There is merit in part of your concerns about progress in recent times,
but allow me to put the "dinner arrangements" thread in some perspective.
The chance to have dinner with Gary is one we all enjoy. I would be
delighted with such an opportunity but the cost of a trip to England is
beyond available means. However there is an issue of scholarship here,
too. Indeed, Gary's recent work on the social life of kitchens and food
service workers is potentially of major significance to the discipline.
Please read the following before setting aside that dinner invitation as
trivial sociability. And read the book before you count symbolic
interactionsits out.
Cordially,
Richard Mitchell
KITCHENS: A MACRO-INTERACTIONIST APPROACH TO ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE
AND CULTURE, Gary Alan Fine, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996, 303 pp..
Kitchens is a memorable and important book, a work that does no
less than reconfirm sociology as a refined and practical guide to
the complexities of modern industrial society.
To begin, Kitchens is a solidly grounded ethnography of commer-
cial food preparation. As a researcher, Fine presumes little
about his subject matter and demands much of himself. Unlike
other mid- and later career sociologists of stature he is unwill-
ing merely to write about fieldwork. He does it, well and
thoroughly. Fine starts his Kitchens inquiry by enrolling as a
researcher-participant in a community college cook training
program, then "graduates" to long-term, observation in four,
varied, independent restaurants in Minnesota's Twin Cites. The
benefits of this first hand experience are obvious in Fine's
sumptuous narrative (and reportedly, his waistline). If Kitchens
stopped here, offering only rich, thick description, only the
opportunity to join Fine backstage in the hot, greasy,
odoriferous, brawling, hurried world of cooks, chefs and servers,
it would be worth its price and more. Not since Orwell's Down
and Out in Paris and London have readers been treated to such an
intimate encounter with knife work and pot banging, savory spic-
ing and flaring tempers. Read Kitchens and discover the surpris-
ing place of powdered cheese sauce, dried mashed potatoes and
Gravy Bouquet in haute cuisine. At times, Fine's reality con-
firms sensitive fiction. His cooks and chefs seem to be tender
characters out of Maria Esquival's Like Water for Chocolate,
seeking through their ephemeral and ambiguous art to share their
passions with distanced and sometimes unappreciative audiences.
At other times they just get by, "sniffing, sneezing, exhausted,
hung-over, distracted or bleeding" (p. 40) as the shift drags on.
Kitchens is a compliment and peer to the likes of Arlie
Hochschild's discussion of commodified expressivity in The
Managed Heart, and Doug Harper's exposition of craft and com-
munity in Working Knowledge. Also like Hochschild and Harper,
Fine's rich reportage grounds an analysis of exceptional
sophistication.
At its core, Kitchens is a book about the sociological tensions
of modern life, the tensions between economics and aesthetics,
between bureaucratic regimen and autonomy, ownership and wage
laboring, taste and kitch, alienating repression and anomic norm-
lessness. In exploring these tensions Fine shirks none of his
sociological responsibilities.
Fine's aim, and accomplishment, is to provide understandings of
the culture of production at all levels -- the place and pos-
sibilities of aesthetics in work, the meaning of work in organi-
zations, and the place of organizations in larger domains. In
Kitchens, microsociology meets structural analysis; the demands
of the external environment affect the interactional order. Fine
challenges the artificial division between structure and culture,
between rationalized management and the intrinsic allure of craft
work. He does not sequester kitchens into some realm of artsy
autonomy but integrates them in encompassing fields of special-
ized labor, organizational ecology, political economy and world
systems. Likewise, kitchens are not mere static effects of
bureaucratic ordering and market pressures. Fine's kitchens are
vitalized interaction fields in which owners, cooks and servers
interpret, negotiate and reconstruct their perceptions of organi-
zational limits and expectations. Kitchens exposes the practical
actions that make both the reality of restaurants and the
aesthetics of dining possible.
Restaurant cooking, like all human endeavor, takes place in con-
texts where resources are limited and unevenly distributed. Life
is short. Dinner is shorter. Sometimes shorting must be sub-
stituted for butter to speed up the cobbler. Sometimes the gray-
ing lamb chops or the broken fish filet must be served. Fine
leaves no doubt that the chef's artistry is challenged by
material shortages. But as he notes, these deprivations are not
distinctive of restaurant cooking. All artisans draw attentions
to the deficiencies in their work environments, schedules and
supplies. All creative endeavor is in part bricolage. While it
is possible to imagine endless paint and canvasses, mountains of
fine granite and bushels of fresh truffles, such abundance is
seldom achieved by artists and never necessary for art. The
great chefs of 18th century Hungary were said to vie with each
other by fashioning delectable dishes from a base of shoe
leather. The material inhibitions to aesthetic achievement per-
ceived by cooks are relative. Fine's cooks bemoan spotted
radishes and the need to serve steaks for large parties a uniform
medium-rare. But he also lets us hear them finding fault in a
banquet menu that "only" contains sole turban, smoked goose
breast with port wine and fruit, goose liver mousse and duck
gelantine, disappointed because the sweeping displays of fresh
lobster and accompanying lobster mousse could not be produced in
time (p. 187). Cooking, like politics, is an art of compromise,
a social process constrained simultaneously by the expectations
of self and others, and by the instruments and ingredients at
hand. Economics and aesthetics balance each other. The prac-
ticality of pots, pans and produce are necessary to create
restaurants. Customers and cooks with standards of taste are,
too. Fine's kitchen characters are heedful of their circum-
stances but never subsumed by them. In his keen analysis of the
occupational rhetoric of cooking, for example, he notes that
cooks and chefs invoke references to their inferior social class
largely when the art goes poorly. When the food is "bad" --
poorly prepared, unflavorful, visually unappealing or
inadequately proportioned -- yet of necessity must be served,
cooks may intentionally alienate their labor by stressing the
external controls over the means of production, by noting their
"powerlessness" as mere manual laborers (p. 184). But these
appeals to structural constraints are selective and uncommon.
More often, those who cook emphasize the perfection of their work
and take modest credit for their achievements.
In the end, Kitchens leaves nothing out. Fine gives us the
demography and the cost accounting of restaurants, he gives us
scheduling stratagems and union negotiations, and he gives us the
romance of working class artisans struggling to ennoble a
national cuisine banalized by demands for efficiency and effec-
tiveness, for fast food and nutrition. This is occupational eth-
nography at its apogee -- empirically sound, literate and rele-
vant.
Kitchens is the best work in Fine's long and notable career and
among the best North American social science in a decade. It
sets new standards for mature symbolic interactionsit scholarship
and will stand as a work of distinction well into the next
century. It is to Kitchens that many in our discipline will
point with rightful pride and say, "That is what sociologists can
do."
Richard Mitchell
Oregon State University