Customer Reviews

Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life

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When all is said and done, American consumers are more alike than they are different. This truth of human psychology provides the bedrock of our mass production economy; it is possible to create core products that millions of people will buy, and it is possible to design methods of presontation and marketing that millions of people will respond to. Consistancy beats creativity. That said, individuals, even those who aren't considered wildly creative or in any way eccentric still need to shave off 5 - 10% of their personalities to find their fit in cultures devoted to providing a consistant product or approach to business.

Dr. Leidner's study of how this morphing of individual to group collective focuses on two job classes at diverse ends of the American economic experience. On the one side is McDonalds, whose counter and burger flipping positions, even if in many instances filled by students on their way to something far different, have also become a shorthand for employment of last resort among those with few skills, options, and long term prospects. On the other end of the study is Combined Insurance Company of America (CICA), a subsidiary of Aon Corp. CICA is a sales driven company, and sales - dispite the field's high washout rate - remains for those who do it well the highest paying profession in America.

Early on Dr. Leidner suggests that there is irony in the fact that these companies, which rely on structure and standardization to a degree uncommon in their respective fields, were formed by highly dynamic individualists, Ray Krock and W. Clement Stone respectively, who challenged convention and relied on personal instinct in building their empires. It makes for a nice sentence or two, but most people who build empires, be they Krock and Stone, or Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, James Hill, Michael Dell, Sam Walton, etc use a different approach to building than will subsiquently be needed to maintain and expand those companies. Even a company as wildly creative as Apple Computer needs to instill a degree of structure within the organization if only so it doesn't fall prey to entrophy.

Still, organizational struture isn't the theme of the book, instead it is what happens to people whose jobs involve working directly with customers, human interactions, that realm of life where individual personality is most apt to express itself, but who are told to conduct those exchanges with the same routine and scripting of a working standing at a machine and mass producing parts on an assembly line. Because McDonalds is a recognizeable American icon most of the attention given this book - including the other review on this site - focuses on the chapters dealing with the fast food giant. I found the chapters about Combined Insurance Company far more interesting. I work in sales and during my second year in the field I joined (and have since left) CICA in Virginia during the time that Leidner was doing her research and observations in the company's midwestern operations.

Leidner focused on the company's Life divison, even as she stated that the Accident Indemnity divison which I sold in, practiced the greatest reliance on standardized presentations and scripting in general. In her assessment the company's philosophy of reliance on a tightly structured sales system came at the expense of individualism and forced sales reps to subliminate elements of their own personalities and as such had to struggle with feelings of inauthicity and a loss of self.

To a degree her assessment makes sense, and as CICA gave her full access to the company's sales school, as well as interivews and field time with new agents and managers, her studies did reflect what her subjects cited as their actual experiences. That said - and dispite CICA giving her more cooperation and acceptance than some at McDonalds gave her - I feel that she didn't do as complete a job of putting CICA in its proper place within the evolution of sales methods over the past 100+ years.

Dr. Leidner seemed at times to subscribe to the myth of the 'natural born salesperson'. The hired gun who shot from the hip, said whatever came to mind, and sold circles around everyone else b/c of inate abilities that couldn't be studied, quantified, or taught. This misconception has long bitten at the heals of anyone who dared argue that sales can be taught. In the 1890's when John Henry Peterson organized the first sales schools for NCR reps, and wrote the first standardized sales manual, which he demanded his reps follow - at the risk of being fired even if they met quota while using other methods there has been a debate over whether selling is a learnable skill or an artform that one either has or hasn't. People in the latter camp react to any approach to standardize the field in the same way a literary writer reacts to romance and mystery novelist who churn out and sell formulaic fiction by the boatload.

It has been my observation over 20 plus yrs that people who enter sales with the latter view often washout and return to other fields when they find that doing it by the seat of their pants doesn't work. CICA's training wasn't so much about denying indiviual initiative, but about giving the individual agent tools that worked (this afterall is the field where Elmer Wheeler, the man remembered for coining the phrase 'sell the sizzle, not the steak' found that a sales rep could increase his sales 500% just by omitting two words in his closing sentence).

Reading Dr. Leidner's account of new hires trying to deal with CICA's methods in 1987 I was reminded of some of my long forgotten impressions from sales school. At the time I watched my classmates, most of whom were new to sales and with little previous knowledge of the history of the field, its inovators, and groundbreakers, or of the principles of human behavior that drove the methods, react defensively and with uncertainty to what they were being taught. My impression at the time was that CICA could have generated greater acceptance of its methods if some time had been given to validating the underlying principles - which that minority of us with prior sales backgrounds knew to be true. Dr. Leidner's interviews suggested that some of the new agents she spent time with struggled with the same thing.

As such, what she terms a stuggle to keep subverting the self, and losing one's individuality to scripted methods, may in fact have been an individual lost in a tool chest or weighed down by a tool belt such that they somehow failed to see themselves for what they really were, craftsmen provided with world class tools, whose success or failure would depend on how they as individuals used those tools.

Hungry and tired of the banality of couscous, hara (a tomato based soup) and tajine that I had been eating in Morocco for the past four months, I burst through the doors of one of the McDonald's in the city of Casablanca. I was on a mission. I had dragged several of my friends by train, bus, taxi, and foot for the singular purpose of eating a Big Mac. I was feed up. I needed food that I could trust to be produced in some standardized fashion, that would be clean and well cooked. I also needed to use a bathroom that was clean. This "quest" occurred during a foreign exchange to Morocco during the fall of 2000. But the story begins much earlier perhaps in 1994 when I was 12 or 13. My father had taken me to our local Borders bookstore in the suburbs of Philadelphia to hear a lecture about McDonald's of all things (I was home schooled at the time and going to lectures such as these was a continual part of my education). Robin Leidner's lecture was probably my first exposure to sociology and I believe one of the causes that lead to a radical shift in my adolescent thinking. Never again was the world the same. In a sense, Robin Leidner gave birth to my "sociological imagination." Ever since I have also been fascinated by McDonald's as an indicator of American culture. There is something awe inspiring about the success of McDonald's and its guarantee of a certain quality of food, cheer, and service no matter where in the world I should travel. (The phenomonem of McDonald's seems reminscent of something one might find in a dystopian post-industrial science ficiton story.) That at, one time, 7% of US workers had worked at McDonald's at one time or another, speaks to the influence of McDonald's in the lives of Americans. On the other hand, the routinization that has been key to McDonald's success raises questions of alienation, autonomy and robotization of employees for the sake of profit. Ever present is the conflict between self-identity and existence in a corporate world that requires all things to be standerdized. Dr. Leidner provides insight into corporate culture that many of us will at sometime or another participate in. It would be good judgment to know what we are getting ourselves involved in. I, for one, have learned to appreciate the significance of McDonald's organizational structure, while being cogent of the impact of its corporate values on the individual and society. There is a sense of empowerment in "decoding" society and locating ones position in society and it is my hope that others, outside of academia, will read Leidner's book and become consciouse of their organizational context. There is the sense of a prophecy fulfilled. After first seeing Dr. Leidner and reading of the expansion of McDonald's to Morocco, I have, seven years later eaten at the first McDonald's in Morocco, always with "Fast Food, Fast Talk" in mind. The impetus for this has always been to see for myself if Dr. Leidner was right: could McDonald's really be the same everywhere? It would seem that my life has already come full circle. As the result of my first exposure to sociology from Dr. Leidner, I am currently studying the sociology of work and occupation!