Abstract
With Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy, Richard Ocejo has written a brilliant account of how blue-collar and service jobs can, in the right context, be successfully “creatified.” He has also, in the process, produced an empirically fascinating set of four case studies set in the context of a broad range of important theoretical issues and debates. He focuses on four occupations, located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate New York: cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole-animal butcher shop workers. For each occupation he used the research strategy that made sense for that occupation. He studied craft distilleries by working in one and doing field work in two others. He examined butchery by working for a year at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, located in the Chelsea Market on Manhattan’s Far West Side. For the world of men’s barbering, he spent many hours sitting in the barber’s saloon at Freeman’s Sporting Club in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. To study cocktail bartenders, he just conducted fieldwork at a range of bars.
He concluded that most of the people in the four occupations he studied found the work meaningful, with many intrinsic rewards. Although each occupation was a “manual labor” job, the workers he studied derived considerable purpose and satisfaction from what they did. They did so by focusing on the quality of the services they provided, the social interactions they had in the workplace, and the quality of the products they made, the combination of which Ocejo calls the workers’ “cultural repertoires.” This finding, as he continually stresses, would not have been predicted from the low prestige often assigned to these occupations. In his words: “While people from certain social backgrounds would have once dismissed, overlooked, or shunned the low status of these occupations, the presence of these cultural repertoires leads these workers to pursue and take pride in them” (pp. xx–xxi).
Ocejo has a range of explanations for what he found. He points to the rise of “cultural omnivorousness,” in which the rising generation of the middle and upper-middle class are as likely to appreciate hip-hop and beer as classical music and wine. As a result, spending the day cutting up meat can be seen by those who do it, as well as by those who associate with them and buy their products, as artisanal and thoughtful work. This occupation is also at the center of the ecological/environmental movement (e.g., “grass fed, grain finished” beef).
Likewise, cocktail bartenders are now making some of the same decisions as celebrity chefs, such as introducing local ingredients and coming up with new recipes, and are constantly tasting and refining their concoctions. Making the right sounds is central for them, too, as in the violent and stylistic shaking of a cocktail, which the bartenders perform in theatrical mode. Similarly, barbers present themselves as stylists and innovators, on the frontier of changing notions of masculinity. The barbers Ocejo studied could often recognize, on the street by his hairstyle, someone whose hair had been cut at their shop.
Ocejo has a terrific discussion of the expertise that customers often expect from these workers. One category of customers, the “curious,” want to learn. They ask about the ingredients in the drink that is being mixed for them, or about the difference between the various razors the barber is using, or about the distinction in chickens between “organic” and “hormone-free,” or about the difference between shoulder side and loin side racks of pork (turns out shoulder side is fattier), or about how best to cook the meats they purchase.
Ocejo has fully researched the history of the four occupations on which he focuses. For example, for bartending he finds the first use of “cocktail” in print in the United States to be 1803. He then traces the ascendance of the cocktail, spurred by transportation and refrigeration technologies that made possible an exotic mixture of ingredients, including fruits, that could not previously be combined and which led to the “golden age” of the cocktail from 1870 to 1920, which was then destroyed by Prohibition. It took decades for the bartender profession to recover from this shock, which Ocejo documents as beginning to happen after the 1990s.
Richard Florida in 2002 published his classic The Rise of the Creative Class, where he argued that nowadays the occupational world is marked by the rise of two great classes. First, “the creative class”—whom he defined as workers in science and technology, arts, culture and entertainment, healthcare, law, and management—whose occupations, he stressed, are based on mental or creative labor. This class, he argued, is doing fine economically. The second great class provided a contrast: this is the service class, who prepare and serve food, carry out routine clerical and administrative tasks, provide home and personal health assistance, do janitorial work, and so forth. The service class, substantially larger than “the creative class” (almost half of the workforce), is doing far less well economically and in other ways.
Florida argued that the solution was to “creatify” service jobs. Ocejo’s research provides an invaluable example for some of the ways this “creatifying” has, and is, occurring. The issues are extremely complex, as Ocejo says and shows in detail throughout. His book is an outstanding contribution to the rich empirical and theoretical issues that inform this ongoing debate.