Doormen

Peter Bearman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226039718
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Little fascinates New Yorkers more than doormen, who know far more about tenants than tenants know about them. Doormen know what their tenants eat, what kind of movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, and whether they have kinky sex. But if doormen are unusually familiar with their tenants, they are also socially very distant. In Doormen, Peter Bearman untangles this unusual dynamic to reveal the many ways that tenants and doormen negotiate their complex relationship.Combining observation, interviews, and survey information, Doormen provides a deep and enduring ethnography of the occupational role of doormen, the dynamics of the residential lobby, and the mundane features of highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants. Here, Bearman explains why doormen find their jobs both boring and stressful, why tenants feel anxious about how much of a Christmas bonus their neighbors give, and how everyday transactions small and large affect tenants' professional and informal relationships with doormen.In the daily life of the doorman resides the profound, and this book provides a brilliant account of how tenants and doormen interact within the complex world of the lobby.

CHAPTER 1

Interpersonal Closeness and Social Distance

What’s the strangest thing to happen here, in this building? I don’t know. Having you come and interview me. That’s pretty strange.

Residential doormen can be found in most major world cities, but like bagels, they are quintessentially New York.¹ While it surprises New Yorkers, for whom doormen are a critical element of their sense of self and place, no one has thought to study them or the larger social ecology of the lobby, where tenants and doormen meet.² But for those living elsewhere, such neglect is less surprising, for as noted in the preface — either for reasons of personal biography, prurience, or (generally) accurate perceptions of marketability — sociologists since the 1960s considering field-based projects tend to study heterodox populations: gang members, sidewalk booksellers, prostitutes, junkies, micro-criminals, and so on. There are some exceptions to this general attraction to the unusual, and these are often occupational studies such as this, many of which also focus on workers in the service industry. There are, for example, outstanding studies of airline flight attendants, bill collectors, cooks, holistic health workers, milkmen, Hollywood composers, and even cosmetologists in nail salons.³ In these studies, sociologists often focus on and reveal the careful management of personality in front-room settings, often in sharp contrast to the tensions, conflicts, and disgusts that make up the more expressive backroom behavior;⁴ careful discussions of the negotiated order;⁵ and deep insights into the strategies and tricks of the trade that people develop to get by.⁶ Likewise, there are a number of excellent ethnographic accounts of complex settings similar to the lobby, for example, the hospital waiting room, the factory floor, public bathrooms, lounges, laboratory life, and street corners.⁷ But overall, given their distribution in the population, everyday workers in everyday occupations and everyday contexts command less attention from social science than might be warranted.⁸ Why this is the case is considered subsequently. But first there is a prior question: Why study doormen?

One answer by analogy might be as follows: Recall the time before there were ice makers and plastic ice-cube trays coated with a miraculous substance that allows ice to just drop out. Instead, ice cubes were released from the grasp of sticky metal containers by wrenching a lever that fractured the ice, breaking its grip on the sides of the tray. As a child, I was always interested in looking at those fractures in the ice, which revealed the structure of the cube in ways hidden under the sheer gloss of uniformity. In order to see new things, one has to shatter the old ways of seeing, and, for this, one needs a lever of some sort; doormen are my levers. By looking closely at one job, one set of relationships, and one setting, the goal is to reveal the patterning of the fractures that make up the larger social structure(s) in which we are embedded. Like all standpoints, the fractures revealed with this lever differ from those revealed by others and remain only partial. But the intent is that they will reveal processes, dynamics, and models useful for understanding other diverse contexts and problems.

TENSIONS

A second answer can be more specific. As implied earlier, doormen can provide a strategic lever for understanding social structure for a number of reasons. First, while many workers in the service industry have sporadic contact with individuals from different social strata, doormen have repeated interactions with the social elite over long stretches of time, typically years. In this context, status signifiers are highly developed and subtle, as doormen and tenants make claims with respect to the nature and meaning of their relationship. Consequently, analysis of the patterning of doormen-tenant interactions at the micro-level yields insight into the expressive nature of distinction, social distance, and social class in contemporary American society. Beyond this, doormen are a paradigmatic example of a new occupational group, best captured as the “professional working class,” revealing the complex ways in which social class in the United States is refracted through the lens of professional rhetoric.

Second, doormen have to develop and act on theories about their tenants in order to do their job. In this sense, good doormen are also good sociologists. Yet when doormen act on the basis of these theories, they often inadvertently induce and solidify ethnic and racial cleavages operating at the macro-level. How doormen get and do their jobs; how doormen manage guests, tenants, and time; and how doormen think about their role, career, and the world of the residential building turn out to reveal much about the macro-structure of race and class in the United States. In this regard, doormen are like police, whose theories about crime induce strategies for policing that tend to induce arrest rates that confirm their orienting theories. Third, the study of doormen reveals something about the grammar of everyday life. This book focuses on this grammar — the unspoken rules that organize social interactions, shape decisions, and motivate behavior. One of the arguments of this book is that one can best see social grammar by focusing on tensions and contradictions in interaction that appear when viewed from multiple standpoints, typically across levels.⁹ Since this is rather abstract, it might help to focus by considering, by way of example, the following small set of contradictions:

• Getting a job as a doorman is both impossible and too easy. Doormen jobs are so hard to get that most people who apply never get past the door. But doormen never wait for their jobs and perceive that they just stumble into them by chance. Why are jobs both so easy and hard to get?

• Most doormen do not feel that they are racists, and are not racist, but in almost all buildings, blacks and other minorities who come to visit are treated quite differently than whites. Why do doormen block access to their buildings to minorities more than for others? Does this have something to do with how they got their job?

• Most doormen are bored much of the time, and most tenants see doormen doing nothing. Yet when tenants need them, the doormen are more often than not busy. At the same time that doormen say they are bored, they report that their jobs are extremely stressful. How is it that they are both too busy and too idle? How do doormen manage to project to tenants an eagerness to serve, even if they cannot serve them exactly when tenants believe they need service?

• Everyone worries about the “Christmas bonus.” Is it a gift, a shakedown, or neither? Why does the bonus generate perverse incentives? Do tenants free ride on their neighbors in order to give larger, not smaller, bonuses to doormen? Tenants are worried about their position in a distribution of tenants. While doormen prefer large bonuses to small ones, they do not shift their behavior in response to bonus size, all things being equal. Doormen are constrained in their response to the bonus by commitments they have to an idiosyncratic interpretation of professional behavior. Is this why signaling fails?

• For doormen, the claim to professional status is central to their sense of self. The formal rules for their job imply universalism, yet doormen try to induce tenants to develop idiosyncratic preferences, many of which contradict building policy. Thus, the delivery of professionalized service requires that doormen act differently to different tenants and take an active role in shaping tenant preferences. How do doormen balance on the tightrope of delivering personalized service and maintaining formal commitment to the norm of universal service?

• Doormen say, and many tenants agree, that their main job is security, but few doormen can ever recall doing anything that was security related, except for protecting tenants from the behavior of other tenants. Why is security the central trope for describing their core role, when it plays the most trivial part in both tenant and doorman everyday experience?

• The doorman union was notoriously corrupt, yet wages and benefits for the doormen in the union put them among the elite of the working class. Doormen in residential buildings help tenants prepare for strikes — to replace them — and therefore appear to act as scabs. Likewise, tenants align themselves with doormen against management. How does this strange pattern of alliance develop? Is the history of union corruption, now ended, positively associated with higher wages?

These and other tensions and contradictions provide some of the raw material for this book. From an analytic perspective, such tensions provide the sociologist the seams through which one can enter the world of the other. In the absence of such tensions, one has only a clear gloss of normative prescriptions, as if skating on an ice-skating rink moments before it has been opened to the public was revelatory of the bump and grind of the morning rush to work. To make sense of the world, in the end, requires an eye for and sensitivity to friction, for friction helps reveal the underlying grammars that organize social life.

SOCIAL DISTANCE, OR UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS

The central problem around which all of the tensions described earlier revolve is how doormen and tenants negotiate interpersonal closeness in the context of vast social distance. Doormen are close to their tenants but socially distant. They know a lot about their tenants: what they eat, what movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, work too much, play with their children, abuse their partner, have kinky sex, are generous or tight, friendly or sour. They infer much of their knowledge from both direct and indirect observation typically extending over many years. Tenants realize that doormen know a lot about them. In talk about their doormen, they try to neutralize the impact of this knowledge in a number of ways: as an expression of their “dependence,” by incorporating doormen into the personal or familial sphere,¹⁰ or as a necessary by-product of ensuring the safety and security of the building. At the same time, tenant knowledge of doormen as persons who live lives outside of work is typically severely truncated, so that the closeness of the relationship is strongly asymmetrical, conditioned by remarkable social distance. Doormen and tenant interactions in the lobby, and the distinct ecology of the residential building, are shaped within the narrow shoals of too much closeness in a context of too much distance. Most of the peculiar tensions described earlier arise from this fundamental sociological element, and most of the everyday grammars that organize social life in the lobby reflect this fundamental contradiction between closeness and distance.

There are other models for and cases in which closeness and distance play a central role in organizing interaction. Historically, and still the case in some contexts, the sociological tension between simultaneous physical closeness and social distance was simply resolved by negating the social identity of the other, through slavery or other physical and psychic forms of inducing social death. The sociological “trick” of such systems is the radical negation of the other as a strategy for neutralizing the intimacy that arises from close physical context — bathing, dressing, scheduling, serving, feeding, and nursing. In such systems, the servant is defined as socially dead — as someone without interests. Therefore their knowledge of the master is of no use in social life; the socially dead exist solely to serve the master. Slaves provide one obvious group; members of the household in patrimonial regimes provide another comparison, as do those whose social death is engineered through physical or psychic intervention, for example, eunuchs in the Chinese civil service or priests in the royal treasury. But these are extreme solutions from systems and cultures largely from the past, and therefore they are not accessible to the middle- and upper-class New Yorkers who live in residential buildings. While the social distance between doormen and tenants may be vast, it is not culturally possible to define it as infinite. Consequently, the closeness that arises from the relationship must be managed more subtly. This book considers such subtle management.

For many, it is natural to think that this book could be considered as a study in upstairs/downstairs dynamics.¹¹ For younger readers, Upstairs Downstairs was a wildly popular English television show that aired on PBS in the 1970s and focused on the interactions between servants and masters in an English upper-class household in the years immediately before and after World War I. Upstairs Downstairs was about many things: descriptively it concerned the gradual breakdown of the English class structure after World War I and the emergence of industrial labor. The central narrative elements focused on the ways in which events, internal or external to the household, differentially shaped the parallel worlds of the Bellamy family (upstairs) and their domestic servants (downstairs). The appeal of the show was precisely in its capacity to unveil two simultaneous realities, connected by the accident of place (165 Eaton Place, the principal home of the Bellamys), punctuated by the occasional moments when — as the class structure broke down — the intimacies between the two worlds collided into the sordid world of family secrets, blackmail, and revenge. The comparison is in some regards apt, but in many ways misleading. The nature of the doorman-tenant relationship is different than the master-servant relationship, even if the levels of intimacy are in some ways comparable and equally asymmetric. At the macro-level, the radical separation between classes constitutive of the English class structure at the turn of the century is not relevant today, at least in the residential apartment buildings that provide the focus for this study. The buffer that radical class (or race) segregation provides to insulate the elite from intimacy with their staff (or slaves) is now absent. Consequently, the strategies for negotiating the boundaries between closeness and distance are now much more complex and subtle.

This said, the analogy is apt in one regard: Upstairs Downstairs concerns the ways in which working-class individuals learn to interpret, respond to, and in some instances shape the preferences of the elite in a context where in order to do their job, they must develop general theories about those with whom they interact on the basis of only partial knowledge. The need to develop general — everyday — theories about those with whom they work distinguishes doormen from other occupational positions whose members are close to their clients, and so it is important to think about doormen in this broader context. Consider what we could call the “close professions.” Lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, social workers, and personal advisers are all close to their clients, in the sense that they come to learn much about their clients through the services that they provide. This closeness is buffered by a number of important facts. First, more or less, those in the close professions have the same or higher status as those they serve. In contrast, doormen work closely with people who are socially distant (and of higher social status) from them.

Second, and perhaps more important, those in the close professions learn, more or less, only about those aspects of their clients’ lives that they have professional claim to and that the clients agree to reveal as part of their relationship. For example, teachers may observe students and infer something about their family from such observation, but their access to family “data” is restricted. Likewise, bankers may suspect that their clients are one kind of a person or another, but their purview is limited to aspects roughly financial. Psychiatrists may penetrate into the deepest recesses of their clients’ minds and behavioral routines, but such penetration occurs in a context in which the client agrees to hand over such information, even if inaccessible to him or her. The boundaries drawn around the kinds and contents of legitimate “professional” data are relatively strict. These boundaries provide a buffer that allows people in contact with those in the close professions to segregate domains if they wish, thereby limiting access to just that which they agree is professionally accessible.

In contrast, doormen are constrained by a normative expectation that they deliver uniform service. Their claim to professional status rests on their ability to respond to, read, and/or induce differences among tenants. But in contrast to those in the close professions, knowledge that shapes the capacity of doormen to deliver professional — that is, personalized — service is not bounded by preexisting social conventions governing the relevant structure of knowledge domains. Knowing what kind of movies tenants watch may (or may not) be more helpful in shaping personal service than knowing much about tenants’ financial profile. If close professionals are kept distant through self-segregation of knowledge domains, such segregation is not an available strategy for tenants and doormen.

There are perhaps more familiar examples, though, of occupations whose workers are socially di...