Scientific Management

Title:Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life.

Author(s):Rob B. Briner.

Source:Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 69.n3 (Sept 1996): p.p311(3). (2073 words) From Expanded Academic ASAP.

Document Type:Magazine/Journal

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Full Text :COPYRIGHT 1996 British Psychological Society (UK)

Perhaps the most puzzling and disappointing feature of the discipline of psychology is just how little it helps us to understand ordinary human behaviour. I would guess that most of us started to study psychology in the vain hope that it would provide us with profound insights into why people do things. However, we soon come to learn that psychology isn't quite like that. Although it does help us to understand some aspects of human behaviour, it does not consider the ordinary and mundane aspects of life - the everyday ebb and flow - which seem to characterize much of our actual experience. The same is also true of the contribution occupational and organizational psychology makes to understanding everyday working life. However, each of these books, written not by occupational and organizational psychologists but by sociologists and organizational behaviour researchers, helps to shed some light on ordinary work experience.

In Fast Food. Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life Robin Leidner offers a rich, illuminating and compelling account of the ways in which work experience can be heavily routinized and, in some cases, quite literally scripted for service workers. Although the parallels with Taylorism are obvious, Leidner refuses to make obvious comparisons and easy moral judgments. Rather, through interviews and participant observation in two organizations she provides a detailed description and analysis of how service workers learn and perform routinized work.

Following two introductory chapters setting out the context for work, a further two chapters describe her fieldwork in McDonald's studying counter servers and in Combined Insurance studying life insurance agents. In both of these organizations she took part in training courses, observed and interviewed trainers, managers and workers, and worked in McDonald's for several months after her training. McDonald's is, of course, the epitome of routinized service work and Leidner's vivid account of McDonald's main management training centre, Hamburger University, shows just how this routinization is instilled into trainees.

At first glance, it is tempting to regard what goes on at Hamburger University as simply amusing: The University is situated in a beautiful 'campus' which also contains two custom-built lakes, 'Lake Ed' and 'Lake Fred' (named after two senior executives); successful trainees receive diplomas which proclaim them to be 'Doctors of Hamburgerology'; the trainers are entitled 'professors' and the director the 'dean'; and one of the aims of the training is to produce managers who have 'ketchup in their veins' (p. 54). A longer look, however, shows that what actually goes on at Hamburger University is deeply serious. The full training programme for managers and franchisees takes from 600 to 1000 hours to complete (following several years' work experience at McDonald's stores) and in addition to teaching management skills and corporate standards, McDonald's also '. . . works on the personalities of its managers' (p. 55). So, in addition to learning answers to questions such as 'what is the height of an English muffin?' and the contents of the 600-page operations and training 'bible', training also covers transactional analysis, and dispenses a 'large dose of personal-growth cheerleading' (p. 55). Leidner argues that this kind of training is vital in an organization such as McDonald's which largely employs part-time temporary staff. The managers and franchisees alone are responsible for the quality control and the transmission of corporate standards to McDonald's employees and customers.

This responsibility extends to the in-store training of counter servers (or the 'window crew') using videos and other materials produced at Hamburger University. It was this training that Leidner received when she started her job at a store in a small city near Chicago. The training covered the Station Operation Checklist which gives a detailed description of every task (e.g. the precise quantities of ketchup and mustard for different kinds of hamburger, the arm motion to be used in salting a batch of fries), the store's rules and regulations, the dress code and personal appearance rules, and the Six Steps of Window Service. New employees were also required to sign a polygraph consent form which Leidner felt somewhat undermined the 'one big happy family motif of the orientation videotape' (p. 66). In addition to her own observations and detailed fieldnotes Leidner conducted interviews with other members of the window crew during breaks and after shifts. Two of many striking observations she makes are first, that even where service work is highly routinized and standardization and uniformity is 'a goal in itself' (p. 84), franchisees, managers and crew members do deviate from the routines they have been taught even though sticking to the routines 'would have produced more efficient and pleasant service' (p. 84). Second, she points out that customers also become routinized in their transactions with service providers (e.g. customers learn to ask for products in the order crew workers are required to take them) and that without this cooperation or compliance the routines would be less efficient.

In Leidner's second organization, Combined Insurance, the routinization of the work of insurance agents was taken much further than the work of McDonald's crews. The agents' routine was literally scripted and included instructions about when and how to walk, use different body postures, maintain or lose eye contact, and even what joke to tell: 'This policy is so good that the president of our company says . . . "once you have it, you will live forever!!!" How's that?' (p. 109). In the training course Leidner attended, trainees were resistant to delivering the Standard Joke as part of the routine. The trainer, Mark, 'willingly conceded that the joke was not funny, but he insisted that it worked well as a means of dispelling tension, especially