Collaboration and competition in cultural fields: non-core high-end cuisines in global cities

ABSTRACT

This paper examines global flows of culinary cultural knowledge, expertise and practitioners from previously culturally peripheral countries/cultures to two global cities in core countries – London and New York. Our paper finds that, contrary to Bourdieu’s claims, “struggle in the field” is not an invariable attribute of cultural fields. Instead, the high-end culinary field shows substantial evidence of collaboration between chefs. We explain this finding by showing the special characteristics of the culinary field in the last odd decade, and by undertaking an in-depth examination of chefs’ habitus and strategies of entry and legitimation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural products
• fields
• cultural agents
• high-end cuisine
• global cities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Like other scholars (e.g., Casanova 2004; Buchholz 2018), we see economic and symbolic power at the global level closely intertwined but with the latter not reducible to the former. Hence we adopt a perspective of a cultural world system and insert the concepts of core and periphery into it to explore whether dominance over the periphery by the core is still invariably the case.

2. While the demand for French cuisine by diners has fallen in both cities, French cuisine is still highly valued by many chefs who recognize the enduring value of its set of techniques.

3. Whereas restaurants in Tokyo and Osaka in 2020 were awarded 226 and 98 stars respectively, Paris and Lyon could claim only 119 and 20 respectively.

4. For further details on the two culinary intermediaries, see Lane (2016, 2019); for an analysis of only the W50B list, see Hatinoglu et al. (2017).

5. While the Michelin Guide has been accused of favoring French cuisine and attempting to maintain its place at the apex of the culinary hierarchy, the current geographical spread of its rating activity and award of stars on all continents, safe Australia and Africa, make this accusation unsustainable.

6. The way in which rankings are established, in particular the W50B list, provides some openings for indirect intervention by individual chefs (e.g., inviting influential opinion-makers to their restaurants) and government-sponsored efforts to promote national cuisines.

7. Although designating a cuisine as national has been viewed as problematic in the theoretical literature (e.g., Mintz 1996), it is still a widely followed practice, and when dealing with the export of a domestic cuisine there is no alternative designation.

8. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this distinction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christel Lane

Christel Lane is Professor Emeritus of Economic Sociology, a member of the Department of Sociology and a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published numerous books and papers in a wide range of journals. Among her books are The Rites of Rulers (CUP 1981); Management and Labor in Europe (Edward Elgar 1989); Industry and Society in Europe (Edward Elgar 1995); Trust Within and Between Organizations (with R. Bachmann, OUP 1998); National Capitalisms, Global Production Networks, Fashioning the value chain in the UK, USA and Germany (with Jocelyn Probert, OUP 2009), Capitalist Diversity and Diversity within Capitalism (edited with Geoffrey Wood, Routledge 2012), The Cultivation of Taste: Chefs and the Organization of Fine Dining (OUP 2014) and From Taverns to Gastropubs: Food, Drink, and Sociality in England (OUP 2018). Prof Lane has served on the editorial boards of The British Journal of Sociology, Work, Employment and Society and Socio-Economic Review. She is Past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) and has served as a member of its Executive Council of SASE, as well as of the Scientific Advisory Board, Soziologisches Forschungsinstitut Goettingen/Germany.

M. Pilar Opazo

M. Pilar Opazo is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. She is the author of Appetite for Innovation (Columbia University Press) and the coauthor of two Spanish-language volumes, Communications in Organizations and Negotiation: Competing or Collaborating. Her work has been published in Organization Studies, Sociological Theory and Poetics. Prior to Boston College, Pilar was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Columbia Graduate School of Business and the MIT Sloan School of Management.