mundane
behavior
journal of mundane behavior
2.2 (june 2001)
schaffer, introduction: social
change and everyday life
sawyer, the improvisational
performance of everyday life
chandler & nelson, common
experience as the source for the
dialogical classroom
dominguez, holiday at the grocery
store
diggs, the bride, off duty
laurier, whyte & buckner, an
ethnography of a neighbourhood
café
birth, sitting there
mccarron, gratitude
ziguras, narcissism and self-care

Journal of Mundane Behavior
Founding and Managing Editor: Scott Schaffer
Founding Co-Editor: Myron Orleans
Cover Art Coordinator: Nadine Wasserman
Outburst Manager: Naomi Mandel
Editorial Board:
Severyn Bruyn George Psathas
Solomon Davidoff Pedro Daniel Rodriguez
Alan Fair John Sears
Orvar Löfgren Jimmy Dean Smith
Edward Lowe Mark Smith
Naomi Mandel William Sokoloff
Pavaninder Mann Caleb Southworth
Martin McQuillan Kelly Train
Michael Perez Nadine Wasserman
Natasha Pravaz Yung-Hsing Wu
Lorraine Prinsky Troy Zimmer
International Standard Serials Number (ISSN): 1529-3041.
Submission guidelines and other information available on our web site:
http://mundanebehavior.org/. Journal of Mundane Behavior is an online,
interdisciplinary, blind peer-reviewed journal devoted to publicly accessible
analyses of everyday life.
This compilation, © 2001 Journal of Mundane Behavior. The copyright to each
individual article is owned by its author in conjunction with Journal of
Mundane Behavior, and all requests beyond US “fair use” policies must be
approved jointly by the two. Forward all “fair use” requests to:
Journal of Mundane Behavior
Department of Sociology/Anthropology
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PO Box 1002
Millersville, PA 17551-0302 USA
Journal of Mundane Behavior
Volume 2, number 2 (June 2001)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Scott Schaffer, “Introduction: Social Change and Everyday Life” 141
R. Keith Sawyer, “The Improvisational Performance of 149
Everyday Life”
William Chandler and Mike Nelson, “Common Experience 163
as a Source for the Dialogical Classroom”
Cesar Dominguez, “Holiday at the Grocery Store: 175
Conversations with a reformed convict” (interview, part two)
Peggy Diggs, “The Bride, Off Duty” (photo essay) 183
Eric Laurier, Angus Whyte, and Kathy Buckner, “An 195
ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table
arrangements and background noise”
Kevin Birth, “Sitting There: Discourses on the Embodiment 233
of Agency, Belonging and Deference in the Classroom”
Gary McCarron, “Gratitude: Almighty Thanks” 245
Christopher Ziguras, “Narcissism and self-care: theorising 260
America’s obsession with mundane health behaviour”
Call for Papers - Mundane Sex (JMB 3.1, February 2002) 278
Cover image: Martijn Oostra, “Amsterdam © 1996.” ©1996, Martijn Oostra;
© 2001, Martijn Oostra and Journal of Mundane Behavior. Used by permission
of artist: info@oostra.org.

Notes
1 I thank Ed Epping for this observation.
Sources
web sites:
• www.corneliapowell.com
• www.gailwatsoncake.com/tips/traditions.html
• www.weddingmag.com/traditions
• www.wildernessweddings.com/traditions
books:
• McBride-Mellinger, Maria, The Wedding Dress; NY: Random House, 1993
• Monsarrat, Ann, And The Bride Wore...The Story of the White Wedding;
NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1973
About the Artist: Peggy Diggs (peggy.diggs@williams.edu) is an
artist who does temporary public art projects about a variety of social
issues; these have taken the form of billboards, subway posters, bar
coasters and milk cartons, concerning issues such as domestic
violence, teen heroes, elderly inner city women’s fears. Most recently
she has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and will
be teaching at Williams College as of 2001-02.
About the Model: Kate Harris is an actress who has been producing
and acting in Chicago since 1979. She is Artistic Director of Pyewacket
Theatre Company, and co-founder of Bailiwick Repertory.
An ethnography of a neighbourhood café:
informality, table arrangements and background
noise
Eric Laurier, Geography, University of Glasgow (UK)
Angus Whyte, International Teledemocracy Centre, Napier
University (UK)
Kathy Buckner, Information Management, Queen Margaret
University College (UK)
Abstract: Café society is something that many of us as customers
and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we
are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way
partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that
has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen
Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the
development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the
tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the
life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a
selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we
deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation
of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able
we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and
analysing our ethnographic studies.
194 Journal of Mundane Behavior 195
Journal of Mundane Behavior, volume 2, number 2 (June 2001). © 2001, Eric Laurier,
Angus Whyte, Kathy Buckner, and Journal of Mundane Behavior. All rights reserved.

Figure 1. The Flaming Cup
Suburbia. Nestling just off a traffic jammed city road, beside a hairdressers and a
mobile phone shop, yellow paint flaking off to reveal a 60’s funky purple, is the
‘Flaming Cup Café’. In the wind its metal panel cutout cup, with flames, swings
back and forth creaking. On the pavement outside a sandwich board advertises ‘tea,
cakes and sandwiches’ in brightly coloured fake chalk on a blackboard background.
It opens at nine in the morning and is closed by around 4pm. At lunchtime it gets
jam-packed with local residents and office workers because it is one of only two cafés
in a fairly large suburban neighbourhood.
The authors of this article found the Flaming Cup whilst carrying outethnographic fieldwork on a ‘high tech’ ICT project called ‘Living
Memory’ (LiMe). There is not the space here to do justice to the multiple
ambitions of LiMe’s 3 years of research which drew on the skills of concept
designers, interaction designers, creative designers, software engineers,
prototype builders, programmers, web-site developers, information scientists,
ergonomists, psychologists and more (however see Whyte, Laurier and
Buckner 2000). The particular ‘slice of LiMe’ we will present in this article is
based on our ethnographic study of pre-existing communities of practice in
a suburban neighbourhood and also describing what occurred when a
number of prototypes were introduced to the ‘locals’ (see also Whyte, Buckner
& Laurier, forthcoming.). During our fieldwork we dealt with a number of
community settings (primary schools, a small public lending library, a large
shopping mall, a medical centre, 3 pubs, a bi-annual charity fair, a historic
building which housed a local history society, church societies, notice boards
and a residential street).1 In this article the public place we would like to
concentrate on, for a number of reasons, is the Flaming Cup café. As it happens
the Flaming Cup also served as a site for carrying out field trials of a table
with an intelligent information interface.2 Testing our prototype electronic
coffee table in a café provided a wonderful opportunity to do a kind of
‘breaching experiment’ in the socio-material order of such a place, an
intervention which sharpened many of our observations of the ordinary
functioning of the cafe.
Before we move on to our ethnographic work it is worth reviewing
some of the existing literature on the social life of cafes, the particular topics
it has raised and the concerns with public space that arose out of our
collaborative research.
A brief excursion on the historical rise of the café
Cafes and bars came to replace the street as the primary place for the
common gathering of town and city residents in late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century in Britain, Germany, and particularly nineteenth century
France and Italy. In nineteenth century Britain, long after the golden epoch
of the coffee houses, cafes and later tearooms were split off from bars which
sold liquor, while in France and Italy no such strong division was made.
Without going into any great detail it is worth noting that as a result of this
historical evolution cafes in Britain have some key differences from those
found in other countries in Europe by dint of this lengthy separation from
the consumption of alcohol. Cafes in the UK have tended to specialise in
providing tea, coffee and other soft drinks, along with simple dishes.3 They
tend to keep the same opening times as high street shops (i.e. 9-5.30-ish and
Monday to Saturday). In the last decade of the twentieth century in the UK
cafes and bars have begun to merge into places closer to their French or
Italian counterparts. Bars have extended their function into the provision of
quality food and non-alcoholic hot drinks. Meanwhile many cafes have
sought licenses to sell alcohol and extended their evening opening hours
(sometimes beyond those of bars). At the same time there has been a more
general boom in coffee drinking at the expense of both tea and alcohol, which
has lead to numerous new franchises such as Costa Coffee, Starbucks and
Café Nero opening places which might once again be called ‘coffee houses’.
196 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 197

Historical sociologists such as Jürgen Habermas (1989) have rooted
grand claims about the rise of the public sphere in amongst the everyday
world of coffee houses in Britain, salons in France and Tischgesellschaften (table
societies) in Germany. These were places, according to Habermas, where a
new form of public life involving politics, letters and culture could emerge
from the previous opposition between the private realm of civil society and
the family, and the public sphere of the state and the court. Habermas points
toward the manner in which periodicals such as the Guardian Newspaper
and the Spectator Magazine were intimately interwoven with the coffee
houses in the early eighteenth century. Coffee houses were places where
affairs of the state, national events of the day, notorious court cases, political
scandals and civil etiquette were discussed and argued over. They were places
where sociable reading occurred, since it was the reading of journals and
periodicals in the cafes that provided the basis for the talk of public life that
occurred (Haine 1996). So interlinked were the coffee houses and the reading
of periodicals that letters to the editors of these papers could be submitted
directly at the coffee houses in specially designed post boxes (Habermas 1989,
p42). Coffee houses, as Habermas elegantly celebrates them -
…preserved a kind of social intercourse that, far from pre-supposing
the equality of status , disregarded status altogether. The tendency
replaced the celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals. The parity
on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert
itself against that of social hierarchy and in the end carry the day
meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of “common humanity”.
Private gentlemen made up the public not just in the sense that power
and prestige of public office were held in suspense; economic
dependencies also in principle had no influence. Laws of the market
were suspended as were laws of the state. Not that this idea of the
public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses; but as
an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an
objective claim. (Habermas 1989, p36)
Picking up once again on these utopian qualities of cafes though this time
with reference to nineteenth century working class cafes in France, Haine
(1996) proposes the ideal of a café of that place and period -
The café provided an opportune space in which to create relations
based on spontaneous solidarity. This fleeting fraternity rested on
three values. The first was selectivity - that is, the freedom of
participants in café sociability to converse with whomever they
wished. The second value was autonomy - the right not to be
interrupted by third parties once you had begun to talk with a
particular person or group. The third involved the idea of tolerance
- that is, the concept that no one in the café should take offense at the
minor irritations and insults that accompanied socializing in a small
space amid a dense urban agglomeration. (Haine 1996, p150)
From even this very brief reading of the socio-historical literature on cafés
we can get a sense then of cafés as places where social status is on a quite
different footing than in a palace, council chamber or family kitchen. They
are public places where common codes of conduct are adhered to, informal
and yet as Haine hints there are values specific to them as places of that type
which guide norms of behaviour for their customers.4
Ethnographic studies of table waiting work and cyber-cafes
In Haine’s historical descriptions of working class cafés in Paris he
provides a rich fund of details on their operation and the etiquette that was
expected in each. He does much in fact to give life to Habermas’ somewhat
scant depiction of cafés as places where ‘ideas’ could become institutionalised.
In our ethnographic work we have sought to avoid using a theory of the
public sphere and the private sphere since our criticism of Habermas’ version
of the life of cafes is that it is subservient to his need to try and give life to an
idea from social theory rather than give us an idea of the life of cafés. As we
noted earlier, Haine’s work is one source for historical material on how cafés
were organised in Europe, a perhaps still more sympathetic account can be
found, not in research specifically on the social life of cafés (of which there is
a paucity), but on ethnographies of restaurants. William F. Whyte, an
American sociologist who had previously carried out an ethnographic study
of a slum (the renowned ‘Street Corner Society’, 1943) studied how the
activities of work were distributed in a restaurant between waiters, kitchen
staff and customers (Whyte 1949). His early studies on waiting on tables
formed part of the inspiration for Goffman’s doctoral research in a small
hotel in Scotland much of which focussed on co-ordinating the team
performance of the dining hall staff of the hotel (Goffman 1956).
In the contemporary period these studies have been revisited by,
firstly, researchers interested in particular forms of labour relation and
performance required by the service industries and, secondly, by researchers
who are looking at the newly emerged variants frequently referred to as
cybercafés (Nunes 1999; Wakeford 1999). An outstanding example of the
former is Crang’s (1994) study of ‘Smokey Joe’s’, a restaurant where the
performance of the staff is seen to be of equal or greater value to customers
than the food itself. ‘Dining as theatre.’ And what Crang brought out for us
to see is the fine details and many rules (including step-by-step scripting of
198 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 199

the waiter’s actions by the restaurant’s owners) by which the ‘spontaneous
solidarity’ of a restaurant comes to succeed or fail. More than that he reminds
us that these ‘informal’ gathering places are hardly utopian when the actual
labour which manufactures their ambience is made conspicuous. Labour
which relied on the craft skills of Smokey Joe’s staff as much as the
management’s scripts for their performances.
Crang describes how he, as a waiter, through his performance of
various well-rehearsed techniques involving displays of attentiveness, pre-
occupation or simple motion, produced table service. For instance, when
food was late during busy periods, he looked furiously at the kitchen and
thereby performed his role as the ‘concerned waiter’ to the expectant diners.
Offering us a window into the expert ways in which managers create the
ambience of an informal place he reports that the manager urged the waiting
staff to keep moving, even if they had no immediate tasks to do, because
their movement made the restaurant buzz. Crang also further details how
his body movements were implicated in the organising of the restaurant
space: thus ‘walking with a determinedly quick stride’ was a way of
displaying that he was busy and thus brushing off all but the most determined
customers and at the same time tempering customer frustration since his
bodily movement was showing he was dutifully serving as quick as possible.
In his depiction of customers clicking their fingers to summon waiting staff,
whilst the staff muttered ‘I’m not a dog’ in response, he reminds us of the
subordinate status of the staff and that such performances are, though highly
polished, not always happy or willing ones.
In Nina Wakeford’s (1999) ethnography of a cybercafé she draws on
Crang’s work to examine how a ‘landscape of computing’ (p180) is produced
by the staff and customers in a ‘real’ place. She notes how carefully the café’s
décor was arranged to produce a sense of its ‘cyber’-ness - only using certain
colours for its walls and furnishing its supporting surfaces in matt silver
metal. Beyond the assembly of materials it was the activities of customers
and staff, as she puts it toward the end of her article, that brought the café to
life:
Bodies-in-movement produce and incorporate accounts of their
journeys as they encounter durable materials and discourses in the
landscape of translation. Customers walked around the café floor
interacting with both machines and cyberhosts (part of the café staff),
consuming machines and food, experiencing the décor and music
and hearing the history of NetCafé.
Her account is unusual in the cyberspace literature for its lack of hyperbole
about technology and its willingness to see the routine grounds for doing
computing in a café. As the quote suggests Wakeford also has a sense of the
café not as a static map-like space which contains the rules for its use in
various material artefacts and texts but rather as a place in which actions
unfold sequentially combining, translating and disconnecting the human and
non-human parts of the cybercafé.
Cafes: The Missing What or Where the Action Is
All too often social and cultural studies of public space and
community gathering places pass over the ‘just thisness’ or ‘what’ of our
activities in favour of relating these ‘various extant social practices back to a
context-free “core” of rules, norms and other social structures’ (Lynch 1993,
p272). Drawing on an example given by Garfinkel of the status relations
between jazz musicians as a classic sociological case of ‘missing the what’ of
playing jazz, Lynch re-announces ethnomethodology’s policies of describing
just what such activities as playing jazz are.5 In terms of the study of public
places (Watson 1993) puts it thus:
What … I am recommending is a new sociology of knowledge which
does not seek to operate from ‘on high’, imputing overarching
perspectives to groups, or societies ‘as wholes’, as the Karls Marx
and Mannheim (plus countless others) have done, but a sociology
of knowledge which addresses peoples’ practices, their typifications/
categorisations in action, their activities and interactions, their
communicative interactions conceived in the broadest sense. (p. 23)
It is no surprise then that we are indifferent to Habermas’ overarching theory
of the public sphere even though we still wish to consider the ordinary
conceptions about cafes it exploits to build its topic (confusing natural
language’s resources with its own, Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, p337). Our
concern is with the ‘ground floor’ (Lee and Watson 1993) understanding of
cafés that is available and accomplished by the people and things that inhabit
those coffee-scented settings,6 a located knowledge of the kind which we
can find in Crang and Wakeford’s ethnographies.
At ground level the city crowd, as we encounter it, has been treated
reductively by many urban theorists as consisting of a crowd of ‘strangers’
(Hannerz 1980; Lofland 1973). Yet if we join that crowd of strangers for a
moment we find that they are not all homogeneously seen or treated as
‘strangers’. From a quick look around we see: members of a bus stop queue,
tourists being lead by a guide, teenagers hanging out, babies in prams,
strollers, window shoppers, security guards, browsers, families, street
cleaners, newspaper sellers, beggars, film stars, and of course, customers in
200 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 201

a café (Lee & Watson 1993; Ryave & Schenkein 1974). Our
ethnomethodological interest in a city neighbourhood leads us in the direction
of trying to show the ‘real-world’ and ‘real-time’ ways in which places and
their inhabitants (temporary or otherwise) are displayed and seen for what
they are.7 As Crabtree writes:
To this it might be added that as the performance of situated activities
relies upon the practised and competent use of material
arrangements, and as there is a distinct uniqueness to materially
embodied spaces (hence our being able to distinguish bus stations
from supermarkets, golf courses from football pitches), that many
of the arrangements, practices and competencies explicated will also
be unique, tied essentially to the particular settings ‘within’ which
they are located (to bus stations, supermarkets, golf courses, football
pitches and the rest. (Crabtree 2000, p10)
A further adjustment that we wish to make in our ethnomethodologically-
informed approach is to shift from a work-setting to a consumption-setting.
We would not wish to imply that consumption is opposed to, or is separable
from ‘work’, consuming is qualitatively, if not quantitatively, just as much
work as producing is. Equally workplaces have been treated by sociologists
as prime sites of consumer practices (Du Gay 1996). Our ambition is to alert
the reader to a change in the general topic of our ethnomethodologically-
informed ethnography from traditional studies of work as work (Garfinkel
1988; Harper and Hughes 1993) to consumption as not only work.8 To put it
simply we are interested in how the ‘customers’ of cafes and bars accomplish
‘doing being customers’ (in the sense of keeping the worlds of cafes and bars
‘utterly mundane’ (Sacks 1992: pp215-221) more than we are interested in
how the staff organise the work of producing service in these places (Cavan
1973; Crang 1994; Wakeford 1999; Whyte 1949).
An exemplary ethnomethodological study of a place with rules
guiding conduct, and how these rules were used by its inhabitants, which
guided our enquiry was Wieder’s (1974) study of a convict’s halfway house.
An unlikely milieu for comparison with a café perhaps yet Wieder’s study
provided inspiration in terms of its treatment of the convict’s code as
preserving and producing the sense of the place in which it was implicated. In
Wieder’s case it was the code of loyalty amongst the residents of a halfway
house: a ‘language’ which was initially somewhat opaque to Wieder and
had to be acquired by inhabiting the halfway house for a reasonable period
of time. In our case it was elements of café life which, paraphrasing
Wittgenstein, were hard for us to analyse precisely because they seemed
obvious and we frequently overlooked them. It was Latour’s (1992) work on
the important organisational features of ‘things’ which provided a pointer
toward ‘where the action is’ in the Flaming Cup. Also, as we noted at the
beginning of this article, by altering certain mundane pieces of ‘equipment’
in the café (notably the furniture and the background noise) as part of our
prototype testing other orderly features of the setting were brought from the
background to the foreground. Most important of all we learnt a great deal
about the life of our café by becoming regulars, thereby following the ordinary
paths through which a person becomes a regular and finding ourselves with
the particular rights and obligations that go along with this mundane identity.
All of the above has been related to the question which had arisen
for us as part of our collaborative work with designers was whether ‘informal
public places’ (like cafés and bars) were less codified rule-bound and
institutionalised than workplaces, as argued by Habermas (1989) and Haine
(1996).9 Whether, although characterisable as places where people have
“greater freedom in interpretation of their roles’ requirements” (Misztal 2000:
p8), they actually were places where people reflexively played with their roles
in a persistent and remarkable manner. One thing we were certain of was
that the best place to try and learn about informality was a place like the
Flaming Cup, which we had come upon in our suburb as a place of that
kind. So we knew where to go without yet interrogating how we had come
to have such an immediate sense of the Flaming Cup as an informal place.10
Ultimately the interactions which we considered significant to the
informal settings that we were considering were selected on the basis of four
elements (which were based on Wieder 1974, p73):
1. The interactions were observable as regular, repeated patterns of
interaction. We were able to see the patterns day in, day out in the
places we were investigating and those patterns persisted even as
the staff and customers in those places changed.
2. The orderly nature of informal interaction, although of some concern
to the customers of cafes and bars, was of high professional relevance
to the staff of the cafes and bars. Producing ‘informality’ or ‘intimacy’
or ‘a sense of community’ as well as clean tabletops, fresh cups of
coffee or pint glasses or real ale were the requirements of the staff of
these venues.
3. The patterns of informal interaction were of relevance to our research
in another fundamental way, since drawing on actor-network theory
(Latour 1992) and ethnomethodologically informed ethnography, we
have set aside a priori explanations (such as sociological theories,
political economic structures and so forth) in order to see informality
as it is accomplished on each occasion by the members/actants in
our sites of interest. The sense, then, of what is happening as informal
202 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 203

interaction is through reference to what any competent customer of
those places knows of informality, be they a solicitor’s secretary,
cultural geographer, designer, police officer or delivery driver.
4. From the numerous interactions occurring in the settings, we have
selected those revolving around and constitutive of the ‘table’ in those
places. Again reflecting the premises of actor-network theory, the
table is treated as a relational entity which is multiple and mobile
whose stability and organisational features are accomplished in use.
Rules for reserving tables at the Flaming Cup
Figure 2. Instruction to the user of an informal setting: ‘When the shop is busy-
please queue for food before taking a seat that way everyone is happy. -Thank you’
Many of the most exclusive restaurants in Europe require the booking
of a table months in advance, indeed in some cases up to a year in advance.
Some may not even allow a table to be booked unless the customer is already
in some way known to them. Merely booking a table is a first step in the
production of formality in these kinds of socially exclusive restaurants
(Finkelstein 1981). At the Flaming Cup Café there is a sign on the door (see
Fig.1) requesting that during busy periods customers do not attempt to reserve
a seat before they have queued up at the counter to order their food. The
sign is hard to miss, written as it is on a lilac-coloured A4 sheet of paper,
secured with blue-tack at the average height off the ground where most
customers will find its instruction directly in front of their gaze. It is also
situated above a small pink sign which contains a warning about a ramp
surface which customers might miss their footing on. After you become a
regular at the Flaming Cup Café then you know the rule and the warning by
way of knowing, how, where and when it applies.
For the staff this DIY pink sign was an ever vigilant yet friendly (it
is, after all, handwritten, polite in tone and pink) doorkeeper (Latour 1992).
It is a doorkeeper in the sense that it is passing on an instruction to those
who enter the café, not only reminding customers to behave in a manner
that suits the staff’s need for maximum turnover of customers per table but
also implicated in how an entrant to the Flaming Cup sees the scene ahead
of them. For the staff if the sign’s rule is followed then during busy periods
the tables need never lie empty, and thus unavailable for eating or drinking
at, due to a queuing customer having deposited their bag or coat on the seat
to ‘reserve’ a table. For the customers the sign indicates the correct conduct
they and others should adopt during a busy period to fit in with the ways
things are done at the Flaming Cup. Of course the Flaming Cup’s request is
not a highly idiosyncratic or unusual way of getting the business of a café
done; customers are familiar with such requests in other cafes and are unlikely
to be confused or angered by it (‘what the hell do they mean, queue first
then take a table!’). Though barely requiring more than a moment’s
registering, the ink-on-pink sign frames the entrance to the Flaming Cup as a
cheap and inclusive place to dine since it is those kinds of places which write
and post their rules in such a way and as one of the first items in your way.11
In their ethnomethodological analysis of queuing Lee and Watson
(1993) tease out the ‘minimum adequate organisational form for the
establishing of turn order, direction etc.’ (p46). Unlike many analyses of the
organisation of space their attention to the fine details and ordinary
understandings of the members actually doing the queuing picks out,
amongst other aspects, the dynamic features of the queue. They show how
the queue although apparently having static categories (such as head of the
queue, second in the queue, tail end of the queue) nevertheless moves members
through its order from one category to the next. Each member of a queue has
a ‘moral requirement’ to be aware of their changing place in the order of the
queue and to take their turn promptly or they will be susceptible to justified
complaints from people further down the line. What we are looking at is
some of the spacing of organisation and organising of space that lies before
204 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 205

and after the queuing sequence in our café. The doorway with its sign thus
provides a sequential order to the space which customers are about to enter
(and by entering through the café door with its audible creaking hinge and
tinkling bell they are immediately placed into the category ‘candidate
customer’). The sequential order as we summarise it, though it can be
decomposed into smaller units12 is:
Join the queue
Take a seat
However there are many ‘tactics’ (De Certeau 1984) customers utilise to get
around the ‘queue-first, seat-second’ rule such as by simply ignoring it and
reserving seats with an item such as a coat or a bag. And it is worth bearing
in mind that if enough customers tactically ignore the text-on-the-door then
it will no longer be seen as a relevant rule once inside the café, it would
clearly be a sign that everyone ignores (as in the classic wasteland sign “no
dumping” with piles of rubbish lying beside it). Also there are customers to
whom its rule fails to apply, such as those who are picking up take-away
food, yet their display of queuing at the counter assists in the apparent
observance of the rule. Additionally they are clearly not going to break the
rule by not taking a seat when they have finished queuing. They are able to
see in the writing on the pink card the members to whom the rule applies.
Returning to the ‘ignorants’ (as we will call those who break the rule
without the matter being raised by other customers or the staff) who place a
coat, hat, bag or other personal item on the table; why is it that their placing
of a ‘deposit’ to hold their seat succeeds even though it is breaking the rule?13
Perhaps because objects that can be seen by everyone to be someone else’s
possessions (or ‘possessional territory’, (Goffman 1971, p38) can only be
interfered with at some degree of risk by a stranger, even when the possessions
are being used to break a rule.14 To move someone else’s coat or a bag off a
chair breaks a more fundamental rule of public places while following another
which means that the ‘mover’ is liable to be challenged with: ‘do you mind!’
or ‘hey get your hands off my jacket!’, ‘stop thief!’ or a similar accusation.
Size of the seating area matters in the use of possessions in this way; the
Flaming Cup is a small café where the staff and customers can see almost
every other customer at a glance. In a larger more anonymous dining area
(such as was found at a nearby shopping mall) the risk of actually having
one’s coat stolen should it be left reserving a table was proportionately greater.
Not only can a reserver no longer so easily monitor their reserving item, the
staff monitor their seated customers, but also regulars become further
diluted.15
Being able to deploy the personal-items-on-seat tactic is further
dependent on the socio-materially ordered manner in which members enter
a place. If we consider for a moment one of the exclusive formal restaurants
mentioned at the outset of this section; reserving a seat with a coat or bag
just cannot be done since customers on entering the restaurant are shown to
their table (which thereby generally becomes theirs for the duration of their
meal) or to some other distinct holding area such as the bar or cocktail lounge
by the waiting staff. Moreover allocation of customers to tables is almost
entirely done in advance by telephone, letter or e-mail bookings etc.
The Flaming Cup’s rule of non-reservation is gotten around by a
more subtle tactic if there are a group of customers dining together. Just as a
person might divide off their belongings to stake a seating claim so arriving
packs of people splitting into table reservers and queuers and thus ‘bending’
the rule by presenting a situation whereby the group (as a unit) can be seen
to be complying with it in part since some of the group are immediately
queuing and at the same time disobeying it since the other part of group are
reserving seats. So we can see that an element of informality is written not
just on to the pink card on the door but also into the flexibility inherent in the
ways in which seating can be taken by newly arrived customers and its
reliance on a degree of craftily established compromise amongst ‘locals’,
‘ignorants’ and the ‘polite’ customers. Taking this as evidence that “informal”
rules allow for greater play with roles would only be justified if we treated
rules as self-sufficient items, whereas rules even in very “formal” settings
are followed and shown to be followed in multiple ways (Sharrock & Button
1999).16
Unwritten visually displayed codes of conduct at the Flaming Cup
In Haine’s (1996) history of working class cafés in Paris he points
toward the arrival of the café bar where customers would “faire une partie” as
key in increasing the sociability of these places (see esp. pp160-178). In contrast
he asserts that: ‘the dominance of the table in the eighteenth-century tavern
had discouraged the intermixing of strangers and different groups’ (p169).
Certainly one of the contrasts between the Flaming Cup as a café and public
houses in the same neighbourhood was the absence of a bar for eating or
drinking at. Yet the furnishings of public places are not so crudely
deterministic, they establish their order through practice and the common
practice at the Flaming Cup which further secured its place as a
neighbourhood café was table-sharing.
On entering the café during a busy period a first-time customer
witnesses people sharing tables, and not just the pre-acquainted, since
frequently lone customers and/or groups have arranged themselves at one
of the round tables so as to politely disattend one another (see figure 6).17 A
customer can see table-sitters as unacquainted by such discernible actions as:
206 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 207

sitting at separate tables, table-sharers avoiding each other’s gazes (in a
similar fashion to the way one can discern who are strangers and friends in
a lift/elevator; Caesar 2000), orienting to other members of their group
through conversation & glancing, moving their chairs farther away from
each other or perhaps using reading-a-newspaper/magazine/book as a
boundary marker if they are sitting alone. Many of the customers at the
Flaming Cup are ‘regulars’ rather than first-time customers and so have built-
up plenty of their own ethnographic experience of how things are done at
the café, how to avoid making mistakes there and also in some respects how
to avoid or encourage table-sharing. We will do no more than note here that
the use of possessions such as coats or bags on spare chairs is one way of
making an initial unwillingness to share and the possible indication that the
seat so marked is being reserved for a queuer or an acquaintance yet to arrive
at the café.
Table-sharing further produces a feeling of informality as
unacquainted customers are put into a situation where there are plenty of
opportunities to initiate a conversation.18 By sharing a table the customers
can expect no easy exemption from ‘small talk’ from the other customers
they are sharing with (Cavan 1973). Initiating and continuing small talk
requires active work from the parties to the talk, and declining to respond
also requires work to ensure that the decliner is not open to scorn and negative
moral evaluation.
Despite being built of standardised steel, wood and Formica, being
the same size and shape, with matching sets of chairs, not all tables are equal
in the Flaming Cup. The arrangement of the tables within the space of Flaming
Cup leant the individual tables differing value according to where they were
positioned. The prime example of this feature being the window table (see
fig. 3), which was almost constantly in use, and thus by far the most popular
of the tables.
Since the tables in the Flaming Cup were of the same design (with
the exception of two smaller tables that were fitted into two tight spots near
the café’s central pillar), they could be substituted into the window seat area
and still be seen as the same ‘window’ seat. We took account of such
arrangements in the introduction of our prototype table with its electronic
augmentation. Indeed it was deliberately placed ‘out of the way’ inside the
café (specifically, in the furthest corner from the serving counter and the
windows). Even this table location was of a certain significance since a group
of elderly women who were ‘regulars’ at the café used this table location
consistently as ‘their’ table. During a pre-installation visit by Eric Laurier
they wanted to know why their table was to be moved and what was going
to be put in its place. They joked that whoever put the table in their place
should expect “trouble”. The fact that such a matter could be raised at all is
the indication of the lease-like entitlements that regular customers acquire
to certain seating positions within a café, even though they are apparently
only passing through for a cup of coffee or a sandwich like every other
customer. And once again an indication of the way in which the seat reserving
rule might run against the entitlements to seating of regulars.19 One of the
clear benefits of being a ‘regular’ is, then, being given priority in the allocation
of seating rights.
Figure 3. A table in a different place has a different value
208 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 209

For customers who wish to remain solitary during potentially busy
periods in the café, the two smaller 2-seater tables could be chosen in
preference to the larger 4-seater tables since table-sharing was less easy to
accomplish at the 2-seater tables. At a 2-seater, a pair of unacquainted
customers would sit directly opposite one another, and managing to avoid
catching one another’s gaze whilst dining required greater skill. By contrast
with the 2-seater arrangement a single person occupying a 4-seater at a busy
period was thereby opening themselves to the possibility of having to share.
(This was the situation that led to the ‘wedding photo’ encounter described
below.)
As Wieder (1974, pp78-79) notes in his ethnography of a halfway
house, seating patterns at the six seater tables in their dining room could
result in a resident ‘getting stuck’ when surrounded by five members of staff.
In the halfway house where residents’ maintenance of distance from staff
was part of their code of conduct then this would lead to the ‘stuck’ resident
getting up and moving to another table. Maintaining a boundary between
staff and inmates was clearly not a central part of the code of behaviour at
the ‘Flaming Cup’; those sharing the seating were all, by one salient
categorisation, customers.20 For the purposes of eating or drinking in the
café what was of import, aside from distinctions between regulars, irregulars
and unknowns, was whether table-sharing was necessary at all. To this end,
recently arrived customers could be seen to ‘hover’, visibly scanning the
tables and their occupants to assess when they might be free and whether
table sharing could be avoided and if not which table was sharable. From
our fieldwork we were both witness to and part of table sharing (see below)
and can assert its regularity as a feature of busy lunchtimes. As a common
occurrence table sharing was, then, one of the ways in which the (passing)
customers of the Flaming Cup were ‘doing informality’. More than that it is
also one significant manner of situation in which previously unacquainted
residents and workers in a neighbourhood could be introduced to one another
for the first time and just how that happens we will deal with subsequently.
The tabletop as a sequential phenomenon
Figure 4. A tabletop at the Flaming Cup with glasses ready to be cleared and soup
and bread newly arrived (there is cutlery still wrapped in paper napkins behind the
vertical card in the middle of the table)
So what does happen at tables in cafes? Clearly we are not going to
provide an exhaustive list but we are, once again, going to turn to some of
the day-in-day-out patterns of interaction which related to the arrangement
of artefacts on the tabletop as relevant to the doing of informality. Fig .4 is a
typical picture of a table recently laid for two people to have lunch at the
Flaming Cup. In other more formal eating places, the tables are often laid in
advance, and part of the formality of such places is that the use of the tables
for purposes other than eating is strictly limited.21 In more informal places,
like the Flaming Cup, customers read newspapers, do paperwork, and play
games on and off the tabletop whilst also consuming food and drink (see
figs. 5, 6 & 7). Some parts of the table are nevertheless laid in advance by the
staff of the Flaming Cup: at the beginning of each day a sugar bowl, a salt &
a pepper shaker, a jug of milk and a small vase of flowers are placed in the
centre of each table. In figure 4 there is also a piece of laminated paper with
210 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 211

brightly coloured illustrations standing upright in a menu holder which was
part of the promotional material for a community website and newsletter
run by our research project. These items fit into the middle of the table leaving
the majority of the horizontal space free and in figure 4 that space is being
occupied by some empty glasses, a bowl of soup and bread and butter. Much
of the cutlery and crockery in the Flaming Cup was mismatched. There were
no expensive delicate items, the assembled dining ware was instead a mish-
mash of heavy-weight durable ceramics in either plain colours (moss green,
peaty brown or white) with either a plain strip, woven pattern or the odd
one with a light brown ‘harvest pattern’ of a wheat sheaf, fruit bowl and
leaves. There was no franchise branding on any of the items (in contrast to
the Starbucks mug just visible in figure 5). Cutlery was left at the counter in
baskets and paper napkins were often hard to find.
Figure 5. Small coffee table at Starbucks, with closed book, pen, muffin, tall
cappuccino, spectacles, sugar and writing on tabletop. We, from a customer’s
perspective, can see by the spatial arrangement of these things and by the unconsumed
status of the food and drink that its occupant will not be leaving soon. For the staff of
the cafe it does not appear to be ready for clearing.
For customers ‘hovering’ and the staff ‘waiting’ at the Flaming Cup,
the visible status of the glasses in figure 4 as empty is an indication of the
current position of the table’s occupation relative to commencement and a
possible completion of the meal.22 As the dining progresses the people at the
table will be seen to be eating and, ultimately, when they are finished the
cups, bowls, plates and sundries will be left in positions which indicate they
are finished (i.e. noticeably empty and no longer being touched with fingers
or cutlery, with napkins on top or beside them). Customers in Britain have
been trained from being children in ways of indicating they are finished their
meal such as arranging their cutlery in a certain fashion, saying “I’m finished
thank you”, or/and demanding the bill. At the Flaming Cup customers pay
at the counter, and such local rules are further local knowledges to be acquired
as part of being a regular. The collection by the staff of finished-with crockery
and cutlery is relatively prompt, though not necessarily or excessively so,
which is as one might expect from a more informal place. It may seem banal
but the clearing away of artefacts from the table is important for customers
and staff in finishing interactions appropriately in a café. For a recently arrived
customer searching for a free table, seeing a full cup of coffee on a tabletop
even though there are no other apparent signs of the table being occupied
can prove problematic. Has the person that ordered the coffee nipped out to
buy a parking ticket or to the toilet? Has the cup been delivered to the wrong
table or moved from another one? Has the full cup been abandoned entirely
by a previous customer and simply not been cleared away by the staff?23
Discovering the status of a lone full coffee cup without other clues is
thus in part reliant on the activities of the staff who clear the traces of the
previous customers and can be expected to know the cup’s biography. Whilst
‘lipstick traces’ were amongst the kind of ephemeral and informal memory
that Living Memory as an electronic interaction recording mechanism aimed
to sustain (Marcus 1989), a previous customer’s ‘lipstick traces’ are the last
thing that a diner wants to find on the glass that they are drinking out of.
Clearing the table is not as mechanical as we may have implied so far, since
the tabletop has to be wiped, the pre-laid items in the centre of the table are
tidied and anything left behind is dealt with as is appropriate. During busy
lunch-hours at the Flaming Cup this is often once the new customers have
arrived and deposited further items on the tabletop. Sometime customers
considerately wait standing beside the table, with perhaps one hand on the
back of one of the chairs signalling their reservation of the table. However
by standing and thereby making their waiting apparent they can also further
pressurise staff to clear the table faster so that the customer’s inconvenience
is lessened.
212 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 213

Whilst clearing, if there is rubbish on the table then it has to be found
to be rubbish, since if someone has accidentally left behind a letter, spectacles
or their wallet, then the staff or the arriving occupants of the table have to
assign these items to the category ‘lost’ (and not ‘rubbish’). An example of
this during our fieldwork was a bus ticket left on the table which had to be
inspected for its expiry date to make sure it had been left behind because it
was out of date rather than left by accident. At the point of clearing the table
the leaving-customer may still be pursued to attempt to return their items to
them, or if this is not convenient then the items will be kept with other lost
property at the café. Items at the table are thus, in part, categorised and done
with by their relation to members (as we hinted earlier in our description of
the tactics of ‘ignorants’). ‘Things’ cannot be left as ‘traces’ since they belong
to various members (they are someone’s things) and have certain functions
for those members which they should serve. Who is allowed to leave traces
on them is regulated by who they belong to and ‘traces’ themselves are not
all of a kind. ‘Madonna’s lipstick traces’ on a glass are not the same as an
anonymous previous customer’s lipstick traces or a friend’s lipstick traces.
A signature on a petition signed on the tabletop is not the same as a signature
signed (as graffiti) on the tabletop. Each trace is dependent on the occasion
out of which it arises and the occasion on which it will be recognised as a
trace of some kind.
Reading and writing at the table
Figure 6. Large Coffee Table at Starbucks, note newspaper reading is done off the
tabletop, facing toward an acquaintance (who is currently away from the table), and
away from the empty chairs opposite. These large coffee tables by the windows were
by far the most popular for sharing.
Beyond the organisation of crockery and cutlery for table clearing,
setting and dining we would like to describe what else was happening on
and off the tabletops since it is these other activities that are both traded
upon by social theorists such as Habermas (1989) and Misztal (2000) or
cultural analysts (Marcus 1989) and were the kinds of interactions that our
engineering and design partners wished to augment.
Newspapers, magazines and children’s books are kept centrally by
the Flaming Cup on a small stand near the entrance as material that customers
can borrow to read at their tables whilst eating. They are existing items closest
in nature to our electronic coffee table prototype which carried a local
electronic publication and information service. The paper and electronic forms
of the publication and information could be read on the prototype table, but
214 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 215

the electronic reading materials were contained in a touchscreen which also
formed part of the table’s supportive surface as well as being the surface
which had to be read. The practical implications of merging the supporting
surface and the reading surface we will move on to shortly, beforehand we
can briefly consider what happens to newspapers and magazines during
and after use. At the Flaming Cup these publications are put back by
customers or staff on to the central stand to indicate they are available to
other customers whilst also clearing the table at the same time. In other words
this is so that for each time a customer comes to a table, the table is visibly
unoccupied and ready for them to use.
From the methodical ways in which tables, chairs and their related
paraphernalia are actually used we can learn how social status is ‘suspended’
(Habermas 1989) in café environments. In figure 6, the reader at the table is
reading his paper off the tabletop and using it to turn away from the other
customers in the café. Minutes before the picture was taken he was sharing
the large (8 seater) table with another group of customers and he used the
newspaper to civilly disattend their conversation by facing away from them.
His performance of disattention goes beyond looking away from the other
customers at his table, since he appears to be engrossed in reading the paper.
His engrossment is, if not an actual focus of his attention, certainly a display
to his neighbours that he is not focussing his visual attention on them nor
eavesdropping on their conversation.24 How then might unacquainted table-
sharers be entitled to strike up a conversation?25
As we noted earlier there are certain situations where a single person
joining a table of members sets themselves up as potentially available for
engaging in an interaction with other diners. An instance from our fieldwork
of two unacquainted customers striking up a conversation at the Flaming
Cup was when Eric Laurier shared a table with a customer who had been
given a set of wedding photos by the manageress.
Clip 1. Two customers sharing a table and looking at wedding photos
Extract from journal (23rd July 1999): I had seen a small white wedding
photo folder lying on the counter for the last couple of days that I had been
taking my lunch at the Flaming Cup. Seeing it lying there had made me a
little curious as to whether it had been left behind by someone or whether
there was some promotional literature inside it or something similar. On
this day Ewan had come along for the first time to sample the Flaming
Cup’s ‘fine homebaking’ and was ‘holding’ the window seat for us while I
ordered food. This, despite the hand-written notice on the door requesting
that ‘customers not reserve seats before ordering their food’. And this
happening precisely because the cafe gets very busy each lunchtime, with
its customers arriving around 1pm. While I was ordering food, a middle-
aged woman joined Ewan at the table. From where I was at the counter
they seemed to be getting on fine and I could overhear occasional remarks
from Ewan about the research project and he pointed toward some of our
material on the café wall.
When I returned to the table Ewan explained, for her benefit as much as
mine, that he had been talking to her about the research project, ‘and I was
the man’ to ask more about it to. We talked for a while, the woman explaining
that she had been coming to the Flaming Cup for 3 years and that she liked
to come there to read: ‘just trashy magazines you know’. She had brought
one with her to the table. The Flaming Cup was far away from her work by
foot and if she was in a hurry she would go to the other local cafe because it
was closer and the service was faster there, (I am learning that the service,
though always friendly, is indeed pretty slow), though we did agree on the
excellence of the homebaking at the Flaming Cup.
After talking about the differences between the ‘Coffee & Cream’ and the
‘Flaming Cup’ cafés the conversation between the 3 of us broke down into
just Ewan and myself having a side-conversation. Anne (the manageress)
brought over the white wedding photo folder at this point and handed it to
the woman. Not much was said, since Anne is too busy at lunchtime to
have any kind of extended conversation. So the woman began to leaf through
the photos and I asked if I could see as well (though of course I could see fine
well already but I was also asking permission to become involved in her act
of looking). Once this was agreed, the implications were then that we could
talk through the photos as we went through them. The photos became
‘tellable’ - the woman used them to give me an impression of her relationship
with the manageress, and who she knew in each of the photos. We commented
on things like who looked like who, who was with who, what people’s ages
were, what they were wearing. And in an ‘ironic’ manner, on the weather
- since they did actually ‘have lovely day for a wedding’ with the sun shining.
216 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 217

Apart from Eric Laurier’s failed attempt at illicit table reservation in
the Flaming Cup what we have here is an actual instance of two previously
unacquainted sets of customers getting to know one another. Several things
are worth commenting on. Firstly Ewan and Eric had reserved the ‘prime’
table in the café, being the window seat, and had in part risked pejorative
assessment and/or table sharing because this ‘best’ table was still free. Though
equally it may not be considered the ‘best’ by some customers since it is also
the most likely to be shared (note also that the large window table in the
Starbucks in figure 5 is the most commonly shared in that café). Secondly
that the woman came to the table with a ‘trashy magazine’ as an artefact that
would be useful in managing the table sharing should Ewan and Eric not
engage her in polite conversation. During the half an hour or so that the
table was shared the conversation between all three did indeed run dry and
it was the manager’s timely intervention with her wedding photos that
restarted the conversation on a new, ‘rich’ topic (Sacks 1992) and thus with a
further basis for the table sharers to build their acquaintance-ship. As part of
the staff’s attention to the sharing of tables by people they know to be
‘regulars’ or strangers, the wedding album was dropped off by the manager
as she cleared the sandwich plates. Her timely dropping off of the album
accomplishes several things: makes sure that the album lands on the tabletop
when there is space available and less chance of it getting spattered by random
soup or sandwich fillings, allows it to arrive when one of her ‘trapped’
customers (i.e. a lone table sharer) is looking as if she is being excluded from
the other’s interaction and perhaps most significantly is marking out this
woman’s status as known, to at least one of the Flaming Cup’s staff, as a
‘regular’. Indeed Eric’s position at the table was also known to the staff as a
regular, since he had been going to the Flaming Cup for about three months
before this event as part of doing his ethnographic work. So for Anne, the
manageress, she was dropping off a conversational token at a table where
there were two people whom she knew as regulars even if these two people
did not know each other as regulars.26
In Wieder’s (1974) description of the ‘convict code’ of a halfway house
he brings out how his ‘documentary method’ (Garfinkel 1967, p78) as an
ethnographer who sees and hears pieces of the ‘code’ is a mutually elaborating
process. Each event he sees or piece of talk he overhears is made sense of
through his developing understanding of the code while at the same time
being ‘more evidence of that code’ (Wieder 1974, p186).27 Clearly there are
differences between a halfway house and a neighbourhood café and to give
an adequate description of the Flaming Cup means teasing out what its
specifics are. A basic distinction being that the Flaming Cup, as with most
cafés, does not have a ‘convict code’ which its customers share and are obliged
to orient to in the same way. Nevertheless as we have brought out so far,
there is a looser sense nevertheless of the proper conduct of a café customer
and even more so of being a ‘regular’. Also the acquiring of the code in the
halfway house bears some parallels to that of becoming a regular at the
Flaming Cup since ‘regulars’ do build up a loose code which guides their
behaviour in relation to the staff and equally the staff in their behaviour
toward regulars.
Regulars can be expected to share certain local knowledges of the Flaming
Cup such as28:
• The seat reserving rule
• That their status as a regular may allow for a bending of the rule
since as we noted earlier part of being a regular may be being known
to have a favourite table (as well as favourite food or drink orders,
i.e. ‘the usual’.) Their status as regulars is also likely to have a repeated
timing to it which makes their appearance relatively predictable and
correspondingly enforceable (“we always have this table at 11am”)
• Who some of the other regulars are, what their names are and
potentially some biographical details (as produced by encounters
like the one just described)
• Who some of the staff are, what their names are and their reputations.
• Where the toilets are.
• What’s good to eat or drink at the Flaming Cup.
What we are trying to show by listing these commonly known-to-regulars
bits of information is that there are a number of parts to learning what any
ordinary regular customer knows and that they are assembled and articulated
over time. To put it a little differently: regulars acquire these items and
numerous other ones partially and their assembly is done as part of their
assembling of the café as a place and as a place for assembling these items
and their accountability for their status. The incident involving the wedding
album was added as another ‘happening’ at the Flaming Cup which I added
to my collection of related ‘happenings’, such as reading the hand-written
notice on the café door (see also below ‘Anne’s loud talk’).
As Wieder puts it with reference to convict’s code:
Since the use-of-the-code-as-a-schema was the procedure, the code
was self- and setting-elaborative. In this sense, it is much more
appropriate to think of the code as a continuous ongoing process,
rather than as a set of stable elements of culture which endure through
time. (Wieder, p.186)
218 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 219

Another key difference is that unlike inhabitants of a halfway house,
customers of the Flaming Cup are also likely to use other cafes, and learn
about its organisation through comparison with other cafes. Certainly as part
of Eric Laurier’s ethnographic fieldwork he spent time observing the
organisation of other café settings. His observations of those places were not
just comparative since many of the same furnishings and techniques were
found in the Flaming Cup. Given that one of the foci of our investigations
was the use of tables in cafes then such additional observations were an
important part of our corpus.
Background Noise
The sound of church-bells in an English village on a Sunday, silences
during play at an international tennis tournament, the acceptable volume of
a conversation in a railway carriage, someone audibly talking above everyone
else, or just being ‘too loud’. Background sounds are not just white noise
above which ‘talk’ or other human communication is heard. Many of the
commentaries made on the availability of visual scenes ‘at a glance’ (Sudnow
1972) to members can equally apply to soundscapes. Just as, through a quick
glance whilst crossing the roads, we can see cars as cars parked and cars in
motion, and find which ones are most likely knock us over, so it is that we
can hear certain beeps as car horns almost instantly in a pre-theoretical
manner, and, by its reflexive relation to our location and action (i.e. running
across the middle of the road), whether the horn is directed at us or not.
Background noise is thus a mighty broad brush stroke over the pre-reflectively
audible and orientational phenomena of social and spatial life.
The manageress of the Flaming Cup knows a considerable number
of her customers as ‘regulars’, some of whom, like Eric, she will greet by
name, often fairly loudly. In one sense this is about doing a greeting and in
another sense it is also about her production of the Flaming Cup as a
neighbourhood café, a ‘place where everybody knows your name’.
To do her greetings audibly louder makes other customers aware of
this form of intimacy occurring in the Flaming Cup.29 This production of
intimacy is further emphasised by the fairly loud talk between the staff behind
the counter as they prepare orders for taking to the customers where they
mention customers’ names loudly amongst themselves and also swap some
piece of news that a customer has given them such as; ‘Mrs McLeod’s
daughter has had a baby’, ‘that’s Jenny back from her holidays’ etc. We can
thus add another element to the attributes of a regular: they are likely to be
greeted by name as they enter the café and mentioned as ‘newsworthy’ items
by the staff. Just as significantly we find another way in which the Flaming
Cup locally produces its ‘ambience’ of being a neighbourhood café.
Unlike many cafés and shops, the Flaming Cup plays no music, nor
radio, nor does it have a television in a corner. By way of contrast, in the
Bulldog Pub, not far from the Flaming Cup, there is a music jukebox, a
gambling machine and two television sets. The control of music via the
jukeboxes, and the control of the television sets within the pubs, is comparable
to the background chatter of the staff in terms of assembling an ‘ambience’.30
In the brief period that we had our electronic coffee table installed in the
Flaming Cup, one of the chief ways it attracted customers’ attention was in
fact by the various bleeping, chirping and other standardised computer noises
it made. To avoid disrupting the café setting each day when the prototype
was started up its volume level had to be carefully set to merge it into the
level of background noise in the café. This ‘level’ and making noises at this
level, be they talking, tapping fingers, dialling numbers on a mobile phone
was key in the ongoing establishment of customers as equals by the informal
codes of the café. To be too loud was to be rude, potentially arrogant and too
show disrespect for other customers.31
Our visit to the Flaming Cup has almost come to an end, and we
return to its doorway again. Latour (1992) has written a great deal on the
social organisation performed by doors and their hinges, particularly self-
closing hinges. As it happens the Flaming Cup Café does indeed have a self-
closing door since customers cannot be relied upon to always close the door
and keep the cold Scottish winds from blowing around the tables. As we
noted at the outset of this section the pink sign posted on the door displays
an instruction on how customers ought to behave. Added to the instructions
of engineers and staff translated into the door as it has been described by us
and by Latour (1992), the Flaming Cup’s door also has a tinkling bell attached
to it which rings whenever the door is opened. It is a sequenced sound which
gains it meaning from the events which it acts as a primer for. A key one of
these being as we noted earlier that it is a summons for the staff’s attention
to the entering customer(s) to look up from their busy food preparation and
see if they recognise anyone entering and ought to greet them. Equally the
staff’s glance provides for a quick check on whether the incoming customers
are going to illicitly reserve a seat. And of course the bell makes a little tinkle
when customers at the café finally take their leave.
Closing remarks
‘The café, in short, was preeminently the theater of neighbourhood life.’
Haine 1996, p163
Returning to the questions raised by and for the Living Memory
project: firstly, whether cafés were less rule bound and looser arenas of action
220 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 221

than workplaces and secondly, whether people had greater freedom to ‘play’
with their social roles in such places. It is worth noting firstly that recent
work on organisations in action has observed that they run in an informal
mode most of the time (Boden 1994), and reflexive play with social roles is
actively encouraged in many workplaces (Adkins 1998; Crang 1997). Further,
although customers in cafes do not have to do the kinds of complex articulation
and coordination work to do which typically characterises the organisational
settings investigated by ethnographers (Schmidt 1994; Harper 2000),
customers attending cafés are still required to engage in the socio-material
ordering of the places of which they are (passing) members (i.e. by not
reserving tables when it is busy, carrying their drinks to their tables, making
their plates & cutlery look ready for collection by the staff, sharing tables
graciously when the café is busy etc.). ‘Informality’ comes with categorial
expectations and finely nuanced methods for its production as much as
formality does, and to ignore them is to invite assessments of one’s social
competence, status as a local, lack of manners, character, sanity and so on. In
‘open regions’ according to Goffman (1963), such as cafés and bars, many of
the changed norms are to do with behaviour towards strangers in terms of
deference and status, whereby hierarchies are played down to some extent.
Each person in a café of bar is ideally the social equal of one another. The
common knowledge that we have underlined in this article is that we are
not all ‘strangers’ to one another in public spaces and in a place such as a
café organise ourselves into staff, regulars, new customers, single customers,
groups and table sharers. As incumbents of these categories we also shift
between them according to sequenced actions, at a later stage other social
categories (such as age, race, class and gender) may or may not be made
relevant (see also the remarks on social categories in queuing in Lee & Watson
1993). It is not only human role players that shift categories since we have
also underlined the changing significance of artefacts such as tables, doors,
cutlery and coats.
Even without doing comparative studies of other cafés we can say
that by the same means that the Flaming Cup was assembled as a
neighbourhood café or Wakeford’s (1999) ‘NetCafe’ as a cybercafé not all
cafés are the same. They display themselves in various ways to allow them
to be recognised as neighbourhood, designer, artistic, family cafés etc. and to
be found and inhabited as such by their potential customers. At this point a
social critique could be launched of these informal places part in securing
the status quo by reinforcing exclusionary practices and reproducing dominant
ideologies of class. Since in ordinary terms: there are cafés that are for the rich
and cafés for the poor, and this is noticeable from more than just the cost of a
cup of coffee. Indeed objections may be raised by theorists of the public sphere
(Habermas 1989) or informality and trust (Fukuyama 1995; Misztal 2000)
that this article has detailed located “micro” practices and their artefacts rather
than building theories or models which show “macro” factors. Our
ambition in treating public spaces in this way is to show that such theories
are the objects of debates in the social sciences and are as “macro” as those
debate, rather than the very stuff of café life, except of course in situations
where someone like Habermas is sharing a table with some other social
theorists.32
The observable differences between cafés become accountable
matters to café socialites on a place-by-place basis through the scenic details
of cafés; background noise, seating arrangements around tables, crockery
and a loose articulation of many other ‘foolish things’. We have foregrounded
the craft production of our study café’s ambience and the mundane, tiring
and yet reasoned work of table clearing to contrast this unfinished ordinary
business with the top-down imposition or bottom-up rise of ‘Western
ideology’ or the prevailing ‘spirit of the times’. It is just the kind of queuing,
reading door-signs, table-setting, table clearing, chattering and sharing that
make it a gathering place for its suburban neighbourhood. We are not arguing
that the small things of life, like coffee cups, need ‘celebrating’, though we
would argue that they are often overlooked in the attempt to ground (or
even ‘embed’) social order in suitably big objects, like all the cafés in France
or ‘the public sphere’ or ‘globalism’ or even ‘context’. Our argument is that
places are massively ordered, or as Sacks (1992) put it, there is ‘order at all
points’. It is a heterogeneous order, a finely grained and lived accomplishment
which is spatially distributed and distributive of space (Crabtree 2000; Latour
1997). As such particular places like the Flaming Cup should be visited by
researchers with an interest in informality and social order, to sample the
ambience, its fine home-baking and to learn from vernacular experts just
how informality and an open-ness to others is done.
Acknowledgements: The rest of the QMUC LiMe Team: Tom, Katie, Rhona
& Gayle, and away from QMUC - Elisabeth Davenport, Henk van der Weij
& Irene McWilliams. Funding for this research was provided by the Esprit
Research Programme as part of Intelligent Information Interfaces - Connected
Communities: Living Memory (project 25621). Ged Murtagh for providing
several comparative café instances and pointers toward the ‘documentary
method’. Phil Crang for suggestions on bodily praxis. Hester Parr for
enthusiasm and reminders on place-bound actions. Most important of all
the regulars, table sharers, Ewan Main and the staff at the Flaming Cup for
their patience and tolerance.
222 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 223

Notes
1 Our approach to the web of communities of practice occurring in our suburb was
similar to an old, and now often ignored, body of community studies carried out in
the early 20th century by sociologists and geographers (Lynd and Lynd 1929; Stacey
1960; Whyte 1943, and for a recent review see Travers 1999)). One of the few later 20th
century studies being the popular book ‘The Organization Man’ (Whyte 1957)
2 One of the LiMe prototypes which can be found at http://www.design.philips.com/
and then choose ‘visions’, then ‘lime’.
3 In fact they had many links with the temperance movement and were seen as a
sober alternative to bawdy bars where alcohol was served. Not only that they also
provided a public gathering place more open to women as both servers and custom-
ers (Kinchin 1991).
4 And as Habermas (1989) might point out make them ‘customers’ rather than say
‘citizens’, and thus involved in the marketplace to some extent.
5 An exemplary ethnomethodological study of learning to play jazz piano being
(Sudnow 1978)
6 For an evocative narration of this movement from panoptic views from above to
street level see chapter 7 of (De Certeau 1984), though De Certeau’s move ultimately
ends up with a lyrical theorising of which steals walking away again from its actual-
ity for walkers (for an on the ground and less poetic treatment - Livingston 1987)
7 The actions of seeing and displaying are parts of a tied pair, since it is not simply
that we see a security guard, a security guard also displays themselves as such (un-
less they are working undercover of course).
8 This move suggests that we are doing something slightly different from what has
been called ‘classic ethnomethodological studies of work’, yet we would remain wary
of claiming that we have tuned into or fully grasped the later radical studies in
ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1992).
9 Already we find a proliferation of categories of places.
10 We have examined elsewhere some of the ways in which people in a city find the
kinds of cafes and bars which match their interests (Laurier and Whyte 2000)
1 In contrast, for instance, to the bye-laws posted at the entrance to the neighbourhood
park which are lengthy, numbered from 1-15, type-written, laminated, observed by
accident and seldom enforced. Or to the street sign outside the Flaming Cup which
lists the parking restrictions which is read very carefully by people parking there
since it is frequently enforced by motor-scooter-riding parking wardens who write
and apply sticky-backed plastic-wrapped tickets to car windshields.
2 See (Lee and Watson 1993) for their breakdown of the queue into its minimal units.
3 Ged Murtagh reminded us that this kind of rule breaking appears harder to contest
in the UK than in the case that he cites which occurred in Athens. There, it is much
more common that customers will speak up about someone reserving a café or bar
seat without entitlement, and equally that for an ‘ignorant’ so challenged, they will
quietly accept their ignorance as such and not as an insult or injury (which we would
suggest is how such remarks might be taken by the locals in the UK).
4 An extreme example being the use of a car to hold on to a parking space in a city
street. Such an object is both materially and more importantly legally hard to move
without the owner’s assistance and it is only actors with special dispensations that
are allowed to move cars, most significantly the Police (Sacks).
5 More could be said about the enforcement of local codes by inhabitants of a place
and how they can be expected to know who and what belongs to who (see Laurier,
Whyte & Buckner, forthcoming)
6 Sharrock & Button (1999) in their work detail how Wittgenstein and Garfinkel’s
explication of rules and how they are used remain frequently misunderstood.
7 It is not simply that a person has to look at a scene and work out ‘inferentially’ what
is occurring in that scene (i.e. 2 people sitting at a table who do not know each other),
as (Sudnow 1972) demonstrates actors in that scene struggle to make their appear-
ances intelligible to an observer who looks, even very briefly, at a scene.
8 In contrast to brief encounters whilst paying the bill at the counter or selecting a
magazine or newspaper from the café’s store of reading material.
9 It is still common in many village British and Irish pubs for ‘regulars’ to have their
own seat and for newcomers to the pub to make the mistake of sitting in a regular’s
seat and later finding themselves the subject of mockery when the regular arrives
and demands their seat back, while the other regulars look on and possibly laugh at
the newcomer for their unwitting but not witless ‘mistake’.
20 The visually displayed ‘space’ that is a café is used as a membership categorisation
device to produce the ensuing/attending categories of customer, waiter, regular etc.
21 In opposition to a place such as a library where eating at a table is strictly prohib-
ited.
22 Our use of the term ‘possible completion’ is a reference to an elementary systemat-
ics of spatial ordering derived from Sacks (1992) work on ‘closing’ sequences in tele-
224 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 225

phone calls as used by Lee and Watson (1993) to examine the organisation of public
space.
23 Whilst discussing ‘priming’ for remedial interchanges in public places, (Goffman
1971, p73) provides an example of the current status of a tabletop in terms of its
displayed objects and the possible misunderstanding of a newly arrived diner:
At lunchtime in a busy cafeteria a man brings his tray of food to a four-
person table that has dirty dishes on it, apparently assuming that no one
“has” the table. He clears a place for his own dishes, takes them to a tray,
and sits down. At this point two young men come up carrying dishes of
dessert and coffee:
Youths: (They place themselves directly in front of the table, both leaning
into it a little, and, dishes in hand, look at the man in the eye as if to give him
the first move.)
Man: (Gathers up his plates, puts them on his tray, rises, and says), “Sorry, I
thought no one was here.”
Youths: “Sorry it’s our table.” (They sit down.)
24 In Goffman’s (1970) book on spies and spying he describes how such shows of
ignoring conversations in restaurants and railway carriages can be used to purpose-
fully overhear conversations and at the same time he brings out the painstaking the-
atrical skill needed to do so and not be detected as a spy.
25 An issue that Sacks (1992) has dealt with in terms of ‘tickets’ for initiating and
maintaining conversations amongst the unacquainted.
26 Our conversation previous to the arrival of the photo album had been of the ‘do
you come here often’ type, which established as both as ‘regulars’ of the café.
27 A key difference in the reflexive argument Wieder (1974) is advancing here is that
such reflexivity is inherent in the social life of this and every place. Like many other
ethnomethodologists he is thereby avoiding treating participants in the situation as
unwitting of their action’s reflexivity to its ‘place’ and avoiding positing the social
researcher as more knowing for having pointed toward their reflexivity.
28 This list is in no way exhaustive and the reader will be able to compare it with their
own habitual public eating and drinking places to check that there are items on the
list which are locally produced elsewhere.
29 ‘Loudness’ in this case is not some absolute; it is heard in comparison to the audi-
bility of other conversations occurring in the café, including some of the staff’s confi-
dential conversations which are not to be overheard.
30 Professional journals in the shop, bar and café interior-design business are filled
with detailed instructions on the use of colour, lighting, music and even smell to
create different kinds of ambience.
31 See also Ged Murtagh’s (2000) work on the ways in which the noisy disruption of
mobile phones is a morally accountable matter in public places.
32 Ordinary actors do not ‘ground’ their actions in the rules or criteria of the public
sphere of Modernity as formalised a priori and the basis of our ethnomethodological
investigation of spatial practice is that we are trying to recover the located rationali-
ties of ordinary activities by signposting the features of spaces which are made rel-
evant and displayed by and for participants. For a similar clarification of
ethnomethodology’s relationship to Habermas’ theory of communicative action, see
Bogen (1989).
226 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 227

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230 Journal of Mundane Behavior Ethnography of Neighbourhood Café 231

About the Authors:
Eric Laurier (elaurier@geog.gla.ac.uk): Having been involved in a
number of post-doctoral research projects, Eric Laurier has a wide
range of interests. Key amongst them are: mobility, technology,
practical and visual knowledges, competence in interaction,
ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, social and cultural theory,
medicine and health. Currently he is the Urban Studies Research
Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Glasgow. In
the late afternoon he likes to idle over butter biscuits with an espresso
macchiato.
Angus Whyte (a.whyte@napier.ac.uk): Currently a research associate
at the International Teledemocracy Centre, Angus Whyte is pursuing
interests in ethnographically-informed participatory design and
social informatics, developed through the Living Memory Project
and from his doctoral research, ‘Structuring Webs of Relevance’
(unpublished PhD thesis, Dept of Information Science, University
of Strathclyde, 1998). He is particularly interested in how place (real
or virtual) is involved in the social and political shaping of
technologies that are intended to serve communities of practice.
Angus was previously Information Scientist at the Royal College of
Surgeons of Edinburgh, managed a worker’s cooperative, worked
as a systems analyst, and ran an independent record label.
Kathy Buckner (kbuckner@qmuc.ac.uk): Currently a lecturer in
Information Management at Queen Margaret University College,
Edinburgh. Her primary research interest is in the field of social
informatics. She investigates human factors affecting the use of
technology for social communication in informal (non-work) and
educational environments. In these settings she also studies the
approaches people adopt when seeking electronic information and
how they learn to use and adapt to complex interfaces. From 1998-
2001 she has been the principal researcher on the ‘Living Memory
Project’ part of Esprit Long Term Research Programme as part of
Intelligent Information Interfaces - Connected Communities (project
25621).
Sitting There: Discourses on the Embodiment of
Agency, Belonging, and Deference in the Classroom
Kevin Birth
Anthropology, Queens College, City University of New York
Abstract: University classes involve students sitting. This
unremarkable activity gains importance through how students
incorporate discussions of sitting into their representations of their
classes. Examining discourses of sitting provides insight into how
students represent issues of agency and belonging in the classroom,
and in so doing, an understanding of how the institution’s efforts to
impose its own image of students’ agency and belonging are
discursively and physically manifested. This study is based on
students’ discourse of sitting at Queens College, where the
institution’s ideas of self and agency in relationship to education
meet multiple ideas brought to college by an extremely diverse
student population.
In discussing West Indian politics, C. L. R. James made a cogent point thatapplies to all endeavors at social analysis: “always you have to watch what
the people do, not what you think they ought to do” (emphasis in original,
1984 [1962]: xviii). Much educational policy is based on what administrators
think faculty, students, and staff “ought to do.” Even a great deal of
scholarship is devoted to time-honored categories of thought such as
“pedagogy” or “critical thinking” and not to a close examination of what
people do. This article goes to the absurd end of the opposite extreme to see
what can be learned from a very mundane, frequently unaddressed
component of education that is very much what students do, namely, sitting.
I shall argue that because sitting is a common experience for students, it
becomes a shared reference in students’ discourse of belonging and agency
even in a highly culturally diverse student population.
In a very cursory survey of the literature, sitting does not seem to be
important as a topic, except in kinesics where relative position and posture,
such as sitting versus standing, indicates relative power (see Goffman 1979).
Those inspired by the literature on embodiment do not address sitting, and
neither do those who emphasize discourse analysis. Yet, sitting is clearly a
common activity. While it sounds silly to say, in an informal survey of my
own “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” with 154 students, in every
232 Journal of Mundane Behavior 233
Journal of Mundane Behavior, volume 2, number 2 (June 2001). © Kevin Birth and Journal
of Mundane Behavior. All rights reserved.