Kitchen Antics: The Importance of Humor and Maintaining Professionalism at Work

Abstract

The role of humor in workplace organizing is examined through a year-long ethnography of a hotel kitchen. An institutional and communicative frame reveals how the chefs use everyday humor to make sense of and shape their labor processes and to maintain their professional autonomy and identity and to resist managerial control of their craft.

Keywords:

• Workplace Humor
• Professional Identity
• Organizational Sensemaking
• Resistance
• Control

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Charlie Conrad, John Lammers, Yvonna Lincoln, Scott Poole, and Linda Putnam for their help.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Owen Hanley Lynch

Owen Hanley Lynch is an Assistant Professor at Southern Methodist University