Café Ethnography : the uses of tables and chairs

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Café Ethnography: being as we noted earlier that it is a summons for the staff's attention to the entering customer(s) to look up from their busy food preparation and see if they recognise anyone entering and ought to greet them. Equally the staff's glance provides for a quick check on whether the incoming customers are going to illicitly reserve a seat. And of course the bell makes a little tinkle when customers at the café finally take their leave. 24
Closing Remarks Café Ethnography: Returning to the questions raised by and for the Living Memory project: firstly, whether cafés were less rule bound and looser arenas of action than workplaces and secondly, whether people had greater freedom to 'play' with their social roles in such places. It is worth noting firstly that recent work on organisations in action has observed that they run in an informal mode most of the time (Boden 1994), and reflexive play with social roles is actively encouraged in many workplaces (Adkins 1998; Crang 1997). Further, although customers in cafes do not have to do the kinds of complex articulation work which typically characterises the organisational settings investigated by ethnographers (Schmidt 1994), customers attending cafés are still required to engage in the socio-material ordering of the places of which they are (passing) members (i.e. by not reserving tables when it is busy, carrying their drinks to their tables, making their plates & cutlery look ready for collection by the staff, sharing tables graciously when the café is busy etc.). 'Informality' comes with normative expectations as much as formality does, and to ignore them is to invite assessments of one's social competence, lack of manners, character, sanity etc. In 'open regions' according to Goffman (1963), such as cafés and bars, many of the changed norms are to do with behaviour towards strangers in terms of deference and status, whereby hierarchies are played down to some extent. Each person in a café of bar is ideally the social equal of one another. The common knowledge that we have underlined in this article is that we are not all 'strangers' to one another in public spaces and in a place such as a café organise ourselves into staff, regular customers, new customers, table sharers etc. As incumbents of these categories we also shift between them according to sequenced actions. It is not only human role players that shift categories since we have also underlined the changing significance of artefacts such as tables, doors, cutlery and coats. Even without doing comparative studies of other cafés we can say that by the same means that the Flaming Cup was assembled as a neighbourhood café or (Wakeford 1999)'s 'NetCafe' as a cybercafé not all cafés are the same. They display themselves in various ways to allow them to be recognised as neighbourhood, designer, artistic, family cafés etc. and to be found as such by their potential customers. At this point a social critique could be launched of these informal place's part in securing the status quo rather than really evading social hierarchies by re-inforcing exclusionary practices and reproducing dominant ideologies of class. Since in ordinary terms: there are cafés that are for the posh and cafés for the poor, and this is noticeable from more than just the cost of a cup of coffee. Indeed objections may be raised by theorists of the public sphere (Habermas 1989) or informality and trust (Fukuyama 1995) (Misztal 2000) that this article has detailed located practices and their artefacts rather than building theories or models. Our ambition in treating public spaces in this way is to show that such apparently over-arching topics are the properties of debates in the social sciences rather than the very stuff of café life, except of course in situations where someone like Habermas is sharing a table with some other social theorists 25 . 25 Ordinary actors do not 'ground' their actions in the rules or criteria of the public sphere of Modernity as formalised a priori and the basis of our ethnomethodological investigation of spatial practice is that we are trying to recover the located rationalities of ordinary activities by signposting the features of 25
Page 1 and 2: Café Ethnography: An ethnography o
Page 3 and 4: Café Ethnography: The authors of t
Page 5 and 6: Ethnographic studies of table waiti
Page 7 and 8: Café Ethnography: At ground level
Page 9 and 10: Selecting a table Café Ethnography
Page 11 and 12: Café Ethnography: Returning to the
Page 13 and 14: Fig. 2 A table in a different place
Page 15 and 16: The tabletop as a sequential phenom
Page 17 and 18: Café Ethnography: ways of indicati
Page 19 and 20: Café Ethnography: As we noted earl
Page 21 and 22: Café Ethnography: Regulars can be
Page 23: Café Ethnography: between the staf
Page 27 and 28: Bibliography Café Ethnography: Adk
Page 29 and 30: Café Ethnography: 2000 Informality

Café Ethnography : the uses of tables and chairs

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