The Cappuccino Community : cafes and civic life in the ...

The Cappuccino Community : cafes and civic life in the
contemporary city
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Duration: 30 months
Start/End Date: July 2002 – December 2004
Introduction
Cafes serving cappuccino have become prominent in many cityscapes over the last
five years providing not just frothy coffee and snacks but as importantly new spaces
for people to meet, relax, work, write, read and most of all talk. In the history of
European civil society cafes played a key role which they only recently seem to have
regained in the UK. This project will investigate the role of cafes in urban
communities in the UK, be they neighbourhood, work or virtual communities. It will
assess the cafe's changing relevance as a site for civic life and public culture. It will
do this through carrying out a multi-site ethnography of over a dozen different kinds
of cafes, their working conditions, customer interactions, and tracing the cafes'
connection into daily routines.
Non-technical summary
It is frothy, warm, and comforting, we can find it in nearly every city in the UK, but
what exactly is community, how is it made and what does it have to do with cafes?
Answering such a question requires that we move away from a vague general and
often nostalgic sense of community to look at specific communities now arguably
emerging in particular places. From near extinction, cappuccino-serving high street
cafes have returned and are suddenly everywhere: from bookshops to DIY stores.
This project seeks to investigate this new British 'cosmopolitan gathering place',
alongside its historical precursors and competitors (i.e greasy spoons, neighbourhood
cafes, dept store cafes) and its European counterparts. Histories of the emergence of
European civic and civil society emphasize the key place of cafes for free and equal
exchange, debate and commerce between the social classes. It is relatively wellknown
that Lloyds Bank was in fact founded in a City of London coffee house. Given
the contemporary return to prominence and popularity of the cafe set against its
historical role in the development of civil society, it is a timely and pertinent research
topic.
Our aims and objectives are:
1. To investigate whether cafes are now becoming sites for new kinds of
community, and, if so, to consider how these forms of community differ from the civil
society that cafes historically supported. Cafes are gathering places for diverse types
of people, centres of mixing, debate and encounter. They are places where some
people come to 'belong' whilst others may be excluded. This project will examine
ethnographically the range of spaces cafes make available and how they constitute
themselves as socially inclusive and exclusive places.
2. To record the many forms of activity that occur in cafes and how the cafe
fits into the daily routines of its inhabitants. To assess thereby levels and kinds of
office work that have shifted into cafes, kinds of community care that may be
occurring there, meetings with friends, neighbours etc. Showing whether and how
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cafes have becomes nodes interconnecting work, leisure, study, casual encounters and
society in general.
3. To describe the practical 'work' that is accomplished by both customers and
staff in creating and maintaining cafes as sites of rule-guided interaction. To consider
how certain people come to be regulars in different kinds of cafes, how customers
sometimes become acquainted, the rights and obligations of various kinds that are
found there.
4. To conduct an ethnographic study of 12 cafes in the UK, 3 in-depth, and 9
shorter studies. The in-depth studies involving participant-observation as a staff
member, as a regular and also the shadowing of 36 customers in their daily routines
(12 from each cafe).
5. To make use of video in gathering observational data of naturally occurring
social interaction. With the assistance of editing facilities and computer assisted
tagging and indexing packages to analyse (and present via multi-media) how people
interact and make communities via practical activities in real time.
Detailed Aims and objectives
1. To investigate the distinctive forms of community found in cafes and what grounds
they provide for a vital civic life in the city. This aim builds on the historical evidence
of the importance of cafes to the rise of civil society in Europe and seeks to situate
them in a contemporary context. Studies of community life in the USA and the UK
have often highlighted evidence of its general decline but in many ways have
overlooked the new places within which forms of communal life are located. This
project will extend the communities of practice approach to provide a more grounded
and heterogenous understanding of community-in-action.
2. To document and index the varied forms of community interaction and social
categorising that are found in cafes predominantly in the UK. What is unquestionable
is that cafes support a diversity of activities for their customers, they also articulate
with the daily routines of the customers in different ways. The project will assemble
an occasioned corpus of customer activities to provide a sense of exactly what kinds
of work, play, sociability occur. Whether there are meetings between the
unacquainted, who the regulars are and what rights and obligations go with their
categorisation as a 'regular'.
3. To examine the methods used by staff and customers for temporally and spatially
organising cafes in the UK and Italy such that public encounters and informal
meetings can occur there. Cafes are places where distinctive communities of practice
can be found which are reflexively tied to their settings. The civic freedoms of talking
to strangers, crossing social hierarchies or publicly debating news and affairs of the
day come about through the sensitive use of codes of conduct rooted in the
background expectations of cafes as category-bound settings.
4. To do multi-site ethnographies of a dozen cafes in the UK of contrasting types,
drawing on commercial and other categorisations (i.e. franchise, 'greasy spoon',
internet and also neighbourhood, city centre, youth cultured). Of these to select three
for prolonged in-depth ethnographies involving participant-observation of the life of
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their staff, the world of customers and finally the shadowing of customers to see how
the cafe fits into their daily routines.
5. To shoot, use and analyse video recordings of naturally occurring interaction in
cafes. Methods of documentary film-making regularly used in anthropological and
ethnomethodological studies will be pursued. Once video data has been acquired it
will be indexed and analysed according to the distinctive and rigorous approaches of
conversation-analysis and ethnomethodology. In addition research participants will
generate photographic material for analysis and discussion.
Methodology
In terms of research practice the project will run for two years and be based on
ethnographic study spread over approximately a dozen cafes in the UK. Ethnography
is an increasingly popular method for gathering data in the social sciences which
relies on inhabiting the sites of the populations under study and gaining an adequate
grasp of how and why things are done in particular places. Studying cafes from the
perspective of a 'native' means joining in their lifeworlds. To do justice to the
diversity of cafes, twelve study sites in the UK will be selected on the criteria of
maximising contrast. Subsequently three of the initial twelve cafes will be selected for
in-depth examination via time-spent becoming 'a regular', observing its production
alongside the staff, and finally shadowing a dozen customers. Preceding the eighteen
months of fieldwork, interviews will be carried out with representatives of the larger
cafe chains and managers of the actual study sites, to provide their experienced views
on the functioning and life of cafes. Alongside interviews, once the ethnographies are
underway the researcher will keep a traditional field journal. Moreover, with
informed-consent videos will be made of social interaction in the cafes for subsequent
analysis and sharing amongst the research community (they will not be publicly
available). The principal investigator (Eric Laurier) has considerable experience in
the use of video for recording naturalistic observations in unusual settings (i.e. inside
cars, inside family homes, public lending libraries, hotels, shopping centres and
cafes.) Finally up to thirty six customers will be recruited from the three in-depth
venues to be shadowed by the researcher and to use Polaroid cameras to take
illustrative photos of their daily routines which will then be used for group
discussions during the analysis stage of the project to investigate how they are nodes
within the network of people's daily lives.
Contact:
Dr Eric Laurier, ESRC Research Fellow, Department of Geography, University of
Glasgow, Glasgow G12 6QQ.
0141 330 4784
07855 361143
elaurier@geog.gla.ac.uk
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