Research
Dr. Wilson is a sociologist who studies the interconnections between race, work, and social inequality in the new urban economy. In researching settings as varied as restaurants, craft breweries, and white-collar offices, Dr. Wilson’s scholarship illuminates how forces of inequality do not merely reflect managerial malpractice but a more complex dynamic of organizational structures, workplace cultures, and inter-personal relationships. As a trained ethnographer, Dr. Wilson engages these research themes by capturing the ground-level, everyday experiences and perspectives of workers themselves.
Craft Beer, Artisanal Consumption, and Handcrafted Careers among U.S. Craft Brewery Workers
Dr. Wilson’s newest project, underway since the summer of 2018, is an ethnography of craft work and workers in the U.S craft beer industry. Dr. Wilson examines how race and gender inequalities operate in “craft” industries that remain largely associated with whiteness, middle-class masculinity, and consumption. His interviews with brewery workers are beginning to reveal how the cultural logic of “craft work” can function as both opportunity and exclusion for different workers. In a recent paper, he argues that craft beer workers idealize those who have a complete devotion to craft brewing, yet the embodied expression of this devotion—from wearing beer branded gear to “hanging out” at the brewery off-hours to talk about the latest beer releases—is based around privileged white male norms that can limit the participation of women and people of color from the industry.
Within the umbrella of this project, Dr. Wilson has also teamed up with Dr. Asa Stone, an Advanced Cicerone and psychology professor, to co-author a book manuscript that uses beer to explore issues of identity, relationships, work, 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.
Recent Project: Examining Restaurant Work and Workers in Los Angeles.
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.
image from Oregonlive.com
Current Project #2: 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.