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Cultural Creation in Culinary Fields: The Cases of New York and San Francisco

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Sociology of the Arts in Action

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Abstract

Sociological and organizational research on creativity and innovation largely falls into two camps: studies of fields of cultural production and organizational studies of the corporate and technology worlds, each emphasizing different social forces at work. However, fields are more likely to combine characteristics of both areas than is typically acknowledged. They are therefore likely to have different risks, pressures, and incentives and, in turn, different patterns of creativity and innovation than it has been typically acknowledged. Drawing on the case of high cuisine, I evaluate the most influential premises in research on cultural creation. I suggest an analytical framework for the explanation of variance in patterns of cultural creation across fields.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bourdieu did not theorize the boundaries of a field. In general, his research on cultural fields assumes an equivalence between the extension of the field and the geographical boundaries of the nation (Bourdieu, 1988, [1992] 1996).

  2. 2.

    See Childress (2012) for a general exception, and Casanova (2004) for a partial exception. Childress is one of the few researchers to specify the geographic limits of literary fields; what is more, he notes the existence of distinct fields within a single country.

  3. 3.

    Although studies of fields inspired by organizational theories do not normally discuss Bourdieu’s theory, they are based on premises highly consistent with it (cf. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, 1991).

  4. 4.

    In effect, the French word chef means boss. Chefs are responsible for the administration of the business whether they are owners or employees of the restaurant. In some cases, restaurants hire managers, who are solely responsible for the commercial administration of the restaurant, and are located below the chef in terms of hierarchy.

  5. 5.

    Restaurants have a profit margin between 3% and 5%. In general, there is an inversely proportional relation between a restaurant’s status and its profit margin. The highest status restaurants also have the highest costs (both in ingredients and labor) and fewer customers (fewer tables and a less rapid turnover, given that meals are of a longer duration), all of which diminish the profit margin relative to restaurants of lower status.

  6. 6.

    The model of elite restaurants is quite different from that of fast food franchises, since the latter offer a certain global standardization in their products and make use of fewer local or seasonal ingredients (though they also adapt their offerings to local tastes).

  7. 7.

    New York and San Francisco constitute ideal cases for an analysis of culinary fields given their high level of prestige (nationally and internationally) and because they possess both similarities and significant differences. This has been developed in more detail in Leschziner (2015).

  8. 8.

    According to 2012 statistics (the most recent at the time of writing this chapter), New York has approximately 8000 restaurants while San Francisco has approximately 1800. The latter figure includes restaurants of Berkeley and Oakland in Alameda County (numbering 600) that were part of this investigation. For more details, see Leschziner (2015; U.S. Census Bureau, 2014a, 2014b).

  9. 9.

    A large proportion of the higher status restaurants in New York are French. Up until the 2000s, French restaurants constituted the majority of this group. However, with the ascension of other cuisines such as Japanese, Modernist, and New Nordic Cuisine, this proportion, while still significant, is no longer a majority. According to data from the first half of 2014, 28.6% of The New York Times’s three and four star restaurants (four stars being the maximum) were classified as French. In order to understand this figure, it is important to keep in mind that this newspaper classifies restaurants under dozens of categories. San Francisco has far fewer high-status French restaurants, a characteristic that has marked the culinary field of the city for quite some time. In addition, New York has a significant number of culinary professionals of French nationality (including those of lower ranks than chef), while in San Francisco this group is small.

  10. 10.

    This factor is frequently invoked in order to explain the difference between Italian and French cuisines. The former, based upon high-quality fresh products, is considered more simple. The latter is compounded from an elaborate combination of ingredients and a technically complex culinary grammar, first developed in the nineteenth century, and subsequently becoming the basis of modern Western high cuisine (Ferguson, 2004; Leschziner, 2006; Leschziner & Dakin, 2011; Trubek, 2000). While the greater part of Italy has access to a large variety of high-quality products thanks to its climate, France developped a culinary complexity in order to compensate for a more restricted access to natural local products throughout the year.

  11. 11.

    My analysis of the restaurant reviews in The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle shows that innovation is perceived positively by critics in New York and less positively in San Francisco. Restaurants perceived as innovative—to the extent that the execution of the dishes is deemed correct and the innovation is not deemed detrimental to the taste—usually received more positive reviews than restaurants perceived as more traditional. Critics identify four forms of innovation—the combination of ingredients, technique, use of new ingredients, and presentation—and more positively value the first of these forms, followed by the second, and to a lesser extent the other two forms (see Leschziner, 2015: 49–71, 179–180).

  12. 12.

    Many elite chefs purchase non-local products, either through local purveyors or by importing them directly. However, the availability, cost, and quality of these products are quite different from those of local products. In addition, the increasing tendency to prepare dishes with local and seasonal ingredients has meant a decline in the acceptance and popularity of such practices. As for customers, while restaurants in cities like New York and San Francisco do attract non-locals, these rarely form the basis of their clientele (see Leschziner, 2015).

  13. 13.

    The names of the chefs and the restaurants have been kept anonymous and confidential.

  14. 14.

    Phillips and Zuckerman (2001) have called this phenomenon “middle status conformity,” an influential term in organizational studies (Burt, 2004; Podolny, 2005; Rao et al., 2005).

  15. 15.

    In my research, I have called middle status “upper-middle” because in the world of elite restaurants, the lowest status is never very low; hence its designation as “middle.”

  16. 16.

    It is not always easy to tell whether the problem with a dish lies in its conception or its preparation.

  17. 17.

    “The mode of cultural production” is obviously inspired by Marx’s concept of modes of production ([1867] 1889). Similar to Marx’s concept, the mode of cultural production refers to what individuals produce and how they produce it. For an elaboration of the characteristics of the mode of cultural production, see Leschziner (2015).

  18. 18.

    Up until the advent of nouvelle cuisine, the culinary movement developed in France in the 1960s and 70s, restaurant chefs were not known by name; the name of the restaurant and the classic dishes on its menu constituted the capital that mattered. With nouvelle cuisine, chefs “came out of the kitchen” and an organizational transformation began which has continued up until the present (Ferguson, 2004; Rao et al., 2003, 2005).

  19. 19.

    Bourdieu (1977) makes reference to this point in his distinction between docta and doxa.

  20. 20.

    Chefs can make use of various intellectual property laws to protect their ideas, but they rarely do. The only common intellectual property law in cuisine is copyright; however, this law protects cookbooks and not the combinations of ingredients that make up the recipes. The normative regulation of knowledge-exchange in cuisine is an important factor in the diffusion of ideas and patterns of creation in a culinary field (Di Stefano et al., 2014; Fauchart & von Hippel, 2006; Leschziner, 2007, 2015: 73-97).

  21. 21.

    Enjeu literally refers to what is at stake in a field.

  22. 22.

    American sociology of culture has given increasing attention to the influence of the context of action in the analysis of cognitive patterns and practices (DiMaggio, 1997; Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003; Swidler, 2003).

  23. 23.

    The New York and San Francisco fields present certain differences in this regard. Here, I only analyze the New York case.

  24. 24.

    In other words, the delimitation of a field should not be a theoretical task (and even less an automatic reproduction of Bourdieusian analyses), but rather an empirical one, on the basis of the observation of the actions and opinions of field members.

  25. 25.

    Some sociological and organizational perspectives provide particularly useful information on the complexity of organizational fields and above all on how individuals respond to it (see Fligstein, 2001; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Porac et al., 1995).

  26. 26.

    These ideas are inspired by Dewey’s pragmatist theory ([1922] 2002, [1939] 1967) and, in particular, by his explanation of the dynamics of action and the intrinsic relation between means and ends (see Leschziner, 2015; Leschziner & Green, 2013).

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  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Vanina Leschziner

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  1. Departamento de Sociología, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Arturo Rodríguez Morató

  2. Department of Sociology, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA

    Alvaro Santana-Acuña

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Leschziner, V. (2022). Cultural Creation in Culinary Fields: The Cases of New York and San Francisco. In: Rodríguez Morató, A., Santana-Acuña, A. (eds) Sociology of the Arts in Action. Sociology of the Arts . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11305-5_4

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