Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Spring 5-6-2026

Faculty Advisor(s)

Steven Pfaff

Abstract

Industrial and white-collar work has been thoroughly examined as exploitative and alienating in the sociological study of work. As the nature of work rapidly evolves, service work has emerged as the dominant sector of the economy. The literature identifies significant structural differences in service work, which complicate the historical understanding of workers’ experiences. Existing food service ethnographies have found that workers ultimately experienced autonomy in their work across varying conditions. I seek to examine how restaurant servers experience their work within the restaurant structure. This ethnography examines a large brewery in Orange County, CA, drawing on four months of detailed field notes of participant observation. I utilize the negotiated order perspective to examine how servers continuously construct the restaurant's social order through their behavior. I find that servers negotiate nearly every aspect of their roles, mostly horizontally among coworkers rather than vertically with management. I argue that the server role is created by the restaurant structure but permits thorough negotiation through server behavior and that servers experience these negotiations as an expression of autonomy. I describe the brewery's culture as a “hustle culture,” embraced and reinforced by workers through this process of negotiation. This study offers insight into the fundamental question of why workers accept conditions like “hustling,” historically understood as exploitative, arguing that workers are agentic actors in shaping the conditions of their work.

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Presented at the Spring 2026 Student Scholar Symposium at Chapman University.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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