in the Twin Cities metropolitan area to observe their cooking programs. I was accepted, even welcomed. I attended one almost every day and became reasonably proficient in the skills that entry-level cooks must acquire, becoming socialized to the tricks of the trade. I developed a theory of the development of occupational aesthetics.
My experiences at these schools led to restaurant kitchens. I was welcomed cordially and hopefully, and I was given access that permitted me to explore organizational culture and structure, grounded in interactionist and interpretivist sociology. My informants were convinced that the world outside the kitchen walls did not understand their working conditions and did not appreciate their skills or the pressures and troubles they experienced. They believed that the public thought of them as drunken and loud, as bums. Most cooks were pleased that a fair academic outsider would tell the truth about them or would at least experience their working conditions.
It is widely accepted in the kitchens of academe that there is no one truth. While my views are my own, I hope to present one set of truths about cooks that will be close enough for them to recognize, even if I don't mirror what any one of them believes. I hope, like Paul Stoller (1989), to capture some of the sensory conditions of work and provide, to borrow his title, “the taste of ethnographic things,” not among the distant Songhay of Niger but among the cooks of Minnesota.
My observations in trade school—collegiums bureaucrats now label “technical colleges,” mirroring a desire to professionalize everything (Wilensky 1964)—taught me how the children of blue-collar workers become socialized to a career that demands knowledge of arenas of cultural capital (“taste”) to which they have not been exposed. Yet, these data ended at the job market: what did these young men and women do when actually employed by an industrial organization? My observation of four restaurant kitchens allowed me to find out. In each restaurant I spent a month watching, taking notes, asking questions, and, when needed, stringing beans, washing potatoes, and performing minor chores. I was never a cook, but I was, occasionally, an empty pair of hands. In each setting described in the appendix, observations were supplemented by in-depth interviews.
As a matter of “field ethics,” I ate those dishes that cooks graciously placed before me to demonstrate their culinary virtuosity, to celebrate my role in their community, and, perhaps, by forcing me to accept their hospitality, to make it more difficult to criticize them. I gained about ten pounds during each month that I spent observing. The two months' interval between each month of observations permitted me to acquire a critical perspective on the data and work myself into shape. Those scholars who choose research projects of which others dream must face a cordial professional jealousy; these collegial critics forget the long hours, the sweat, and the filth: it's a dirty job, but I challenged myself to do it.
Sociologists and friends assisted me in shaping this research by providing ideas, comments, criticism, or simply fellowship as I talked and ate. Specifically I thank Howard S. Becker, Harold Bershady, Charles Bosk, Terry Clark, George Dickie, Robert Faulkner, Priscilla Ferguson, William Finlay, Joseph Galaskiewicz, Wendy Griswold, Jay Gubrium, Hans Haferkamp, Janet Harris, Mark Haugan, Lori Holyfield, Thomas Hood, Sherryl Kleinman, Michal McCall, Richard Mitchell, Harvey Molotch, Richard Peterson, Charles Stevens, Robert Sutton, Doris Taub, Richard Taub, Graham Tomlinson, and John Young. I am grateful to colleagues at colloquia at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, the University of Georgia, and Emory University for challenging me on critical points. Pam Chase and Cathy Rajtar helped to transcribe the interviews quoted in this volume. Hilda Daniels, Gloria DeWolfe, and Clara Roesler helped in typing the manuscript, particularly before the time that I acquired word-processing skills. I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for providing an environment in which I could complete this text, and grateful for financial support provided by National Science Foundation grant SBR-9022192. Warm appreciation is also due to my wife, Susan, and sons, Todd and Peter, for sometimes eating what I cooked. I am deeply grateful to Naomi Schneider and her colleagues at the University of California Press for providing a hospitable home for this volume.
As is customary and right, I reserve my special thanks for those individuals I cannot name, who let me intrude into their lives and kitchens. I hope that I have managed to capture a taste of their tasks and the environment in which they labor.
Palo Alto, CaliforniaSeptember 1994
Introduction
What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood.
—Lin Yutang
Food reveals our souls. Like Marcel Proust reminiscing about a madeleine or Calvin Trillin astonished at a plate of ribs, we are entangled in our meals. The connection between identity and consumption gives food a central role in the creation of community,1 and we use our diet to convey images of public identity (Bourdieu 1984; MacClancy 1992). The routinization of feeding is one of the central requirements of families (DeVault 1991) and other social systems. The existence of profit-making organizations to process and serve food reveals something crucial about capitalist, industrial society. As is true for mills, foundries, and hospitals, the growth of restaurants—the hospitality industry—is implicated in the economic changes in the West in the past two centuries. Given their ubiquity and our frequency of contact with them, restaurants represent the apotheosis of free-market capitalism, production lines, a consumption economy, and interorganizational linkages. The production, service, and consumption of food is a nexus of central sociological constructs—organization, resources, authority, community, rhetoric, gender, and status.
Yet, for all their potential allure, restaurants have rarely been studied sociologically (but see Whyte 1946; Gross 1958; Hannon and Freeman 1989). Cooks, despite continual, though mediated, contact in our quotidian lives, are invisible workers in occupational sociology.
While wishing to capture the flavor of this work environment, I have equally salient theoretical aims. I wish to present an organizational sociology that is grounded in interactionist and cultural concerns, but does justice to the reality of the organization and the equal, insistent reality of the environment outside the organization. Alan Wolfe (1991) labels my generation of organizational ethnographers the “new institutionalists” (see Dimaggio and Powell 1991). These scholars look behind the generalizations and abstractions of institutional theory to examine how institutions operate in practice. While I first heard the term used by Wolfe, the moniker captures part of the impetus for this volume. Through my ethnography I present a perspective that accounts for features of the organizational literature (e.g., Scott 1992) while remaining true to the lived experiences of workers who labor behind the kitchen door. An interactionist approach need not eschew organizational and system constraints, and can address the political economy. In the past two decades, while embracing the basic precepts of an interpretivist perspective, I have confronted questions that had of ten been left to structural sociologists.2 This book explores several features of organizational sociology, providing some basis for future research.
The font of my analysis is the negotiated order perspective: that approach to the interactionist understanding of organizations pioneered by Anselm Strauss and his colleagues from the University of Chicago, such as Donald Roy and Howard Becker, some three decades ago (Colomy and Brown 1995). Strauss's studies of psychiatric hospitals (Strauss et al. 1963; Strauss et al. 1964)3 are classics and contribute to an ongoing research project (e.g., Corbin and Strauss 1993). The most detailed treatment of this approach, which expands it beyond the confines of a single work setting, is found in Strauss's Negotiations (1978), in which he develops a theory of organization and structural negotiations. While Strauss did not emphasize the impact of external forces and social constraints in shaping trajectories of work and did not provide a single detailed case, his theory provides a base for any interactionist examination of organizations. Strauss is at pains to explain the flexibility within organizations and the conditions under which this flexibility is likely to appear.
