Home / Lectures / Chad Borkenhagen, Columbia University
Culinary Careers: Navigating Rank and Status in a Creative Organizational Field

Chad Borkenhagen, Columbia University
Description
Semester:
- Winter 2020
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, January 31, 2020 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
R0220 Ross School of Business
Speaker Webpage(s):
Introduced By:
No introduction available.
Abstract
As the product of repeated negotiations between individuals and the organizations in which they are embedded, careers reflect a range of factors, from personal skills and connections, to the particular institutional logics governing an organizational field. Drawing on a crowdsourced dataset of chefs and restaurants, we examine how these factors shape careers in the field of fine dining. Building on previous ethnographic work finding that chefs understand the logic of their careers as involving repeated tradeoffs between occupational status (their rank within the kitchen), and organizational status (the standing of the restaurant at which they work), we explore how particular patterns of these tradeoffs are associated with different career outcomes. Our results show that a single occupation can contain multiple, competing career logics, some of which may be more successful than others. More generally, we argue that our approach provides a useful entry point for future research on other fields in which both occupational and organizational status are key to the process of career building.
Recording & Additional Notes
No additional notes available.