One of the things that immediately struck me about the Rose paper was the
agency he attributes to tipping as a mediator of how a waitress approaches
her work.
Now here is a puzzle. If I reflect on how I, a diner, experience being
waited on in American restaurants on the one hand, and New Zealand ones on
the other, then the differences are not to do with the way in which I am
treated or the quality of the service I receive, but are to do with the
fundamental cultural differences of a predisposition towards extroversion or
introversion, hurry-hurry versus laid back (although on the whole it takes
me no longer to complete a meal in an NZ restaurant than it does in a
similar US one), and so on.
This is a puzzle in terms of Rose's paper because tipping is not something
that happens in NZ. And despite the huge recent increases of foreign
tourists whose expectations are to tip, our restaurant trade has so far
managed to deter most of them from doing so (this is done explicitly in
'Welcome to NZ' pamphlets for tourists) while they are here.
So if, as Rose suggests, American restaurant staff work for speed of
throughput plus happy customers at least partly because of the prospect of
the amount they will take home in tips, what is it that causes most NZ
waiting staff to behave in broadly the same way?
One difference is that NZ waiting staff generally receive somewhat more than
the minimum wage, but it is still a low paid job, and that alone cannot
explain why high throughput in family restaurants is worked for by waiting
staff.
So my speculation is that the other factors that Rose talks about - a desire
for self-esteem, intrisic pleasure in social contact with other people, and
so on - may be more important than Rose credits. There are other possible
explanations I can think of - some of them economic - but one would have to
replicate Rose's interviews and observations with a New Zealand sample to
find out.
So why do I find this interesting? Because it seems to me to demonstrate how
in the activity of research we filter what we observe through the lens of
our own deeply embedded cultural assumptions when we come to try and make
sense of our data. This is one reason why we find DWR so much more
satisfying a frame. By conducting research in a way which co-constructs
meaning we stand a better chance of standing aside from our own cultural
assumptions.
However it seems to me that while Rose elegantly crosses the boundaries
between working class (waitressing) America and middle class (academic)
America, he fails to transcend America itself. Hence he is led into
unexamined assumptions about the mediating effect of the culturally
instantiated practice of tipping. Yrjo works in both Finland and America. I
would love to see him address this topic. Mike Cole addresses these matters
tangentially in his report on the Velikhov-Hamburg Project, but I am not
aware of his specifically addressing the issue of the cultural mediation of
the way in which a researcher makes sense of research data on social
systems.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
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