Privileging Passion: How the Cultural Logic of Work Perpetuates Social Inequality in the Craft Beer Industry

Abstract

Having or “finding” passion for work has become an increasingly common cultural logic of work today, one that workers use to justify career choices and managers use to make hiring decisions. However, scholars have yet to articulate how workers enact this cultural logic of work in ways that may ultimately contribute to social inequality in modern workplaces. On the basis of 115 in-depth interviews and two years of ethnographic fieldwork in U.S. craft breweries, the author shows how brewery workers express a heightened relationship to their jobs, which the author calls pure passion, in ways that encompass labor, consumption, and lifestyle practices. Yet because these enactments of pure passion are predicated on privileged social attributes with respect to race, class, and gender, this cultural logic of work ends up reinforcing the dominant position of white, middle-class men in this industry while simultaneously marginalizing the experiences of women and people of color.