Machines, People, and Social Interaction in “Third-Wave” Coffeehouses
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/journal.v3i8.527Keywords:
Coffee, space, ethnomethodology, machine-human interactionAbstract
Coffeehouses have a long history as not only spaces of and for consumption but also as social settings that facilitate and encourage public sociality even in an epoch in which such spaces for sociability are alleged to be fading away. This paper comprises a study of coffeehouses with analytic perspectives and priorities that are very different from past research on this social form. The empirical focus here is on so-called “third wave” coffeehouses, which view coffee as an artisanal product and which deploy, among other resources, high-end equipment in their beverage creation. This equipment is itself an additional empirical focus, and the ways in which traditional face-to-face sociability and, in particular, interaction between customers and employees is facilitated by those machines is considered here. The theoretical perspective used here is ethnomethodological and as such a central concern with describing lived experience at these venues is accomplished by considering photographic evidence of machines and people in situ to see how machines, people, spaces and comestibles interact in these cafes.References
Abaza, M. (2001) “Shopping malls, consumer culture and the reshaping of public space in Egypt.” Theory,Culture and Society 18(5): 97-122
Altheide, D. L. (1987) "Ethnographic content analysis." Qualitative Sociology 10(1): 65-77
Arjomand, S (2004). “Coffeehouses, guilds and oriental despotism government and civil society in jate 17th to early 18th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, and as seen from Paris and London.” European Journal of Sociology 45(1):23-42
Bowman, B. (2008) “Starbucks as demographic indicator.” The Maynard Institute, http://www.mije.org/bobbibowman/starbucks
Bryman, (2004) The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage.
Calhoun, C. (1993) “Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere.” Pp. 1-51 in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed.
C. Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cowan, B. (2005) The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Francis, D. and S. Hester. (2004) An Invitation to Ethnomethodology: Language, Society, and Interaction. London: Sage Publictations.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Gaudio, R. (2003) “Coffeetalk: Starbucks and the commercialization of conversation.” Language in Society 32(5):659-691
Gold, J. (2008) “LA mill: The latest buzz.” LA Weekly, http://www.laweekly.com/2008-03-13/eat-drink/the-latest-buzz
Gottdiener, M. (2000) “The consumption of space and the spaces of consumption.” In New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture, and Commodification, ed. Gottdiener, M., pp. 265-285. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Gottdiener, Mark. (2001) The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments. Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Habermas, J. (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger (1989). London: Polity.
Haine, W. (1996) The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914. London: John Hopkins University Press.
Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Husserl, E. (1911) "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft." Logos 1(2): 289-341
Hutchens, W. (2014) Caffeinated PDX: How Portland Became the Best Coffee City in America. Portland: HFC Media.
Komecoglu, U. (2005) “The publicness and sociabilities of the Ottoman coffeehouse.” Javnost/The Public 12(2):5-22
Laurier, E. (2008) “Drinking up: Conversational resources of the café.” Language & Communication, 28 (2):165-181
Laurier, E. and C. Philo. (2007) “'A parcel of muddling muckworms': Revisiting Habermas and the English coffee house.” Social and Cultural Geography 8(2):259-281
Laurier, E., A. Whyte, and K. Buckner. (2001) "An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: Informality, table arrangements and background noise." Journal of Mundane Behavior 2(2):195-232
Lyons, J. (2005) “’Think Seattle, act globally’: Specialty coffee, commodity biographies and the promotion of place.” Cultural Studies 19(4):14-34
Manzo, J. (2005) "Social control and the management of 'personal' space in shopping malls." Space and Culture 8(1):83-97
Manzo, J, (2010) “Coffee, connoisseurship, and an ethnomethodologically-informed sociology of taste.” Human Studies 33(2-3):141-155
Milligan, M. (1998) “Interactional past and potential: The social construction of place attachment.” Symbolic Interaction 21(1):1-33
Neuschwander, H. (2012) Left Coast Roast: A Guide to the Best Coffee and Roasters from San Francisco to Seattle. Portland: Timber Press.
Oldenburg, R. (1991) The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon House.
Oldenburg, R. (1997) “Our vanishing ‘third places.’” Planning Commissioners’ Journal, 25(1)
Prout, A. (1996) “Actor-network theory, technology and medical sociology: An illustrative analysis of the metered dose inhaler.” Sociology of Health and Illness 18(2):198-219
Shaw-Garlock, G. (2011) “Loving machines: Theorizing human and sociable-technology interaction.” Pp. 1-10 in Lamers, M. and F. Verbeek (eds), Human-Robot Personal Relationships: Third International Conference, HRPR 2010, Leiden, The Netherlands, June 23-24, 2010, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin: Springer
Suchman, L. (2003) “Human/Machine reconsidered.” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc040ls.html
Talbot, J. (2004) Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain. Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littefield
Young, J. and G. Simpson. (2014) The London Coffee Guide. London: Allegra
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).