araştırmacı olarak, olağanüstü koşullarda oluşturulmuş sahra mutfağının analizini yapmak belirli ölçülerde analitik sınırlandırmalara sahip olacaktır. Ancak yine de deprem veya başka afetlerde sahra mutfaklarının yaşamsal önemine ilişkin daha sonra yaşanabilecek benzer afet durumlarında eyleme geçmek için çeşitli önerilerde bulunmak, afet koordinasyonu, planlaması ve hazırlıkları için elzemdir. Öte yandan afet sosyolojisi ve gıda sosyolojisi kesişiminde gıda hakkı, gıda güvencesi ve kültürel beğeniler gibi kavramsallaştırmalar ile ilişkilendirerek kısa, orta ve uzun vadeli olarak depremin gıda, gıda temini ve sürdürülebilirlik açısından etkilerine bu çalışma kapsamında yer verilecektir.
Research Summary
We investigate the extent to which the increasing availability of ratings information has affected heterogeneity in firm performance and, if so, what market segments are responsible for these changes. A unique dataset was constructed with restricted-access government data to examine these questions in the context of the New York City restaurant industry between 1994 and 2013. We find that firms serving tourist and expensive price point market segments experienced increasing sales discrepancies as a function of rating differentials when ratings information became more easily accessible with the advent of online rating platforms. These findings depict how the prevalence of online rating systems have shaped competition and value capture, thus providing insight into the determinants of firm performance heterogeneity.
Managerial Summary
We examine the extent to which increasing availability of ratings information has affected firm performance by estimating changes in comparative sales between New York City restaurants between 1994 and 2013. Analyses indicate that increased access to ratings information during this period had a considerable effect on comparative sales for firms serving the tourist and the expensive price point market segments. These results provide insights into other industries where access to evaluations and rating systems have also increased. This work suggests that online ratings have affected how firms compete and capture value, and managers have opportunities to use rating systems to their advantage.
The focus of this methodological paper is to discuss the challenges of conducting fieldwork, using reflections from our experiences of accessing a research site for ethnographic data collection. The research project aimed to explore nurses' social relations in their workplace and the inequities between and within these relations among nurses of diverse social positions. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, access to the research site posed several challenges and was further complicated by the bureaucratic ethics process that governs clinical sites in Australia. Although this study was considered a low and negligible risk research, negotiating the ethics process was full of hitches and hindrances resulting in the refusal of access. This paper offers ethnographers a reflection on challenges in accessing clinical sites to conduct research and a discussion of strategies that may be useful to navigate and counter these challenges by managing social relations in the field.
A discussão acerca da transposição do registro culinário para a prática, bem como da transmissão e aprendizagem do conhecimento gastronômico, surge do desejo de compreender como os/as chefs executam suas habilidades diárias e como ensinam as suas técnicas. Cozinhar é uma atividade que exige muitas etapas simultâneas e superpostas, tornando-se uma tarefa complexa. O grande desafio é entender como tais profissionais enxergam o registro, bem como a relação entre a prática e as receitas culinárias. De facto, as receitas são importantes, mas não são consideradas pelos/as chefs e cozinheiros/as como algo rígido e normativo. Eles utilizam seus conhecimentos avisos, provenientes de experiências anteriores, para encontrar a sequência de erros e acertos que levam a uma técnica de sucesso. É nessa negociação entre a anotação e a prática que a receita evolui para se tornar algo saboroso e requintado. O estudo utilizou uma investigação qualitativa, com duas entrevistas em profundidade, para compreender a natureza desse processo. As entrevistas revelaram as trajetórias dos chefs, seus significados atribuídos ao trabalho e processos de formação. A transmissão das técnicas culinárias acontece principalmente pela prática e pela relação entre mestre e aprendiz (Sennett, 2012), onde o cozinhar exige conhecimentos específicos que são programados e apreendido através do fazer.
Everybody eats to live but food is more than nutrition. Food is a powerful carrier of cultural meaning. Food touches many core issues in sociology and social life, like social stratification, poverty, and prestige, class, gender roles, consumption, nationalism, and globalization. These cross‐pressures generate rich collections of meaning. Local meanings as they are modified by culture, institutional context, class, politics, and history make food a rewarding research subject.
This article reveals social varieties of eating out through a comparison of the metropolises of Santiago (Chile) and Paris (France). Building on recent scholarship, we move beyond dichotomies of work vs. leisure and domesticity vs. commodification by generating a typology that integrates spatial, social, and temporal dimensions. Operationally, the spatial dimension corresponds to eating places, the social dimension to commensality (eating with others), and the temporal dimension to meal synchronization (eating on a socially shared schedule). Furthermore, we seek to document sociodemographic correlates of eating out and to advance comparative scholarship in food studies by including the Global South. We use representative, population-based survey data with information on weekday meal patterns and conduct latent class analyses. First, we describe differences between Santiago and Paris regarding places, commensality, and synchronization. Second, we map out varieties of eating in and eating out. Third, we identify three sociodemographic factors as significant, strong predictors of weekday eating out in both metropolises: young age, employment, and higher education. Our findings point to a twofold diversity of practice: (1) conventional and occasional, familial and friendly, and distinguishing older people; (2) driven by convenience, shared with a wider variety of people, and distinguishing younger people.
The chapter introduces and defines key concepts and terms, and discusses how status is to be considered from an organization theory perspective, i.e., how is status and status relations determined by organizational practices and mechanisms. In contrast, in much scholarly literature, status is examined as a psychological or social theory concept that serve to structure the social order on basis of individual and collective beliefs. In contrast, in an organization theory perspective, status is construed as a social fact (in the Durkheimian sense of the term) that provide advantages for the high-status actor.
The licensed serving of alcoholic beverages is an important institutional aspect of food culture. In Sweden, the Government’s policies to battle the Covid-19 pandemic meant further restrictions, including a temporary law, to mitigate contagion at licensed restaurants, bars, producers’ tasting events, etc. This paper inquiries into the “art” exercised by managers of such businesses, already used to strict governance, of “being governed” when faced with these new and sudden policies. The study draws on Swedish Covid-19 policy and interviews with managers of licensed premises and a municipal auditor during the three months of the most far-reaching restrictions. By analyzing these materials through anthropological theories of state governance, the paper shows how Covid-19 restrictions were enacted in practice, including their discontents. The study’s findings contribute to further insights into the role of alcohol policy in food culture and opens up for further bridging of food studies, service studies, and alcohol research.
Research on work-based learning has produced much insight into how newcomers to work roles acquire the skills and knowledge required in their work. Overwhelmingly, studies have shown that learning takes place through participation in work activities which provides opportunities for learning. But participation can be problematic when workers and the workplace provide limited opportunities for newcomers to take part in ongoing work activities. This article presents the case of a trainee cook negotiating access to work activities and routinising participation through 'origination' and establishing a 'legitimate presence'. The data are drawn from a linguistic ethnography on the work placement experience of trainee cooks and were collected through participant observation, interviews and audio-recordings of verbal interactions in nine professional kitchens. The conclusions reached are useful for understanding the ways in which trainees and other newcomers may initiate themselves into work in order to learn through doing so, and will be relevant to professionals involved in the design of work preparation programmes.
Creativity is the intentional combination of symbols, ideas, or objects in a way that is unexpected for a given audience. While creativity is a process, innovation is the outcome of this process. Moving from the macro‐level to the micro‐level, I survey the literature on innovation and creativity in creative industries, spanning cultural, economic, and organizational sociology as well as management studies. As a broader market force, uncertainty over innovativeness results in powerful status orders with each creative industry. Within these markets, creative producers work to situate their products as innovative within certain categories and breadths of categories. Creative producers' social network configurations and their face‐to‐face interactions within these networks shape both the process of creative collaboration and the resulting innovations. Producers' moment‐to‐moment valuations, modes of cognition, and interactions with material properties of creative products also influence the creative process. I argue that future research should give more attention to how decisions in the creative process evolve over time and are relationally shaped.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that restaurant leaders are not prepared to deal with the mental health issues of their employees. A total of 20 leaders of restaurants were interviewed to address the implications of this question: “Is there a gap between mental health support needed for restaurant workers and the preparedness of their leaders and organizations?” Findings suggest restaurant leaders believe dealing with employee mental health issues is an increasingly significant part of their job, especially with the onset of the COVID-19. While there is a varying range of leader preparedness to deal with these issues, restaurants as organizations seem unprepared.
Symbolic Interactionism discusses the theories, theorists, and influential factors involved in the study and knowledge of symbolic interactionism.
Organizational aesthetics comprises a way of understanding organizational life based on immediate sensory reactions (i.e., sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) to the material components of organizing (e.g., artifacts, physical settings, and material practices). Despite the growing interest in the topic, however, research is fragmented across management areas. To advance scholarly knowledge in this field, we reviewed the empirical work examining aesthetics in organizations. Our review yields two major insights. First, we identify three perspectives on the role of aesthetics. Scholars have treated aesthetics as (1) a directed stimulus (that elicits product evaluation and work organization), (2) a knowledge tool (that is entwined with creative work and everyday tasks), or (3) an open-ended outcome (that serves as a personal experience). Second, we find that each perspective highlights emotional and cognitive mechanisms through which aesthetics is implicated in organizing. Building on these two insights, our review offers an integrative framework that provides a comprehensive picture of the state of the field, illuminating the work of aesthetics in and around organizations and providing avenues for future studies.
We trace the pragmatic turn in regulatory governance from the level of the state and civil society to the coalface of the regulated organization. Since the 1980s, an array of new regulatory models has emerged. These models, while distinct, are unified in two related tendencies. First, they support the devolution of responsibility for standard setting, program design, and enforcement to the regulated organization. This delegation of governance to the organization itself has catalyzed the creation of accountability infrastructures within organizations, a network of offices, roles, programs, and procedures dedicated to aligning the organization's operations with external standards, codes of conduct, ethical and normative expectations, and regulations. Second, the diverse regulatory models depend, often implicitly, on organizational accountability infrastructures that incorporate the tenets of pragmatist philosophy: inquiry through narration, adaptation to context, and problem-solving through experimentation. Reviewing the empirical literature on organizational compliance, we find ample evidence of inquiry through narration at the organizational coalface. However, we find limited evidence of narrating plurality in the organization and narrating experimentation as problem-solving, as these activities create tensions with internal and external parties who expect singular, stable representations of governance. These tensions reveal an important incongruity between pragmatic governance across organizations and pragmatic governance within organizations. We contribute to the regulatory governance literature by documenting this important shift in the locus of governance to the organizational coalface and by charting a new research agenda. We argue that examinations of regulatory governance should be retraced in three ways. First, attention should shift to the organizational coalface, recognizing and analyzing accountability infrastructures as the central contemporary mechanism of governance. Second, the long-standing focus in regulatory studies on why parties comply should shift to understanding how regulated parties manage themselves to achieve compliance. Third, analyses of compliance should examine the tensions in narrating adaptation and experimentation, and the implications of such tensions for the achievement of prosocial outcomes.
For teachers, self-reflection involves the questions ‘who am I as a teacher?’ and ‘how am I as a teacher?’ While the ‘who’ question involves teacher identity, the ‘how’ question involves self-authenticity. This chapter reports on a study examining the self-authenticity experiences of teachers of English at a secondary school in Sweden. With a focus on narrative evaluations of practice events, three types of authenticity experience are identified: perceptions of authenticity/inauthenticity in relationships, perceptions of authenticity/inauthenticity in the creation of meaningful learning opportunities, and perceptions of frustrated authenticity when managing challenging situations.
With the meteoric rise of the celebrity chef and the lure of the coveted Michelin star, it takes an individual with an elite skill set coupled with verve, vigor, and dedication to the craft to reach the highest echelons of the kitchen. This phenomenological case study highlights the journey of a chef, ‘Michel’, who has demonstrated the requisite recipe to achieve Michelin ratings. Through the in-depth interview process, a candid and vivid imagery of the kitchenscape and what it takes to persevere in this heated environment is depicted. Michel reveals that breaking with the traditional kitchen culture through empathy and compassion, and abandoning substance use as a coping mechanism helped him attain success. His shared experiences also reveal the importance of dedication, passion, self-confidence and competitiveness, overcoming challenges, sacrifice, learning from failure, learning on the job, and mentorship as the internal and external factors that propelled him to the stars.
This article documents an exploration of the following question: How does transition from one to another subuniverse of social reality shape the individual's sense of duration? That question is addressed through a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness. The data consist of personal testimony in the form of anecdotes that summarize incidents in which time was felt to slow noticeably. Analytic induction is applied to these ethnographic observations. These data suggest that the shock that accompanies relatively distinct shifts from one finite province of meaning to another provokes increased perception of immediate detail as the individual strives to interpret emerging events.
The question for research is: what effect does job autonomy have on the sense of vulnerability expressed by those working for tips rather than for contracted wages? Vulnerability, the dependent variable, is a measure of the worker's perception of risk attached to working under such an arrangement. Autonomy, the independent variable, evaluates organizational conditions which permit or limit control over one's work. It is measured by restaurant procedures of surveillance and discipline. Sixty-one waitresses employed as the dining room staff of a stratified sample of 8 restaurants provided the data to test the relationship between autonomy and occupational vulnerability. A positive association was found between procedures of autonomy and the restaurant worker's expression of vulnerability. Study findings suggest that the less control restaurant management allows the waitress over the execution of her work, the more vulnerable and less satisfied she is with the tipping/wage arrangement. In addition, study findings suggest that autonomy is as critical a variable for women in their work as it has been reported to be in studies of the male labor force.
Recent criticism of rural sociology has suggested that it is characterized by theoretical closure, methodological monism, and a tendency to ignore the actor's view of the world. This paper attempts to come to grips with those issues by presenting a new set of questions for rural sociological research and by showing how interpretive and structural concerns may be employed in a complementary manner so as to illuminate an area of substantive interest - the role and nature of the agricultural sciences. First, the contemporary structure of the American agricultural sciences is described. Then, certain negotiations carried on within that structure are elaborated. Third, several examples are used to illustrate how contemporary structure can be traced back to earlier negotiations. Fourth, some variations among agricultural disciplines are noted. It is concluded that an applied sociology of the agricultural sciences could contribute much to the resolution of both disciplinary and social problems.- Author
This article introduces The Sociological Quarterly's feature on temporality and sociological inquiry. It sets the context of this feature as one of sociological neglect of temporality and of an increasing univocality in sociological work, and it suggests some of the consequences of that neglect and univocality. It is argued that the incorporation of up-to-date conceptions of temporality into sociological work will contribute to improved theory and better understanding of human social life.