Organizational Time: Temporal Demands and the Experience of Work in Restaurant Kitchens

Critical Analysis

Time, alone, is difficult to conceptualize; breaking time into smaller dimensions provides a way to consider how the idea of time becomes a phenomenon of time, and then impacts actual experiences (that, of course, occur over time.) Lauer provides five concepts of the organization of time; these include periodicity (or rhythm), tempo and speed, timing (the synchronization of activities, which can be purposefully adjusted—“adjusting the timing of something”), duration, and sequence. These five elements impact job performance and experiential negotiation of workers and work.

Time in restaurant work is particularly vivid, as a restaurant kitchen is highly dynamic, visual and experiential, and things that happen in a kitchen are typically explicitly time-bound. Customers expect meals within a certain amount of time. Items in an order come in a sequence. The kitchen operates across customers, and so time of customer-task are distributed. Food ingredients have a bounded amount of time before they go bad. In observing restaurants, Fine focuses on the relationship of the five concepts of the organization in time, and identifies a number of ways environment impacts the passage of “restaurant time.”

Both customer processing and food processing have clearly articulated boundaries and relationships to time. Customer processing time is subjective (the time of day a restaurant is open, for example, is entirely at the control of the restaurant owner), but once bounded, time becomes a contract or commitment. Food processing time is objective, and a kitchen is beholden to nature.

The actual experience of cooking, and the time related to cooking, is deeply related to synchronization and dexterity. A kitchen is limited in size and number of employees, and serving multiple customers with staggered schedules and inconsistent orders means acting with choreography. Time-based synchronization is bracketed, with brackets acting as artificial boundaries to make work tractable. Choreography and artificial time boundaries are familiar in other contexts, such as acting and plays, and the metaphor of a performance is commonly referenced by research participants as a way of organizing the time of prep.

Research participants offered a “just right” approach to stress, anxiety, and “temporal overloads”, such as a rush of customers all at once. The author presents the idea of “backstage” as a space where chaos may occur, but customers watching the “frontstage” must remain oblivious to any time-based challenges. Some cooks find the rush and performative nature particularly valuable, as a high where “you’re just cranking.”

Fine argues that emotions are intertwined in the experience of time. “Too much to do in too short a time can lead to anger, while not enough to do for a long time is boring; a fit between time and attention characterizes an experience of flow.” Synchronization becomes of the most culturally considered part of time in organizations, where it becomes obvious that work is relational and must be structured to reinforce cooperation.Time, then, bounds the “lived experience of organizational life.” Time creates social control, which has an immediate impact on workers. Workers then partially evade the control to manage the inconsistencies of time, and this provides a mechanism for workers to “structure their jobs to make them self-satisfying and to provide themselves with some measure of autonomy.” Fine concludes that “organization, emotion and time are intimately linked.”

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Provides a framework (Lauer's, not Fine's) for thinking about time
• Connects time, experience, emotion, and power/control
• Legitimizes time as a quality of communal experiences
• Uses performance as a metaphor, in a very similar way as studio culture an crit is considered.