The transformations of economic structures as well as of transportation and communication means have altered neighborhood-based interaction in the last decades. Therefore most urban studies argue that local neighborhoods have lost their function as places of sociability and solidarity. But if one looks at the more semipublic local contact sites and therein on a more “superficial” and fluid interactional level, interactions and ties among local residents do not seem to decrease in the same way as close and intimate ties have exceeded the neighborhood boundaries. This article thus examines the neighborhood-based interactions in one example of an important neighborhood space – a café – that demands different kinds of commitments.
Practice theories thereby provide a particularly advantageous set of approaches to examine these rather spontaneous and loose micro-interactions. This is why this article ethnographically analyzes a café, as one of the important social neighborhood spaces. The article elaborates on Theodore Schatzki's (2010) and Elizabeth Shove's (2012) idea of practices as linked entities of material, competence, and meanings, coupled with Erving Goffman's conceptualization of public behavior (1959, 1963) regarding why local businesses represent locational material neighborhood settings for local micro-interactions (as social practices). Furthermore, the article addresses how these interactional practices lead to a sense of belonging and community for their carriers.
The transformation of the labor market as well as transportation and
communication structures have altered neighborhood-based interaction over
the last decades: professional and leisure activities most often take place
outside of places of residence, wherewith most interaction between familiar
and strange people is no longer confined to the common
neighborhood. “Neighborhood” and “community” are not
seen as normatively privileged terms in this article. I reject the notion of
a neighborhood as a natural community area as well as the romantic
affirmation of neighborhoods or local communities as an urban public good in
itself (see Madden, 2014:492).
Local businesses (considered as retail and dining/drinking facilities)
constitute one important type of these local spaces that still bring
together people on a local level. As such, they represent spaces that
host nearly all characteristics of social, cultural, and economic
life. Exemplary characteristics are various forms of exchange,
modes of production, and the symbolic meanings of consumption.
With this said, this article ethnographically examines in depth a café as one semipublic site for local interaction. The aim is to reveal the ways in which customers and salespeople's practices turn the café into a place of fleeting but nonetheless meaningful interactions and a place of higher sociability – as a so-called third place – defined as “public place[s] that host[s] the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (Oldenburg, 1999: p. 16; see also Oldenburg and Brissett, 1982; Oldenburg, 2001).
As a study of social practices, this article addresses first and foremost
the employees and customers' everyday practices with a particular focus on
their bodily and material aspects and how these generate a distinct social
and physical setting that enables the kind of sociability and communal
spirit that Raymond Oldenburg describes as typical for third
places. Certainly businesses as semipublic places of sociability
have an exclusionary dimension for some customers. Not only do these places
have clear behavioral rules, depending on the type of ownership and
business, but they also attract on the basis of the offers only certain consumer
groups, depending on their social and ethnic background, milieu, lifestyle,
age, gender, and so on. However, for the current case, the café is
formally and informally open to and receives customer from all local
population groups that can afford the café's (low) prices.
Many central concepts of urban geography and sociology, including the distinctions between private and public or domestic and public life, as well as the rules that govern relations with kin or strangers, are challenged and blurred in retail and gastronomic facilities. In short, from the 19th century working-class meetings in neighborhood taverns to today's lifestyle cafés, geographical and sociological research has tried to capture how social (and political) life emerges in and through these establishments, as well as how they have become important symbols of postmodern life, often contributing to a (promoted) image of neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states (see Beriss and Sutton, 2007; Zukin, 2011, 2012). However, while businesses might have become the central neighborhood institutions and organizations in many places, they are rarely acknowledged as spaces for sociality and sociability (see Oldenburg, 1999, 2001). Furthermore, “going shopping”, “eating out”, or “daily supply” do not necessarily carry the same meanings in different geographical, cultural, and social contexts. This raises the following questions: what is really being practiced – produced, exchanged, and consumed – in these spaces, and which meanings are involved when people use local or remote commercial facilities outside of their homes?
So despite the high interest in neighborhood businesses as features of local
employment and supply, and despite the many historical analyses on
restaurants and their respective societal roles (see, e.g., Mennell, 1996;
Ferguson, 2004), along with the growing interest in food and food habits,
urban studies still lack ethnographic studies on the social practices that
make up the everyday social life in shopping streets as well as in the local
businesses. Examples of ethnographic studies within urban
geography are Everts (2008, 2010), Shove and Warde (2002), Laurier (2008),
Laurier and Philo (2004, 2006a, b, 2007), Laurier et al. (2001), Coles and Crang
(2011),
and Coles (2013). However, not all of them work with a practice theory
approach.
This need for a more micro-focus also prompted renewed interest in applying
“practice theories” to the field of consumption (see, e.g., Warde, 2005;
Everts and Jackson, 2009). They help to focus the research
on routinized “ordinary” provisional consumption, the organization of
consumption, interactions in the course of conspicuous consumption, or
window shopping. Their common research subjects represent different social
practices with respective emotional attachments and meanings for their
carriers. Since only a practice theory approach can work out the core
processes, mechanisms, and meaning of social interaction, practice theories
provide a useful framework for the inquiry of consumption- and
shopping-related interactions and their socio-spatial settings (see Shove, 2012). Even if the conceptualizations of consumption-related
practices differ widely, most see consumption as an integrated practice,
encompassing all of the addressed issues. However, Warde (2005) considers
consumption as a dispersed practice, occurring often and on many different
sites, but not an integrated practice. As per him, “[p]eople mostly consume
without registering or reflecting that is what they are doing because
they are, from their point of view, actually doing things like driving,
eating or playing. They only rarely understand their behavior as
`consuming'; though, the more the notion and discourse of `the consumer'
penetrates, the more often do people speak of themselves as consuming.
However, such utterances are usually references to purchasing and shopping.
Shopping, by contrast, is an integrated practice, with understandings,
know-how and teleo-affective structures” (Warde, 2005:150). As such,
they constitute everyday urban life.
For the latter, the concrete socio-spatial settings, I draw on Oldenburg's idea of “third places” (1989, 1999) in order to examine how everyday social life (as mainly routinized practices) is enabled and practiced in a single consumption space: a café. After presenting Oldenburg's conceptual ideas of what makes a business a third place, I outline the practice theory framework, differentiated with Goffman's ideas for front and back stage behavior, for the last part of the paper: an empirical case study of a café as a potentially “third place” business.
Although Oldenburg does not delineate the single practices that contribute
to public familiarity and sociability as his ascribed main third-place
characteristics, he develops a list of business features that support the
social interaction among customers. In his search for the “remaining”
“local” (Oldenburg and Brissett, 1982; Oldenburg, 1989) places where sociable
associations tend to take place, he laments the loss of social capital and
interaction just in the same vain as Putnam (2000) decries the
steady decline in people's sense of responsibility and control, caused by
the narrowed range of available arenas for social participation. As per
Oldenburg, this decline is due to the societal two-stop model between home
(“first”) and work (“second”) place (Oldenburg and Brissett, 1982:265 f.).
Bemoaning the decline of public life and the rise of “non-places”
(Augé, 1995), such as shopping malls, he discovers that it is often the
local, independently owned, small-scale bars, diners, coffee shops, and
hangouts that represent the remaining places outside of home and work
places where strangers and categorically known people come together and may
interact. He thus defines third places as “a generic designation for a
great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal,
and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home
and work” (Oldenburg, 1989:16). Observing the social life in the selected
neighborhood bars and restaurants, he further claims that third places
nourish the kinds of fleeting relationships and interaction that tempt
people to engage in social interaction and conversation with others: third
places are usually patronized by a group of regular customers who often
transform the business space into their second homes (Oldenburg and Brissett,
1982). However, Oldenburg's work lacks a precise empirical
analysis of his broad assumptions on third places and their important
function for the social cohesion of American “cities”. He also never
refers to the scale and reach of the discussed places (blocks,
neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, etc.). There is more than escape, more than a respite from obligations to be
derived from third places and the quality of human association which they
offer. They provide opportunities for important experiences and
relationships in a sane society, and are uniquely qualified to sustain a
sense of well-being among its members. However, before their socially obscured
virtues are held up to examination, it will help to specify them more
concretely. Third places exist outside the home [...]. They are
places where people gather primarily to enjoy each other's company
(Oldenburg and Brissett, 1982:268 f.).
For the current research, the third-place concept is mainly used in order to generate first assumptions about the kind of places, their spatial outlay and design, as well as the ethnographic observation of the social practices therein, all of which might jointly generate higher levels of sociability among unknown or “categorically known” (Bahrdt, 1969; Lofland, 1989) people on a neighborhood level. In his search for local contact sites, Oldenburg finds that among all local businesses, those establishments that are operated by people who seem to be familiar with almost everyone in the neighborhood host an “atmosphere” (Kazig, 2012) that facilitates social interaction and inclusion. Since Oldenburg's work left a conceptual gap by not examining the distinct social practices of the store owners, bartenders, and other employees that create this atmosphere, the ethnographic observations were particularly focused on these social practices.
This article's main argument, having emerged from the ethnographic data, is
that it is less the physical attributes of a business and more the social
practices of staff and customers that turn a local business Despite
this, his concept helps to distinguish their different sets of practices
that generate sociability and sociality in businesses. Although this article
only examines the empirical data of one single café, other (less
gastronomic) businesses and also more standardized chain store may be used
as contact sites and places for sociability and familiarity. In addition,
Oldenburg's elaborations remain too focused on geographies whose physical
designs invite longer stays and conversations, such as his emblematic
“neighborhood tavern.” Oldenburg and Brissett develop their idea of third
places only out of their observations in gastronomic facilities: “[t]he
tavern, or bar, is without doubt the dominant third place in our society and
we are not unique in this. Be it saloon, cocktail lounge, pub, or
whatever – place it among the golf links and call it a clubhouse, put it at
the water's edge and call it a yacht club, or organize a fraternal order
around it and call it a lodge – the bar is nonetheless at the core of the
institution” (1982:269).
Practice theories provide a particularly advantageous set of approaches to examine some of the local everyday contact spaces – retail and gastronomic businesses – and their corresponding loose, spontaneous, and often ephemeral micro-interactions, and explain and help to analyze the interactions' more fluid nature. Particularly Shove's (2012) idea of practices as linked entities of material, competencies, and meanings allows for the examination of the different constituents of practices (as doings and sayings) and how they act together in a practiced locational material business setting, where the micro-interactions around consumption generate a sense of belonging and community for their carriers.
In brief, practice theories start with the claim that practices enable and
constitute social life, each practice consisting of specific ways of doing
and saying, such as consuming or working, thereby including a specific
understanding and know-how, as well as specific states of emotions and
meanings (Reckwitz, 2002:249 f.). Although practice theories have circulated
in social theory for over a century, undergoing cycles of revival and
decline in recent last decades, they have only experienced their current
revival in cultural sociology and geography in the last decade. The majority
of the current practice theorists (e.g., Reckwitz, 2002, 2003; Schatzki, 2001;
Shove, 2012) draw on Bourdieu (1977, 1990) and Giddens
(1984) and particularly on Giddens' theory of structuration (see Everts et
al., 2011). They basically argue that social life is constituted in and
through practice – that “the doing itself is everything” (Nietzsche, 1998
[1887]:29), the social derives out of the activities, the doings
and sayings are performed by a knowledgeable actor, and social practices involve
artifacts and things (as human and not-human made). Their praxeological approach constitutes an attempt
to overcome the “rigid action–structure opposition” (Schatzki,
2001:1). In general, four items, which are also part of the
practice itself, constitute a practice: practical understanding, rules,
teleo-affective structures, and general understanding, all of which enable
the knowledgeable – but often routinized – performance of a practice
(Schatzki, 2001; Everts et al., 2011). In a similar vein, Reckwitz defines
practices as “a routinized type of behavior which consists of several
elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms
of mental activities, `things' and their use, a background knowledge in the
form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational
knowledge.” (Reckwitz, 2002:249) A “simplified” and more empirically
applicable version of practice theories is developed by Shove et
al. (2012), who conceptualizes practices as doings and sayings, involving
specific meanings and competencies, but also artifacts or things.
A practice theory approach thus helps to draw attention to the more ordinary and banal sides and sites of social life, run by mostly routinized actions, intentional or not – many of which seem too banal to be researched in sociology and geography. Consumption, everyday shopping, and the related interactions are among these possible banalities. Particularly Theodore Schatzki and Andreas Reckwitz see consumption as an integrative practice – a bundle of (intentional or routinized) actions that possibly involve for instance grabbing and touching the wares, pushing the cart, chatting to the salesperson, or asking the cashier questions about the products, combining more strategic, intentional, and routinized actions (see Everts et al., 2011:325). A business can therefore host a variety of (often simultaneous) practices, each of which forms interdependent relations between the hardware of consumption (cutlery or tools, sold products, tables, etc.), distributions of competence (between humans and non-humans), the emergence of consumer “projects” (Watson and Shove, 2008:4), and, with them, new patterns of interactions and emotional attachments.
Schatzki (2003) elaborates on the spatial context a bit more than Reckwitz
and Shove, making his deliberations particularly helpful for urban studies
research. Most prominent are his more recent developments of a “site
ontology” that include more explicitly the time–space setting of practices,
addressing material and immaterial entities and their relation to each
other, which then constitute the practices' respective meanings, orders, and
arrangements (Everts et al., 2011:324). Schatzki (2002: XI) claims
that the best way to approach the nature of social life and the character of
its transformation “is to tie social life to something called `the site of
the social”'. The social site or “the stuff of social practice” (Shove et
al., 2007a:12) forms the core of all social life.
Despite this spatial dimension in Schatzki's development of site ontology, there has been only occasional engagement with his take on urban studies, most of which represents rather empirical and less theoretical works such as work on the use of mundane objects in DIY culture (Shove et al., 2007a; Watson and Shove, 2008), on Nordic walking (Shove and Pantzar, 2005), as well as on everyday practices of shopping (Everts, 2008; Everts and Jackson, 2009; Warde, 2005), all of which use ethnographic observations for the respective case studies. This article also works with a praxeological approach on a more empirical level – for the ethnographic field work in one selected business, a café and bakery, in an ethnically and socially diverse neighborhood in Berlin.
With the addressed practice theories and Oldenburg's work on third places as
two of the sensitizing concepts, I conceptualize the sampled café as a
social lifeworld These small social lifeworlds are created by
the business people and customers through their social practices (e.g.,
shopping, consumption, selling, caring, serving practices) on the very local
level, yet each lifeworld is always linked to broader national and global
levels: the on-site practices link the global (e.g., the sold products) with
the national (e.g., the legal framework) and the local level (e.g., the
business ethos). Hence, through the practices people socially locate and
position themselves within these lifeworlds and further create their
identities within these social lifeworlds. Most of these practices are
routinized, led by practical understanding, which helps the social
participants to conduct these practices in a consistent way, in an everyday
life mode (Reckwitz, 2002).
The café's geographical setting Since consumption-related
practices also provide a framework for “public conflicts over what
constitutes cultural authenticity”, as well as over gender, race, and class
relations, I consider retail and dining/drinking businesses as ideal setting
for a socio-geographical study (see also Berris and Sutton, 2007:12). Neukölln has 32 5716 inhabitants from more than 147
different countries. Of all inhabitants, 42.1 % have a so-called migration
background and 22.8 % are so-called foreigners (in 2013); the majority of
both groups live in the denser, northern parts of the district around the
field site shopping street (31 December 2014, District Administration of
Neukölln).
The café was sampled for this article because the bodily and material aspects of interactional practices became most apparent here – compared to the observations in the other businesses that were sampled for my dissertation's empirical research (between late 2012 and early 2016). The café is owned by two middle-aged men of Turkish origin, who employ mainly younger women with a Turkish migration background.
The business opens to the street with a full glass front and door, also providing six outdoor communal tables during the warmer months. The glass windows and doors allow for a good view inside the café and vice versa. The interior consists of about 11 tables, each surrounded by four to six chairs. A long seating bench runs along the red and golden painted walls with dimmed chandeliers; on the opposite side, the counter and self-service boxes display the baked goods. The café has a smell of freshly baked goods, brewed coffee, and tea, inviting even more distant passersby in for a short visit. The café is usually very crowded. Particularly from the late morning until the afternoon, people squeeze in and out of the business, but nonetheless the initial chaos has a routinized order: people lining up for the self-service counter, the cashier, or the restrooms; people looking for free tables; people searching for additional cutlery or newspapers; people observing other customers; waitresses sidling through the sales room, people looking for friends, family, or other familiar people – thereby segregating spatially into the different business parts. Sometimes their activities intersect, altering, preventing, constraining, changing, or producing new (interactional) activities.
According to the works of Shove et al. (2012), Reckwitz (2002, 2003), and Schatzki
(1996, 2010) on practice theories, bodies along with artifacts
constitute social practices' core elements: bodies carry out and perform the
practices, and artifacts represent the further material basis for the social
practice, such as the café's bought or sold items or its furniture. This
section thus presents some examples of the ethnographic analysis on how
bodies and things are constantly moved and involved in the social
interactions in the café and on how they thereby contribute to the
creation of sociability, attachment, and a sense of belonging for staff
and/or customers. In this context, one starting point for the
analysis is my own experiences in the café.
It seems that newcomers, entering the café for the first time, and
particularly if being watched by regulars, the owners, staff, or
customers Sometimes newcomers to the café unexpectedly also
encounter friends or family in the café.
The decoration, lighting, background noise and music, furniture arrangement, the (physical and symbolic) layout and display of the offered goods and services, and the presence of other people have a strong impact on how customers and other visitors act and interact, in line with Oldenburg's concept. The observed newcomers seem to take this atmosphere into account and depending on their mood and the socio-spatial setting, they then decide how they will act in the café's social and material environment and select for a purchase and place to eat or drink. With this, the café and particularly its sales and dining room become a stage for the following social practices and eventual social intercourse.
The observations reveal that new visitors who enter the café during busy business times encounter a scene in which customers and salespeople are constantly moving around in the kitchen and the sales room, behind the counter, tripping around and between the tables, wiggling in and out of the smoking room, break room, or storage rooms, and rushing to the sidewalk and back. Due to the crowdedness it is often difficult to differentiate customers, salespeople, and different delivery men. In the mornings and quieter times, most of the waitresses work behind the counter or in the kitchen, preparing the warm meals and stuffing the self-service boxes; if the weather allows for outdoor seating, the waitresses clean and prepare these tables as well, while more and more customers enter the dining or salesroom. Hence, in the beginning of a business day, the distinction between front stage and back stage (Goffman, 1959, 1963) is quite recognizable: customers in the front and staff in the back. The behavior of both customers and salespeople is guided by the rules of the space: customers as “audience” wait to be entertained, or served, and their governing space is the front stage. Salespeople as “actors” need to follow both the rules of the front stage as well as of the back stage and constantly switch between the two. At this point, the café's small social lifeworld consists of socio-spatial relations of consumption (Crang, 1994:677) but does not work as a third place, where everybody interacts in a rather intimate way. The café's micro-geography defines still who moves where and how, permitting use of certain spaces and constraining practices for some and forbidding others. For instance, the entrance, lines, and bathroom lines mark a spatial order and cornerstones for the bodily movements in the business space.
Just as Jacobs (1961) describes sidewalk life between more or less
strange people in urban neighborhoods as “sidewalk ballet”, as walkers'
rapid crisscrossing and skipping around each other, the social life in the
café can be framed the same way as a dynamic “business ballet”. Ballet
refers to the constant movement of bodies and material – a dance that is
confined to a particular space, time, and social setting, involving
different dancers in different tempi and styles depending on the available
space and time of the day or week. With “dancing” or “ballet”
I mean in its widest sense the spontaneous activity of the muscles under the
influence of some strong emotion, such as joy, and a combination of
movements performed for the sake of the pleasure. However, it is also an exercise
that the dancer affords to the spectator.
However, the staff's practices seem to be carried out in a more nuanced way, differentiating and often (unintentionally?) acknowledging the front and back stage lines. For instance, front and back behavior becomes clearly recognizable when the saleswomen come from the kitchen to the counter or salesroom: they straighten up, smooth their clothes and their hair, and smile. In the more (nonetheless public and visible) back spaces behind the counter, they often loosen their clothes, shake their hair and rearrange it; in the kitchen they also put their feet up on one of the few stools, sometimes even taking their shoes off when they take a break. Here, their bodies loose and relax, sometimes teasing and pinching or massaging each other.
However, sometimes they also carry out these more private or “back” practices
in the front rooms. During the observations, waitresses also sit down with
customers and chat with them, thereby loosening their aprons, shoes, and
overall posture. Hence, because of this kind of staff behavior – displaying private behavior in (still) public settings – their
social practices lead to a rather informal and familial setting, in which
some customers also infringe upon the implicit rules and the socio-spatial
orders of the business. However, if salespeople do not know or do not feel
comfortable with customers entering “their” space, they will tell them
so. However, only three times during my fieldwork staff corrected
or guided back customers to the “formal” rooms; in one occasion it was a
lost elderly lady who was looking for the restrooms but ended up in the
kitchen. However, this example also highlights who the “formal” and “legal”
place owners are the owners and their staff.
In addition, the back stages of the café are constructed in a way that offers a little protection for the employees (at least visually) but does allow them to rejuvenate. This is also where the “real” work is done: where meals and baked goods are prepared, and where deliveries and other ingredients are stowed, where schedules and daily tasks are distributed. Even if salespeople or owners complain about work to customers in their chats over the counter or on the tables, customers are generally meant to see as little as possible of the back stage work, and the physical division therefore also allows for a little bit of offstage behavior for the employees, namely to chat, relax, rest, drop the front stage character for some minutes or seconds, and finally prepare themselves for reentering the front stage. Consequently, interaction in the kitchen remains confined to the staff, whereas interaction behind the counter as well as in the salesroom and sidewalk circles mainly between customers and salespeople in a less distinguishable way.
Despite the limited size of the café, the sales space is rather packed
with furniture and fast-moving people, making physical contact and
interaction likely. For instance, when waitresses enter from the back space
with hot meals in their hands, they shout the name of the meal into the
dining room in order to get a little bit of free space to move to the
respective table and to get the customers' attention – and sometimes also
respect for how hard they are working. Then they wriggle through the crowded
room to the sought-for customer. Most often they need to direct customers
away while dancing and balancing the meal to the table, often teasing them. The lack of space further prevents them from moving forward. If they have
a free hand, they lightly touch the customers in a friendly and familiar
way. Since most customers react with a smile or banteringly touch
back, it seems that they enjoy these body contacts. Customers'
bodily movements are nonetheless more confined, since they cannot enter all
of the café's spaces. Clearing the way for the waitresses, they are
confined to the self-service boxes, counter, and tables.
This dance reveals insights into the role of the café for customers,
staff, and the wider neighborhood as an important low-threshold contact
site. First, as a micro-public, the café and its ballet bring together
diverse people that might not interact in other local places. As such, the
café and its ballet blur the lines of what is considered public and
private spaces in many ways. If the business is imagined as a stage, the
curtain as the dividing principle between front and back stage does not run
necessarily between dining room and the kitchen or between the street and
the business space. As per Goffman (1959), different public and
private settings have different audiences and thus require the actor to
alter their performances for each setting. In the front stage, the rather
public space, the performance serves to define the situation for the
observers: the actor “formally” performs and adheres to specific conventions
that have meaning to the audience – the other people present in the
café. The performers know that they are being watched and act
accordingly to the set of (imagined or present) observers. Nevertheless, the kitchen remains
mostly confined to the staff.
Through the performance of the dance but also certain practices such as
shaking hands, the actors give meaning and identity to themselves and
others, as well as their common situation. For example, the café owner
greets and hugs selected customers when they enter the business. Thereby he
enacts their identity as renowned regular customers or members of the
café's social circle, creating a social relationship that is bound to
these (greeting and consumption) practices and their timespaces in the
café. Hence these practices create a business “community”, even if
only for the time of the customers' stay and confined to the business'
space. In other words, the owner's practices of greeting and hugging,
touching and smiling, chatting, and serving (as doings and sayings)
contribute to a relationship with these selected customers and increase the
inclusion and well-being for many customers and staff alike. However, these everyday practices might become institutionalized as abstract
stereotyped expectations about how the actors should behave or interact in
that situation. This reveals the underlying power relations between
“formal” owners and “temporal” owners of the space: if the owner
would not greet the same customer in such a warm way the next day,
disappointment and feelings of exclusion may result from this moment of
abstraction. If the customer or staff take on a new role or task, they might
encounter several already well-established fronts among which they must
choose (Goffman, 1959).
Hence, the social practices of the people working in the business and
through the café's ballet not only bring together diverse customers but
also foster the generation of social relationships among customers and
between customers and staff. Only an approach that combines insights from
practice theories and from Goffman's differentiation for public behavior
reveals how the business ballet, but the other observed social
activities that accompany this dance, such as caring, socializing, eating,
chatting, relaxing, observing others, and so on, and their assignment to
front and back stages also represent the core social practices in the café.
As these practices culminate with the staff and customers' bodies, and the
café's material and space, they turn the café into an “extended
living room” A male customer told me that whenever waitresses
have a chat with him, even if they primarily focus on their work practices,
he feels as sitting on his home sofa in front of his sofa table and thus he
uses the café as an “extended living room.”
This article has explored different ways of conceptualizing and explaining the social practices in a café with a focus on the bodily and material aspects of practices. Social interactions in a business might not be sustained without the material and spatial setting, such as the tables, seating facilities, food, and drinks. However, without the familiar and informal character of the employees' practices, such as touching shoulders, smiling, and pulling chairs for customers, the café presumably would not provide a “home away from home”. By conceptualizing consumption as a form of integrative practice, I suggest that it is the practices of the people in the café, which sustain the sociability of the place. The café example served to underline the material, conventional, and temporal dimensions of a third-place sociability and third-place community, all of which are held together by such practices.
The brief depiction of the café's everyday ballet also highlights how and where social practices conflate or reestablish front and back stage behaviors, carrying different meanings and social qualities. Self-confident, intended front stage performances, directed towards an audience, constantly alternate and blend with more eased, less impressive and expressive, intimate interactions. So if one imagines the local café as a theater, one can observe the actions and performances in the front and the back interlacing in a dance that involves the interaction of customers and staff. However, interaction is much more confined and restricted by the rules of the space – as practices themselves – than in Oldenburg's idea of third places.
Accordingly, it is the practices which build community in local
contact sites like the café. By whatever notion this community might
carry, the café is one of the places where community is practiced. At
one time and in the restricted space of the café different –
intersecting, interdependent, or mutually excluding – communities also
intersect in this space. On the one hand, observations reveal communities not only of
the owners and their families or (extended) relatives and employees but
also of employees and acquainted or related persons that go beyond the
café's temporal and spatial structures. On the other hand, there are
rather institutionalized communities of selected customers on certain days
of the week and at times of day, such as regular coffee tables or business
meetings, whose cohesion might also go beyond the café, but which are
nonetheless practiced (and thus reinforced) on a regular basis in the
café. Regular coffee table meetings were observed for
different customer groups: “senior”, “middle age” and “teenage”, with
different or no migration background, as well as mixed-gender groups. For
instance, customers or salespeople started chats on the basis of a heard
(common) dialect, hinting to their own or related people's origin. Other
examples of how and why unrelated people started to chat involve artifacts
such as school backpacks or shopping bags, clothes, or strollers that
symbolized commonalities and induced the conversations. Since all field
notes on these conversations include observed “smiles” and “joy/enjoyment”
of the involved people, I consider these types of chats as increasing the
people's well-being.
Put together, the crowdedness and interior design of the café's (semipublic) space with the correlating and rather intimate practices, such as touching, shouting, or teasing, along with other practices that are considered to belong to rather private social settings, such as hugging, child caring and nursing, hair dressing, and taking off shoes, create a specific type of sociability that Oldenburg (1989, 2001) ascribes to his third places. However, Oldenburg missed the importance of the employees and customers' bodies and their intimate engagement in the work in the café, which constitute a necessary element of the interactions: not only are they the carriers of the practices in the café but they also enable the physical contact necessary for the creation of a third-place sociability or community.
This article discussed and applied the possibilities and potential of a “practice-based” approach to the analysis of how community is created in everyday life outside of work and residential places. However, the article leaves many questions unanswered. One, for instance, concerns the temporal and geographical stability of the practiced sociability and community. In other words, are the feelings of belonging and community confined to or do they exceed the duration of the stay and the business space?
If community is practiced and re-enacted in the course of mundane everyday life, I see the need not only for further research to focus more on the respective everyday contact spaces such as the sampled café but also for more ethnographies on the social practices in these spaces; thus there is a need for a stronger integration of practice theory approaches to urban studies.
Field notes and conversational notes as well as transcriptions of the more formal in-depth interviews with owners and staff are safely stored at Technical University Berlin, Center for Metropolitan Studies. Since all interview partners were offered anonymity throughout the field work from 2012–2016, the stored data are not publicly available. All observations and interviews were conducted by solely the author of this article.