Communicating Values to Cultivate Sustainable Occupational Identity: How Restaurant Workers Resist Service Work Stigma

Kyle A. Hanners,Shawna Malvini Redden

doi:10.3390/su13158587

Kyle A. Hanners, Shawna Malvini Redden

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158587

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Abstract

Pre-COVID-19 pandemic, restaurant workers comprised one of the largest workforces in the United States, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the national economy. Yet, restaurant workers routinely face customer abuse, meager wages, lack of benefits, sexual harassment, and one of the highest rates of turnover across industries. Given these conditions, this qualitative study investigates how restaurant workers make sense of a contested occupation and manage the stigma associated with their occupation. Specifically, this study examines how food and beverage service workers identify with and navigate a demanding industry while managing the sociocultural assumptions of service work. Using a multi-level discourse analytic framework, we analyze how service workers craft and enact occupational identities. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with 19 restaurant employees, we demonstrate how people foreground the positive attributes of restaurant work while resisting social Discourses that position the work as dirty, demeaning, emotional, and meaningless. We analyze how workers frame the values of working in restaurants and the communicative strategies they use to navigate stigmatized social interactions, including emphasizing flexibility, empathy, emotion management, and teamwork. Theoretical and practical implications offer suggestions to improve workforce sustainability and working conditions for employees.

Highlights

As of 2020 and before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the restaurant industry, more than 10 million people worked in food and beverage service in the United States [1]
Taking into account the aforementioned literature and how service work is discursively constructed, the following research questions guided this study: RQ1: How do restaurant workers construct and enact occupational identities? RQ2: How do restaurant workers negotiate stigmatized d/Discourses associated with service work?
We described how restaurant workers construct and enact occupational identity by illustrating occupational ideals including flexibility, empathy, emotion management, and teamwork

Summary

Introduction

As of 2020 and before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the restaurant industry, more than 10 million people worked in food and beverage service in the United States [1]. More than six in ten U.S adults have worked in the restaurant industry at some point in their lives [2]. The food and beverage service industry is increasingly central to American culture [5], its workforce is treated as disposable, with the highest rates of employee turnover [6] and sexual harassment [7] across industries, as well as meager pay and lack of stability [1]. Restaurant work is routinely framed as transitory and less meaningful than other “real” jobs [9]

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