This page has only limited features, please log in for full access.
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.
Kyle Hanners; Shawna Malvini Redden. Communicating Values to Cultivate Sustainable Occupational Identity: How Restaurant Workers Resist Service Work Stigma. Sustainability 2021, 13, 8587 .
AMA StyleKyle Hanners, Shawna Malvini Redden. Communicating Values to Cultivate Sustainable Occupational Identity: How Restaurant Workers Resist Service Work Stigma. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (15):8587.
Chicago/Turabian StyleKyle Hanners; Shawna Malvini Redden. 2021. "Communicating Values to Cultivate Sustainable Occupational Identity: How Restaurant Workers Resist Service Work Stigma." Sustainability 13, no. 15: 8587.
Change is a constant feature of organizing and one that requires resilience, or the ability to effectively face challenges. Although research demonstrates important findings about resilience during chaotic change like crises, less is known about resilience in mundane situations like planned change. This study explores team-driven planned organizational change, offering insights about how team members metaphorically frame change how their framing fluctuates over time relative to perceptions of team success. Our three theoretical contributions extend theory about metaphors and organizational change, showing how negative framings of change are endemic to teams, regardless of perceived success; generate knowledge about resilience in organizing by showing how metaphors both build and undermine resilience; and extend applied theory about stakeholder participation in bureaucratic organizations.
Shawna Malvini Redden; Lou Clark; Sarah J. Tracy; Michael S. Shafer. How metaphorical framings build and undermine resilience during change: A longitudinal study of metaphors in team-driven planned organizational change. Communication Monographs 2019, 86, 501 -525.
AMA StyleShawna Malvini Redden, Lou Clark, Sarah J. Tracy, Michael S. Shafer. How metaphorical framings build and undermine resilience during change: A longitudinal study of metaphors in team-driven planned organizational change. Communication Monographs. 2019; 86 (4):501-525.
Chicago/Turabian StyleShawna Malvini Redden; Lou Clark; Sarah J. Tracy; Michael S. Shafer. 2019. "How metaphorical framings build and undermine resilience during change: A longitudinal study of metaphors in team-driven planned organizational change." Communication Monographs 86, no. 4: 501-525.