Learning to Serve

It seems that Mirabelli's aim for his research is to fit in the paradigm of the "work in this book [that] argues that literacy extends beyond individual experiences of reading and writing to include the various modes of communication and situations of any socially meaningful group or network where language is used in multiple ways." He doesn't seem to explicitly state his research question, but he states his goal again, asserting "there is something unique and complex about the ways waiters and waitresses in diners use language and literacy in doing their work." I think his research question would be something like 'are interactive service workers learning a unique literacy, if so, how does it work?'

Mirabelli collects data from two different restaurants, one privately owned and one a chain place. He said he used direct participation, observation, and transcriptions, among other items, to document the interactions in these restaurants.

One of his big conclusions is that meaning via communication is and can be constructed through various types of non-text conduits. Another interesting bit he found was that waiters and waitresses must be mutable when it comes to authority, because it's a useful tool in customer interactions, while they are more subjected TO it when talking in the kitchen. I do remember this two-facedness necessary for food service workers, as I used to wait in a little diner, and it was hard.