service, and specialty techniques, including bakery and some ethnic cuisine. These skills are acquired in the artificial environment of the trade school, where students are rarely pressured, overworked, or sharply criticized. While they acquire technical skills, some claim they graduate ignorant of the culinary “real world.”12
Because of this artificial training environment, some chefs fret over hiring trade-school graduates, in absence of information that they know how to prepare food in restaurant kitchens:
I ask Tim, the head chef at La Pomme de Terre and a trade-school graduate, if he likes to hire students with a TVI [Technical Vocational Institute] background. He tells me: “Not really. If they have common sense, I can teach them how we cook. I look for their ambition.”
(Field notes, La Pomme de Terre)
Denver explains to me that “TVI is a great little institution, but there's more to industry than they can teach you. I don't want to belittle the school, but it's a rude awakening when you come out of school. The industry doesn't work like that. There's no way that they can teach you to improvise. There's no way they can tell you to get along with waitresses.”
(Field notes, Blakemore Hotel)
Trade school builds expectations for which the real world is a “rude awakening.” Some consider trade school to be a “dream world.” Cooks agree that while trade-school training is not worthless, it is not an adequate introduction to the skills that they need when hired by a restaurant. Industry lacks a safety net.
Being Taught. American industry does not rely—at least in this century—on apprenticeship. This applies to virtually every occupation, including cooking. Contrasted to European, particularly French, culinary traditions, American cooks either learn by observation or formal schooling (Fine 1985). Even though American restaurants do not rely on apprenticeship, a fortunate cook may gain a mentor, an older cook or chef who takes the young worker under his or her wing and teaches culinary techniques. The respected cook-teacher Anne Willan writes:
I think it is almost impossible to learn to cook completely on the job. Sure, if you have the quite extraordinary luck to find an outstanding chef who's willing to take the time to teach you, then perhaps in that exceptional case, you can get really good training on the job…. very few chefs have the ability, the time, and the willingness to pass on everything they know to young people who are working in the kitchen. It just isn't practical. You're under pressure; you want to go and do the orders for tomorrow's food; you've got someone on the telephone; you can't spend time saying to somebody, “Don't chop like that, chop like this.”…Chefs, quite simply, don't want nice boys who are totally inexperienced messing around as unknown quantities when they have to pay them a sort of basic wage. It's becoming more and more an idealistic thing to pass on skills to the next generation, rather than an economically reasonable one.…So some structured instruction is almost indispensable.
(“Cook's Interview: Anne Willan” 1985, pp. 18-19)
While in some sites, those to be socialized are resistant to or ambivalent about the staffs goals (Becker et al. 1961), novices are often enthusiastically supportive of these goals, more than willing to conform (Gamier 1973). Whereas much research on occupational socialization describes schools, the same process occurs on the job, with less opportunity for resistance. If one chooses to resist, the easiest option is to exit and move to a more congenial location.
Novices are typically delighted to learn at the knee of their superiors as a means of self-fulfillment and advancement: “Lured by its reputation as a standout on the local culinary scene, he landed a lowly post at the New French Cafe. ‘It was like a breath of fresh air,' he recalls. ‘Before you went there, you knew you weren't going to get paid [much], but it's like going to graduate school'—with lessons in beautiful food handling.…He started at the bottom…. ‘I'd work like crazy so I could get up and watch the chef. He'd show me certain things, then let me do them’ ” (Waldemar 1985, p. 154). Cooks in my sample had similar role models in their early work—men whose concern and teaching transformed them into sophisticated cooks:
You take that guy like that Frenchman. He took me right underneath his wing, and I'd do anything for him. He liked you, so he'd take you back in the corner and explain to you what you were doing wrong. One of his instructions to me is that I'm going to show you once and tell you once, and that's all. So I've got a little blue address book that I used to carry in my back pocket, and the minute he'd tell me to do something, and I didn't think I could remember it, I'd write it right in that book.
(Personal interview, Owl's Nest)
| GAF: | What do you like most about being a chef? |
| PAUL: | Being able to take in people and work with them. People who are really anxious to learn. Jon's a real good example. He's a hardworking young kid that wants to learn. He's so excited to learn something new. Teach him how to do this or how to do that. I reflect back and see my own excitement about the first time that I was able to do this or that. It was fun; it was an adventure.(Personal interview, Owl's Nest) |
The chef who chooses to mentor adopts that role in addition to his other duties as an act of altruism, which may be dangerous because some managers replace high-paid workers with low-paid ones. Although mentoring relationships are ideal and produce dedicated and well-trained cooks, they are serendipitous: a chance encounter that makes a life.
TWO
Cooks' Time
Temporal Demandsand the Experience of Work
The chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels which there was no time to fight out—they pass description.…It was only later, when I understood the working of a hotel that I saw order in all this chaos.
—George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
As a principle of social life, temporality affects the life of an organization as much as physical space or hierarchical organization (Maines 1987).1 Indeed, organization and time are intimately connected. For an organization to run efficiently, schedules must be meshed (Cottrell 1939; Zerubavel 1979), and work products must be generated at a regular or intermittent rate that permits the organization to prosper (Baldamus 1961).
The way that people experience the passage of time is a central, yet frequently ignored, feature of organizational life. Industrial capitalism depends upon temporal structure and synchronization (Thompson 1967); time is a resource like material and personnel. Much research—notably those studies inspired by the tradition of Taylorism—attempts to improve the efficiency of work. Time is a cost that must be minimized, but how time is experienced by workers is not considered.
Observing work life reminds us that features external to the doing of work constrain the use of time, and temporal constraints influence how work is experienced. Time can be transformed into a mechanism of social control, as is dramatically evident to those who labor on assembly lines but also is true for those who work in medical clinics or restaurant kitchens. Workers develop techniques to cope with demands on their time and, as a consequence, gain a measure of temporal autonomy (Lyman and Scott 1970, p. 191; Hodson 1991, p. 63), carving out temporal niches.2 Time operates on several levels: from lengthy periods of work (seasons, weeks, days) to smaller chunks of time (portions of days, or the time taken to achieve particular work tasks).
Time passes whether or not a worker or sleeper experiences that passage, and both “objective” and “experienced” components of time affect organizational life (Flaherty 1987). The philosopher Henri Berg-son emphasized that effects of time
