Research
Dr. Wilson is a sociologist who studies how work, culture, and social inequality get linked together in our changing economy and workplaces. Through closely examining settings such as full-service restaurants, craft breweries, and white-collar government offices, his scholarship illuminates how forces of social inequality stem from a combination of organizational structures, workplace cultures, and inter-personal relationships. As a trained ethnographer, Dr. Wilson brings leading academic theories into conversation with the everyday experiences and perspectives of workers themselves.
Make it stand out
The Labor of Lifestyle: Health, Wellness, and the Pursuit of Better Selves
Dr. Wilson’s current project investigates the first-hand labor experiences of people who engage in lifestyle work. Lifestyle work is part of a small but rapidly growing health and wellness industry that generates over $23 billion annually and is comprised of 370,000 workers in the US. Lifestyle work centers on the provision of personal services geared towards helping people construct “healthy,” well-curated lifestyles. Workers operating in this industry must pitch themselves as knowledgeable and friendly experts in subfields of health and wellness that fit popular cultural trends, such as “self-care.” Demographically, lifestyle workers are disproportionately women, particularly White women. This is consistent with other feminized types of employment involving both interactive service and care work and targeting a more affluent clientele. Yet unlike in well-established industries, such as healthcare, many lifestyle workers rely on short-term contracts and perform their jobs in entrepreneurial labor settings with few regulations or formal licensure requirements. An increasing number of people may be drawn to lifestyle work because of the freedom and autonomy they perceive it will offer to do what they love for a career. Who succeeds in this industry—and how they achieve it—is anything but clear.
Researching the everyday labor realities of lifestyle workers will break new ground in understanding how people manage their work lives in an era defined by unpredictable employment, stratified opportunities (by race, gender, and class), and changing cultural tastes for personal services. Prior scholarship predicts that workers who face precarious employment conditions are likely to adopt an entrepreneurial career approach by attempting to secure a steady stream of gig employment and by marketing themselves in ways that appeal to their target consumers. Workers from more socially privileged backgrounds generally have greater opportunities to do so than their less privileged peers due to their structural advantages (access to personal resources) and cultural advantages (embodying upper-middle-class tastes and lifestyles) relevant to the industry. Informed by these insights, Dr. Wilson’s study asks: 1) How are the service demands of elites reshaping employment for workers on the ground in terms of its structural conditions as well as cultural underpinnings? 2) To what extent are workers able to infuse their own aims and interests into these jobs, and what affects their ability to do so? Lastly, 3) How do lifestyle workers attempt to manage their employment in ways that not only reflect and reproduce existing social inequalities but also potentially challenge them?
Handcrafted Careers, Authenticity, and Artisanal Consumption in the Craft Beer Industry
Dr. Wilson’s recent project (2019-2024) is an ethnography of craft beer work in United States. Dr. Wilson examines how race, class, and gender inequalities manifest in modern craft industries that are centered on passion, artisanship, and authenticity.
This research asks big questions about how racism, sexism, and class dynamics impact the career paths of craft beer’s workers, exploring why (and how) men tend to move into creative roles of authority, whereas women are steered towards hospitality and working-class or Latinx workers into warehouse roles.
Within the umbrella of this project, Dr. Wilson also co-authored Beer and Society: How We Make Beer, and Beer Makes Us. Co-written with Dr. Asa Stone, an Advanced Cicerone and psychology professor, the book explores issues of identity, work, business, and culture in the world of beer. Drawing from both scholarly insights and industry expertise, this book offers a critical perspective on how beer and society are intertwined, including how beer is embedded within our larger economic system, racial hierarchies, and existing systems of power in our society. Together, these scholars detail how the recent growth of women and people of color in the beer industry is reshaping these craft workplaces to be more inclusive for both workers and consumers, though these efforts have also been met with pockets of resistance within the industry.
Tip Work in the New Economy
Tipping, as a deeply-held cultural practice in the U.S., has come under recent scrutiny due to labor activism surrounding tipped minimum wage laws and the disproportionate number of Black and Brown workers employed in these types of service workplaces. As his research on tipped workers — which builds on previous restaurant scholarship — is uncovering, tipping involves a blurry line between gift giving and market exchange that can reinforce a shadowy system of racial inequality in service workplaces. This is due to both limited access to higher-earning tipped jobs by members of disadvantaged groups, as well as the racialized, classed, and gendered assumptions that tipping customers bring with them into the service encounter.
Over the course of this project, Dr. Wilson expects to conduct further field research with two other groups of tipped workers over the next two years, exploring variations in meanings and manipulations within a tip-based economy that now amounts to over $47 billion dollars annually in the U.S. restaurant industry alone.
Examining Restaurant Work and Workers in Los Angeles (Past Project)
How workers navigate race, gender, and class in the food service industry
Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view.
In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry.
Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness.
Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.
Research
Dr. Wilson is a sociologist who studies how work, culture, and social inequality get linked together in our changing economy and workplaces. Through closely examining settings such as full-service restaurants, craft breweries, and white-collar government offices, his scholarship illuminates how forces of social inequality stem from a combination of organizational structures, workplace cultures, and inter-personal relationships. As a trained ethnographer, Dr. Wilson brings leading academic theories into conversation with the everyday experiences and perspectives of workers themselves.
Handcrafted Careers, Authenticity, and Artisanal Consumption in the Craft Beer Industry
Dr. Wilson’s recent project (2019-2024) is an ethnography of craft beer work in United States. Dr. Wilson examines how race, class, and gender inequalities manifest in modern craft industries that are centered on passion, artisanship, and authenticity.
This research asks big questions about how racism, sexism, and class dynamics impact the career paths of craft beer’s workers, exploring why (and how) men tend to move into creative roles of authority, whereas women are steered towards hospitality and working-class or Latinx workers into warehouse roles.
Within the umbrella of this project, Dr. Wilson also co-authored Beer and Society: How We Make Beer, and Beer Makes Us. Co-written with Dr. Asa Stone, an Advanced Cicerone and psychology professor, the book explores issues of identity, work, business, and culture in the world of beer. Drawing from both scholarly insights and industry expertise, this book offers a critical perspective on how beer and society are intertwined, including how beer is embedded within our larger economic system, racial hierarchies, and existing systems of power in our society. Together, these scholars detail how the recent growth of women and people of color in the beer industry is reshaping these craft workplaces to be more inclusive for both workers and consumers, though these efforts have also been met with pockets of resistance within the industry.
image from Oregonlive.com
Tip Work in the New Economy
Tipping, as a deeply-held cultural practice in the U.S., has come under recent scrutiny due to labor activism surrounding tipped minimum wage laws and the disproportionate number of Black and Brown workers employed in these types of service workplaces. As his research on tipped workers — which builds on previous restaurant scholarship — is uncovering, tipping involves a blurry line between gift giving and market exchange that can reinforce a shadowy system of racial inequality in service workplaces. This is due to both limited access to higher-earning tipped jobs by members of disadvantaged groups, as well as the racialized, classed, and gendered assumptions that tipping customers bring with them into the service encounter.
Over the course of this project, Dr. Wilson expects to conduct further field research with two other groups of tipped workers over the next two years, exploring variations in meanings and manipulations within a tip-based economy that now amounts to over $47 billion dollars annually in the U.S. restaurant industry alone.
Examining Restaurant Work and Workers in Los Angeles (Past Project)
How workers navigate race, gender, and class in the food service industry
Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house—also known as the public areas of the restaurant—while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view.
In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry.
Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness.
Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.