Labor, culture, and capital in corporate fast food restaurant franchises: Global and local interactions among an immigrant workforce in New York City.
Item
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Title
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Labor, culture, and capital in corporate fast food restaurant franchises: Global and local interactions among an immigrant workforce in New York City.
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Identifier
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AAI9707140
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identifier
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9707140
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Creator
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Parker, Jennifer Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Sharon Zukin
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Economics, Labor
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a qualitative study of labor and cultural processes in corporate fast food restaurant franchises in New York City. Immigrants from virtually every continent in the world, but mainly from the Third World, provide a growing labor supply to corporate fast food restaurants in New York City. I show how a multitude of factors including both structural and cultural demands of the industry and various features to do with this immigrant labor supply shape a workforce that is globally and culturally diverse. I examine seven restaurants in three different New York City areas: Chinatown Manhattan, Washington Heights, and Downtown Brooklyn, and show how the social stratification of a fast food workforce turns out to be geographically shaped and culturally defined according to local characteristics of these neighborhoods and districts. I find that recruitment and hiring practices linked to immigrant social networks work to reinforce and reproduce patterns of social stratification among a fast food workforce in New York City. But fast food restaurants tend to employ ethnically diverse workforces, rather than homogenous groups of "co-ethnics." This diversity is reinforced by social class diversity, where people from a range of family backgrounds, work experiences, and life chances come together in the fast food restaurant. Culture, ethnicity, and social class in the fast food restaurant, then, is seen in the context of a larger global and ethnic hierarchy among immigrants in New York's labor market. I also show how the shifting technical and social organization of the fast food restaurant affects the way immigrants are organized in this industry. Most importantly, a growing emphasis on "service interaction" (which parallels the implementation of new technologies such as computerized registers) has affected cultural and gender divisions of labor, and cultured and gendered based opportunity in the restaurant. Further, I explore social relations within the workforce, showing how racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity shapes relations, perceptions, attitudes and biases among different groups new to New York's labor market. I show how these relations shape culturally and ethnically based experiences as well as employment opportunities and chances for mobility among employees. I then broaden my focus to explore the role the fast food job plays in people's lives and households, showing how low-wage fast food employment fits into employees' life-long occupational trajectories, and, the extent to which employees and their families do or do not depend on fast food wages today, not only as a "first" job, but also as a "moonlighting" job, a second or third job, or, as a job of "last resort.".
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
