Juggling Food and Feelings: Emotional Balance in the Workplace

In Juggling Food and Feelings Mary Gatta applies social and structuration theory to the workplace as she analyzes the emotional challenges faced by restaurant workers. Gatta utilizes extensive participatory observation of, and interviews with, restaurant managers and servers to explore how workers deal with emotional experience in the workplace. Positing that we ordinarily maintain an emotional balance, Gatta theorizes that our ability to cope with emotional disturbances in the workplace depends on situated rebalancing "scripts" used to control feelings. Contributing to the sociology of gender, social psychology, and labor theory this study of occupations expertly reveals the complex typology of emotion management.