5. I am aware that covert research has come under significant attack from social scientists. The issue seems to be that of disguise: misrepresentation of self in order to enter a new or forbidden domain, and deliberate misrepresentation of the character of research one is engaged in (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). These issues do not apply to my project, since I did not disguise myself in any way in order to get “in” at Bazooms. The management did not ask why I was applying and I therefore did not volunteer the information. Furthermore, I was up front with my subjects about “doing a school project,” upon interviewing them. Finally, with names and identities changed throughout, I cannot see this report inflicting harm in any way. All quotes (from waitresses) are based upon recorded interviews.
6. LaPointe argues that requiring employees to wear degrading uniforms emphasizes their “low status” and distinguishes them from their superiors.
7. Recent news coverage did report that, based upon a four-year investigation, Bazooms is being charged $22 million by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for sex discrimination in hiring. Yet, amid recent controversy over the EEOC’s decision, Bazooms Company took out full-page ads in major national newspapers to insist that men do not belong as servers at Bazooms. Each ad featured a picture of a brawny man ludicrously dressed in a Bazooms girl uniform.
8. It must be mentioned that, like women, males are also often required to do “emotional labor” in the workplace. Nonetheless, as Hochschild points out, females hold the majority of responsibility for emotion work. According to Hochschild: With the growth of large organizations calling for skills in personal relations, the womanly art of status enhancement and the emotion work that it requires has been made more public, more systematized, more standardized. It is performed by mostly middle-class women in largely public-contact jobs. Jobs involving emotional labor comprise over a third of all jobs. But they form only a quarter of all jobs that men do, and over half of all the jobs that women do (1983:171).
9. It is important to add that some of the waitresses believe “management is just doing their job,” and don’t complain.
References
Denzin, N. K. and Y. S. Lincoln. 1994. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Goldman, Emma. 1910. The Traffic in Women. Ojai, CA: Times Change Press.
Gutek, Barbara. 1985. Sex and the Workplace. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85(3):551–72.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.
LaPointe, Eleanor. 1992. “Relationships with Waitresses: Gendered Social Distance in Restaurant Hierarchies.” Qualitative Sociology 15(4):377–93.
MacKinnon, Catherine. 1980. “Women’s Work,” and “Sexual Harassment Cases.” Pp. 59–66 and 111–13 in Sexuality in Organizations, edited by D. A. Neugarten and J. M. Shafritz. Oak Park, IL: Moore Publishing.
Paules, Greta. 1991. Dishing It Out: Power and Resistance among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Reskin, B. F. and P. A. Roos. 1987. “Status Hierarchies and Sex Segregation.” Pp. 3–22 in Ingredients for Women’s Employment Policy. New York: State University of New York Press.
Spradley, James P. and Brenda J. Mann. 1975. The Cocktail Waitress, Woman’s Work in a Man’s World. New York: Wiley.
Reading 10 Culture: A Sociological View
Howard S. Becker
Culture is defined as the shared ways of a human social group. This definition includes the ways of thinking, understanding, and feeling that have been gained through common experience in social groups and are passed on from one generation to another. Thus, culture reflects the social patterns of thought, emotions, and practices that arise from social interaction within a given society. In this reading, the first of three to explore culture, Howard S. Becker, a professor emeritus of sociology, provides an overview of the concept of culture. This classic piece, published in The Yale Review in 1982, helps the reader to understand why this concept is so central to the discipline of sociology. Becker introduces not only the content of the sociological study of culture but also many of the key scholars who have studied it.
I was for some years what is called a Saturday night musician, making myself available to whoever called and hired me to play for dances and parties in groups of varying sizes, playing everything from polkas through mambos, jazz, and imitations of Wayne King. Whoever called would tell me where the job was, what time it began, and usually would tell me to wear a dark suit and a bow tie, thus ensuring that the collection of strangers he was hiring would at least look like a band because they would all be dressed more or less alike. When we arrived at work we would introduce ourselves—the chances were, in a city the size of Chicago (where I did much of my playing), that we were in fact strangers—and see whom we knew in common and whether our paths had ever crossed before. The drummer would assemble his drums, the others would put together their instruments and tune up, and when it was time to start the leader would announce the name of a song and a key—”Exactly Like You” in B flat, for instance—and we would begin to play. We not only began at the same time, but also played background figures that fit the melody someone else was playing and, perhaps most miraculously, ended together. No one in the audience ever guessed that we had never met until twenty minutes earlier. And we kept that up all night, as though we had rehearsed often and played together for years. In a place like Chicago, that scene might be repeated hundreds of times during a weekend.
Source: Howard S. Becker, “Culture: A Sociological View.” The Yale Review, Vol. 71, Summer 1982: pp. 513–528. Copyright © 1982 The Yale Review on behalf of Mr. Becker. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
What I have just described embodies the phenomenon that sociologists have made the core problem of their discipline. The social sciences are such a contentious bunch of disciplines that it makes trouble to say what I think is true, that they all in fact concern themselves with one or another version of this issue—the problem of collective action, of how people manage to act together. I will not attempt a rigorous definition of collective action here, but the story of the Saturday night musicians can serve as an example of it. The example might have concerned a larger group—the employees of a factory who turn out several hundred automobiles in the course of a day, say. Or it might have been about so small a group as a family. It needn’t have dealt with a casual collection of strangers, though the ability of strangers to perform together that way makes clear the nature of the problem. How do they do it? How do people act together so as to get anything done without a great deal of trouble, without missteps and conflict?
We can approach the meaning of a concept by seeing how it is used, what work it is called on to do. Sociologists use the concept of culture as one of a family of explanations for the phenomenon of concerted activity; I will consider some of the others below, in order to differentiate culture from them. Robert Redfield defined culture as “conventional understandings made manifest in act and artifact.” The notion is that the people involved have a similar idea of things, understand them in the same way, as having the same character and the same potential, capable of being dealt with in the same way; they also know that this idea is shared, that the people they are dealing with know, just as they do, what these things are and how they can be used. Because all of them have roughly the same idea, they can all act in ways that are roughly the same, and their activities will, as a result, mesh and be coordinated. Thus, because all those musicians understood what a Saturday night job at a country club consisted of and acted accordingly, because they all knew the melody and harmony of “Exactly Like You” and