writingaboutwriting2ebim

Getting Ready to Read

Getting Ready to Read

Before you read, do at least one of these activities:

Think back to your first job. What was it like learning to do it? What did you have to learn? How difficult did you find it? Why?
Find some friends who have worked in food service, and have them compare notes: Are there different Discourses (to use Gee’s term) or discourse community conventions (to use Swales’s term) for different kinds of food service?

As you read, consider the following questions:

How do you understand the notion of Discourses differently depending on which (or what kind of) Discourse is being studied and analyzed?
How many kinds of literacies do you imagine there are? Is there a “literacy” for every kind of reading? (How many kinds of reading are there?)
How do discourse communities, Discourses, communities of practice, and activity systems avoid stereotyping—or is this impossible? As analysts and researchers of discourse, how do we avoid abusive stereotyping?

Bitterwaitress.com is one of the newest among a burgeoning number of worker-produced websites associated with the service industry.¹ The menu on the first page of this website offers links to gossip about celebrity behavior in restaurants, gossip about chefs and restaurant owners, accounts from famous people who were once waitresses,² and customer-related horror stories. There is also a forum that includes a “hate mail” page that posts email criticisms of the website itself, as well as general criticisms of waitressing, but the criticisms are followed by rebuttals usually from past or present waitresses. Predictably, most of the criticisms either implicitly or explicitly portray waitresses as ignorant and stupid. One email respondent didn’t like what he read on the customer horror story page and sent in this response:

If you find your job [as a waitress] so despicable, then go get an education and get a REAL job. You are whining about something that you can fix. Stop being such a weakling, go out and learn something, anything, and go make a real contribution to society.... Wait, let me guess: you do not have any marketable skills or useful knowledge, so you do what any bumbling fool can do, wait on tables. This is your own fault.

This response inspired a number of rebuttals of which the following two best summarize the overall sentiment expressed in response to the rant above. The first is from the webmaster of bitterwaitress.com:

Is it possible that I have an education, maybe I went to, oh say, Duke, and I just waitressed for some free time? Or that there are very many people in the industry who do this so that they CAN get an education? Not all of us were born with a trust fund.—There is, I might add, considerably more or less to a job than a “clear cut” salary. If you... live in New York,... you’ll know that empty stores and un-crowded subways are half the reason to work at night. By the way, what are the three Leovilles? What are the two kinds of tripe? Who was Cesar Ritz’ partner? What is the JavaScript for a rollover? I guess I would have to ask a bumbling fool those questions. So, tell me then.

The second is from a mother of four:

I might not have a college education, but I would love to see those so called intelligent people get a big tip out of a bad meal, or from a person who is rude and cocky just because that’s the way they are—that takes talent and its not a talent you can learn at any university. So, think about it before you say, “poor girl—too dumb to get a real job....”

Assumptions that waitresses (and waiters) are ignorant and stupid and that waiting on tables contributes little to society are not new. The rebuttals to commonplace, pejorative understandings of the food service industry suggest, however, that there is complexity and skill that may go unrecognized by the general public or institutions such as universities. Indeed institutions, particularly government and corporate entities in the United States, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the National Skills Labor Board, define waiting on tables as a low skilled profession. By defining this kind of work as low skilled, there is a concomitant implication that the more than one-third of America’s workforce who do it are low skilled.

Service occupations, otherwise known as “in-person” services (Reich, 1992) or “interactive services” (Leidner, 1993; MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996), include any kind of work which fundamentally involves face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions and conscious manipulation of self-presentation. As distinguished from white-collar service work, this category of “emotional proletariat” (MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996) is comprised primarily of retail sales workers, hotel workers, cashiers, house cleaners, flight attendants, taxi drivers, package delivery drivers, and waiters, among others. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1996), one-fifth of the jobs in eating, drinking, and grocery store establishments are held by youth workers between the ages of 16 and 24. While this kind of work is traditionally assumed to be primarily a stop-gap for young workers who will later move up and on to other careers, it also involves youths who will later end up in both middle- and working-class careers. It should not be forgotten that more than two thirds of the workers involved in food service are mature adults—many or most who began their careers in the same or similar industries. Interactive service work is a significant part of the economy in the U.S. today, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that jobs will be “abundant” in this category through 2006.

Economists such as Peter Drucker (1993) suggest that interactive service workers lack the necessary education to be “knowledge” workers. These economists support general conceptions that service work is “mindless,” involving routine and repetitive tasks that require little education. This orientation further suggests that these supposedly low skilled workers lack the problem identifying, problem solving, and other high level abilities needed to work in other occupations. However, relatively little specific attention and analysis have been given to the literacy skills and language abilities needed to do this work. My research investigates these issues with a focus on waiters and waitresses who work in diners. Diner restaurants are somewhat distinct from fast food or fine-dining restaurants, and they also epitomize many of the assumptions held about low skilled workplaces that require interactive services. The National Skills Standard Board, for instance, has determined that a ninth-grade level of spoken and written language use is needed to be a waiter or a waitress. Yet, how language is spoken, read, or written in a restaurant may be vastly different from how it is used in a classroom. A seemingly simple event such as taking a customer’s food order can become significantly more complex, for example, when a customer has a special request. How the waitress or waiter understands and uses texts such as the menu and how she or he “reads” and verbally interacts with the customer reflect carefully constructed uses of language and literacy.

This chapter explores these constructed ways of “reading” texts (and customers) along with the verbal, “performances” and other manipulations of self-presentation that characterize interactive service work. In line with MacDonald and Sirianni (1996), I hope this work will contribute to the development of understandings and policies that build more respect and recognition for service work to help ensure it does not become equated with servitude.