Racialized and Classed Contexts: Shifting Audiences and Changes in Emotional Labor Among Restaurant Servers
This ethnographic study examines the importance of context in the emotional labor of restaurant servers. While the emotional labor of workers in the service industry has been studied extensively, little attention has been paid to the differing audiences and demands of restaurant servers in the front and backstages and the ways these spaces and performances are racialized and classed. Relying on organizational materials, face to face interviews, and participant observation conducted from September through December 2013, this article addresses this gap. Findings indicate that the emotional labor that servers engage in the frontstage is processed in backstage spaces where servers interact out of earshot of customers. In this space, servers mitigate the stress associated with the emotional labor demands from the frontstage by relying on racialized and classed discourse about their customers, processes that may, in turn, contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies.