Overview

What does it feel like to work in the hospitality industry? Over 50 years of research into working lives has bequeathed us many and mixed images. One of the most persistent of these is of the actor (or con-artist) waiter who emerges from a squalid back of house to deliver a wonderful performance to the guest. The guests are made to feel that they are in control but all of the time it is the waiter who is calling the shots. This image is perhaps best summed up in the following, much quoted, extract from Orwell s (1933) description of his life working in hotels in Paris in the 1930s:

It is an Instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped off in an instant. He glides over the carpet with a solemn priest-like air And you (cannot) help thinking, as you (see) him bow and smile, with the benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer (is) put to shame by having such an aristocrat serve him.

The same ideas can also be found in Goffman s (1959) description of a Shetland hotel in the 1950s, in Mars and Nicod s (1984) work on the cons and scams of waiters and...