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LEIDNER, ROBIN. Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 278. $40.00, cloth; $15.00, paper
"Would you like some fries with that?" asks the McDonald's employee. This suggestive selling technique is so standardized and so recognizable that comedians can include it in their routines for guaranteed laughs. Comedians have found fast food restaurants like McDonald's a rich source for their material, in part because so many Americans have participated in what Robin Leidner describes in the book Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life as "routinized interactive service."
Routinized interactive service jobs are those service jobs that have been designed using principles first applied by Frederick Taylor in a manufacturing setting: (a) The best way for performing a job is identified scientifically (through the use of "time and motion studies"), (b) individuals are selected to be as perfectly matched, physically and mentally, as possible to the demands of the job, and (c) employees are trained carefully to ensure that they perform the work exactly as specified by prior scientific analysis (Cascio, 1992).
However, routinizing service jobs poses some challenges different from those found in manufacturing. For example, there are no clear distinctions among the product being sold, the work process, and the worker. Additionally, interactive service workers are at the boundaries of their organizations, where they must mediate between the organization and outsiders. They are buffers, oftentimes absorbing the hostilities consumers feel when organizational routines do not meet their needs or expectations. Furthermore, there is a need to standardize the behavior of the "service-recipients" to some extent. For a McDonald's restaurant to function smoothly, customers must play their prescribed roles (knowing what they want before the reach the cash register, ordering in the prescribed sequence, etc.). However, McDonald's customers and other service recipients do not always comply, and some actively resist. This makes it more difficult to control the service interaction, one of the goals of routinization.
Leidner identifies several methods employers use to routinize service work: They may specify exactly how workers look, exactly what they say, their demeanors, their gestures, their moods, and even their thoughts. Techniques for standardizing service work include: scripting;...