Racial and Ethnic Differences in Tipping: The Role of Perceived Descriptive and Injunctive Tipping Norms

In U.S. restaurants, racial and ethnic minorities often tip less than whites. These differences in tipping create numerous problems ranging from discriminatory service to restaurant executives’ reluctance to open restaurants in minority communities. Thus, racial differences in tipping need to be sizably reduced, which requires an understanding of their underlying causes. In this paper, we ask a racially and ethnically diverse sample of respondents in an online survey about how much they would tip in a hypothetical dining scenario, how much their best friend would tip, and how much the average person in their area would tip, as well as what the smallest tip a server in their area would consider satisfactory. Analyses of these data indicate that perceived injunctive and descriptive tipping norms independently mediate racial and ethnic differences in tipping. This finding suggests that racial differences in tipping can be reduced with marketing campaigns that promote the dominant 15 to 20 percent injunctive tipping norm and that inform consumers about widespread compliance with that norm

Dignity Transacted: Emotional Labor and the Racialized Workplace

In interactive customer service encounters, the dignity of the parties becomes the currency of a commercial transaction. Service firms that profit from customer satisfaction place great emphasis on emotional labor, the work that service providers do to make customers feel cared for and esteemed. But performing emotional labor can deny dignity to workers by highlighting their subservience and requiring them to suppress their own emotions in an effort to elevate the status and experiences of their customers. Paradoxically, the burden of performing emotional labor may also impose transactional costs on some customers by facilitating discrimination in service delivery. Drawing on the extant scholarship on emotional labor and ongoing research on full-service restaurants, we argue that the strain and indignities of performing emotional labor, often for precarious compensation, lead servers to adopt various coping strategies, including some that open the door to their delivery of inferior and inhospitable service. When these strains and indignities are coupled with culturally entrenched racial stereotypes and racialized discourse in the workplace, the result is that people of color—a legally protected category of customers—are systematically denied dignity and equality by being excluded from the benefits of welcoming and caring customer service. Discriminatory customer service often is so subtle and ambiguous that it escapes legal accountability. It nevertheless warrants our attention, because it contributes to the social and economic marginalization of people of color. Far from being a mundane or trivial concern, the dynamics described in this Article underscore the various ways in which particular groups come to be designated as suitable targets for a wide range of disregard and mistreatment. These dynamics also illuminate how structural conditions facilitate and promote economic discrimination, as well as the connections between workers’ rights and civil rights

Dignity Transacted

In interactive customer service encounters, the dignity of the parties becomes the currency of a commercial transaction. Service firms that profit from customer satisfaction place great emphasis on emotional labor, the work that service providers do to make customers feel cared for and esteemed. But performing emotional labor can deny dignity to workers, by highlighting their subservience and requiring them to suppress their own emotions in an effort to elevate the status and experiences of their customers. Paradoxically, the burden of performing emotional labor may also impose transactional costs on some customers by facilitating discrimination in service delivery. Drawing on the extant scholarship on emotional labor and ongoing research on full-service restaurants, we argue that the strain and indignities of performing emotional labor, often for precarious compensation, lead servers to adopt various coping strategies, including some that open the door to their delivery of inferior and inhospitable service. When these strains and indignities are coupled with culturally entrenched racial stereotypes and racialized discourse in the workplace, the result is that people of color—a legally protected category of customers—are systematically denied dignity and equality by being excluded from the benefits of welcoming and caring customer service. Discriminatory customer service often is so subtle and ambiguous that it escapes legal accountability. It nevertheless warrants our attention, because it contributes to the social and economic marginalization of people of color. Far from being a mundane or trivial concern, the dynamics described in this article underscore the various ways in which particular groups come to be designated as suitable targets for a wide range of disregard and mistreatment. These dynamics also illuminate how structural conditions facilitate and promote economic discrimination, as well as the connections between workers’ rights and civil rights

Dignity Transacted: Emotional Labor and the Racialized Workplace

In interactive customer service encounters, the dignity of the parties becomes the currency of a commercial transaction. Service firms that profit from customer satisfaction place great emphasis on emotional labor, the work that service providers do to make customers feel cared for and esteemed. But performing emotional labor can deny dignity to workers by highlighting their subservience and requiring them to suppress their own emotions in an effort to elevate the status and experiences of their customers. Paradoxically, the burden of performing emotional labor may also impose transactional costs on some customers by facilitating discrimination in service delivery. Drawing on the extant scholarship on emotional labor and ongoing research on full-service restaurants, we argue that the strain and indignities of performing emotional labor, often for precarious compensation, lead servers to adopt various coping strategies, including some that open the door to their delivery of inferior and inhospitable service. When these strains and indignities are coupled with culturally entrenched racial stereotypes and racialized discourse in the workplace, the result is that people of color—a legally protected category of customers—are systematically denied dignity and equality by being excluded from the benefits of welcoming and caring customer service. Discriminatory customer service often is so subtle and ambiguous that it escapes legal accountability. It nevertheless warrants our attention, because it contributes to the social and economic marginalization of people of color. Far from being a mundane or trivial concern, the dynamics described in this Article underscore the various ways in which particular groups come to be designated as suitable targets for a wide range of disregard and mistreatment. These dynamics also illuminate how structural conditions facilitate and promote economic discrimination, as well as the connections between workers’ rights and civil rights

Political Ideological Distance between Sociology Students and their Instructors: The Effects of Students’ Perceptions

College instructors, as a group, are more liberal than the general US population. The causes and consequences of this incongruence have been the focus of a considerable amount of discourse. However, little scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding if and how political ideologies shape students’ classroom experiences. We advance this area of inquiry by assessing empirically how sociology students’ perceived ideological distance from graduate student instructors affects multiple outcomes, ranging from classroom behaviors to course evaluations. Our findings suggest that students’ perceptions of political ideological distance from their instructors, regardless of the direction of that distance, negatively affect seven out of the eight outcomes we evaluate. We submit that shared concerns about student learning should prompt increased scholarly attention to the role of political ideologies in the college classroom