ANTH 18: Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology
How full-time staff at Dartmouth’s ‘53 Commons find meaning and connection
Introduction
In this project, I explore how service staff members at Dartmouth’s Class of 1953 Commons (‘53 Commons) find meaning in their work and connect with undergraduate student diners (henceforth referred to as “students” unless otherwise specified). A range of employees with different backgrounds, motivations, and personalities work the floor of ‘53 Commons and interact with students, which is the group they primarily serve. I combine prior research on service work with interviews and observations to discuss (1) how a good job at the dining hall lays the groundwork for meaningful experiences; (2) how framing the dining hall as a home or staff as family can make the job more meaningful, and (3) how staff “cross the counter” to build relationships with students and overcome stereotypes in the process. I hope this research can recognize the work of ‘53 Commons staff and offer a model for understanding foodservice work at the academic institution.
The campus dining hall is a space ripe for cultural study. However, much of the research conducted on “service encounters” including those between service workers and customers and “servicescapes” such as dining halls is focused on the interactions themselves rather than how they are culturally situated, falling within the purview of sociological and business research. In these contexts, a “service encounter” is broadly defined as “a specific period of time during which the customer interacts with a service” (Bitner 1990, 70). These would include face-to-face interactions between staff and students, but also students’ interactions with tangible aspects of ‘53 Commons that staff maintain, such as self-serve buffet lines (Liljander and Mattsson 2002, 839). We can analyze a service encounter by its process (e.g., the steps of ordering food at a counter) and through its outcome (e.g., enjoying a meal)—both of which are influenced by the attitudes of the service worker and customer, as well as their perceptions of each other (Liljander and Mattsson 2002, 854; Fraga 2022, 4). These attitudes and perceptions are conditioned by the previous experiences of each party and actively shaped during the service encounter (Liljander and Mattsson 2002, 840). But a service encounter cannot be strictly described by these factors alone; it also involves the affective state of the staff member and the student (Liljander and Mattsson 2002, 840).
However, anthropologists have broadened the concept of affect (the “feeling side of consciousness”, which produces emotions and experiences like pleasure/displeasure) into affective theory, which generally seeks to identify “the forces that move people, forces that attract, repel, and provoke” (Oliver 2010, 317-320; Rutherford 2016, 286). Specifically, the term “affective labor”, as developed by Michael Hardt, refers to the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of work that is built upon emotional engagement and that builds emotional experiences (Rutherford 2016, 288). Arlie Russell Hocshchild studied this as “emotional labor” in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, which aimed an ethnographic lens at flight attendants and corporate bill collectors using interviews and observations (2003, 13-17). The job expectations of flight attendants are far from those of workers at ‘53 Commons, but both roles involve dealing with serving food to customers in a wide range of affective states (consider the range from hungry/irritable to full/satisfied) and contributing affective labor (offering sympathy, trust, and goodwill towards the customer) (Hocshchild 2003, 137).
It is important to study the campus dining hall not only because it is a place where interactions between staff and students take place, but because it is central to the culture of the school. Foodservice spaces on campus facilitate social interactions, offer a space for students to work, and satisfy basic needs to eat and drink, which not only contribute to student success but build the campus community at large (Lugosi 2018 229-231). Conversely, the only way to understand the institution at a macro level is to zoom in on individual interactions and rituals (Dacey, Munir and Tracey 2010, 1414). Additionally, ‘53 Commons presents an opportunity to examine the interactions between class and service work as low- and middle-income staff interact with elite/upper-class (Ivy League) students, which has rarely been studied by anthropologists and sociologists (Fraga 2022, 9). Approaching this topic from an ethnographic/anthropological perspective will allow me to produce insights I might not have come across if I were looking to optimize or improve service encounters, which is the goal of most business and hospitality research on the topic.
Research Setting
The Class of 1953 Commons is known as “foco” by students (likely an abbreviation of “food court”) and ‘53 Commons to staff, or shortened to ‘53. It is the primary and largest dining venue operated by Dartmouth Dining Services (DDS). ‘53 Commons is located at 6 Mass Row in Hanover, NH, west of the college green and relatively central on campus (Bruner/Cott n.d.). Formerly Thayer Dining Hall, the facility covers 20,000 square feet of dining and 12,000 square feet of servery and seats around 1,100—about a quarter of undergraduate students (Dartmouth Admissions 2024, Smith 2011, Bruner/Cott n.d.). There are two main dining halls within the building: the North “dark” side having a classical aesthetic with tables and wood features, and a more modern South “light” side with tables and booths. Additional seating is available upstairs, in the front entranceway, and sparingly around the serving area. Occasionally, dining halls and two conference rooms will be reserved (e.g., for athletic teams). ‘53 Commons operates over 10 stations, including two made-to-order stations and two served buffet stations for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and converts into an individually priced cafe with a restricted menu for late night (Dartmouth Dining 2024). In all, doors are unlocked from 7:30 AM to 1:30 AM, with rush hours at around 12:00-12:30 PM for lunch and 6:00-7:00 PM for dinner. The space is frequented by undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and friends/family/visitors to the college.
Methods
Participants
‘53 Commons employs over 300 staff, the large majority (supervisors estimate around two-thirds) of which are interacting with students in addition to fellow staff as part of their day-to-day work. As a fourth-year student and frequent customer of the dining hall, I was able to leverage my existing connections with 4-5 staff members I’d built a rapport with over the years to start to initially scope out my fieldwork. Then, at the end of each interview and observation session, I took suggestions of who to reach out to next and what I should ask them to capture as wide a range of experiences as possible, often asking specifically for contrasting perspectives or life experiences. This purposive “snowballing” approach to sampling follows the guidance of Luborsky and Rubinstein (1995, 104) and Professor Carpenter-Song (2024, “Introduction to Qualitative Research Design”). My intent was to capture the diversity of responsibilities, cultural backgrounds, ages, genders, and personal experiences of staff in the dining hall. In addition to a number of short informal interviews with staff as they went about their day, I was able to conduct a number of semi-structured interviews with full-time staff. Four staff were in manager/supervisor roles, meaning they helped oversee other staff and step in when there were problems. Nine staff were in food service associate (FSA) and cook roles (labeled FSA-X in quotations; see appendix), directly helping prepare, serve, and stock food and maintain the dining and serving areas. Three staff were in chef-like roles (labeled CHF-X), overseeing the planning and execution of menus. And three staff were in directorial roles (labeled DIR-X), guiding Dartmouth Dining Services as a whole and overseeing broader initiatives. (Other interviewees are labeled NFT-X.) I did not interview in this specific order, but shifted naturally between roles as staff schedules permitted.
Procedures
I used two primary modes of research in this project. First, I conducted limited observation in the dining hall. This involved posting up at various locations in the ‘53 Commons facility—including behind the registers where students get checked in, and in front of certain counters like the A9 allergy station—to observe staff going about their work. As a Dartmouth student who eats most of my meals at the dining hall, I also was able to make observations during informal visits as a participant in the space.
However, I found that observation (and informal follow-up interviews) could only take me so far. I was interested in how staff found meaning in their jobs; so while I could observe what their day-to-day tasks looked like in setting the stage for my interviews or collecting evidence for how their orientations towards foodservice/students manifested, I didn’t have the opportunity to witness the infrequent interactions staff reported as being most personally meaningful. This is perhaps with the exception of an observation period during a special, themed Halloween dinner, which was a high point in the fall season for many staff members.
Given this limitation of observation, I turned primarily to semi-structured interviews in order to get a bigger picture of staff experiences at ‘53 Commons. These interviews were audio-recorded where the consent of staff and the interview setting allowed it. I limited interviews to take no longer than an hour; many were conducted during staff breaks while at work, and therefore a few were limited to only 15- to 30-minute periods. While participants were offered the opportunity to meet outside of ‘53 Commons or work hours, most were comfortable chatting in a semi-private setting (in a quieter upstairs dining alcove or in a personal office/conference room where we would not be easily overheard) within the facility and during the workday. This was useful because it enabled me to ask questions directly about experiences happening that day, observe staff briefly before interviews were conducted, and see parts of their job or be introduced to their coworkers as follow-ups. They also helped mitigate scheduling conflicts or burdens on the staff (and while I frequently expressed that I didn’t want to take up staff’s break time, all of those I interviewed during work hours were eager to spend this time sitting and chatting). I also cleared my project, individual interviews, and observation sessions with senior staff where necessary to ensure I was not causing undue disruptions in the dining hall.
I used staff-student interactions as a jumping-off point to frame how staff found meaning in their work. Initially, I intended for this project to center around these interactions, but later recognized that there were other driving factors (for example, ideas about family) that I needed to understand in order to properly frame staff-student interactions. Therefore, I made light adjustments to my initial interview guide such that I hit the same general topics in all of my interviews, and opened myself up to discussing more life experiences and perspectives to avoid spending too much time on students alone. Interviews focused on day-to-day responsibilities and interactions; work history and personal background; satisfaction and tensions in the job; and meaning, community, and values surrounding food and foodservice at Dartmouth and beyond. Given the personal and potentially sensitive nature of these topics, I took care to ensure the continuous comfort and consent of participants and made sure they had clear expectations of the project and their part in it.During interviews, I took jottings on my laptop during observations and interviews to track follow-up questions and details that jumped out to me. These notes were used alongside an inductively-developed codebook (see appendix) in order to code and extract salient quotations and observations from transcripts/fieldnotes, following the guidance of Professor Carpenter-Song (2024, “Working with Your Data”). Audio was transcribed and diarized using WhisperX software on the private Dartmouth Discovery computing cluster and analyzed alongside the audio recording, hand-corrected where necessary when extracting quotes. I used ATLAS.ti to assist in this qualitative data analysis. Participants were made aware of how their information would be processed (as described above), protected (personally de-identified and not used beyond the scope of the project), and published (as a high-level summary and as in this report) over the course of the project. I performed a thematic analysis, following from Braun and Clarke, to develop codes and memos into the following discussion (2006).
Results and Discussion
I uncovered many common threads across my interviews and came to some unexpected discoveries during the research process. For example, I did my longest observation session over the course of a themed Halloween dinner. I had the opportunity to chat with the two staff members working the registers (I expressed that I didn’t want to monopolize their break time, but NFT-U exclaimed “oh, they make me [take breaks]!” and both were happy to have me observe and chat), where I learned that neither of them were full-time employees at the dining hall. Both presently worked in different offices in the college unrelated to foodservice. NFT-U took a register shift because “I work remotely so it’s nice to come on campus and interact every week”, and both expressed pleasure in having the opportunity to interact with students directly and offer a pair of hands to the dining hall. I learned that other Dartmouth staff would take similar shifts on the serving floor or volunteer for special dining events like a Late Night Breakfast celebrating the end of the term. These experiences gave me the sense that the opportunity to exchange with students—if even only for a second to swipe their ID card and say hello—were meaningful and desirable beyond a job description. They also gave me confidence that staff-student interactions was an appropriate jumping-off point for starting conversations with full-time staff members.One other observation which is crucial to how I frame Dartmouth Dining in my analysis is that the organization is operated directly by the college and not an outside contractor with its own staff, procedures, and culture (or lack thereof). Senior staff frequently impressed this upon me, emphasizing how “we are Dartmouth dining. We are part of the college. We are able to do things that other contract companies can’t” (DIR-L) and that “there are a lot of salesmen out there that will promise you the world, but when you say jump, we just say how high and how soon” (SUP-H). Being operated by the college means that Dartmouth Dining is closely related not only to students, but to the college administration and the rest of the support services on campus. This is evidenced generally by how staff are clued into academics and the school calendar, or specifically; for instance, how the Kosher kitchen closes and caters meals in the Jewish student center during religious holidays. Overarchingly, staff are able to see themselves within a broader network of student care and feel supported by the rest of the college, which I observed when I asked each how they related to the “Dartmouth community”. As one staff member put it, “the Dartmouth community to me represents all of the people that live and work in kind of the Dartmouth world. So everything from the coaches, their assistant coaches, athletic trainers, to obviously everybody that works at the college, whether it be [my partner], who works in Dartmouth childcare…” (SUP-H). I am not sure how common this structure is for institutional food service administration; but staff members certainly expressed that Dartmouth was special to them.
It’s a good job
For staff at ‘53 Commons, the benefits of working in an institutional dining hall—from stable hours to career growth—create a foundation of stability that fosters emotional connection and fulfillment. Nearly every staff member I talked to, across a variety of positions, described working at ‘53 Commons as a good job. Each cited a different combination of benefits of the job and perks of working at the dining hall (and not all of these applied equally; consider that only FSAs and cooks are union workers), but all of these contributed to broader feelings of stability and comfort, which I speculate is foundational to the stability and comfort staff offer students in turn.
With good hours at the dining hall, staff were able to establish healthy balances between work and personal life, often for the first time in their careers. Several staff members came to ‘53 Commons out of jobs in restaurants. These positions were related in terms of preparing and serving food; but restaurants’ comparatively small staff and less predictable demand for food led to a greater number of hours being worked with less stability. As SUP-H explains:
And I decided that I wanted to move back to New Hampshire, so I left [a gourmet market in New York City] and started working for a restaurant here. And my family didn’t get to see me very much because I was working a lot of hours, six days a week in the restaurants. And my sisters, who were both in education, said “you should go work at a school district.” … And like I say, if I had known about college food service, I would have done it my whole career. Because the benefits of the job are more than just the financial benefits. I’ve worked the same schedule. I worked Monday through Friday at [the University of New Hampshire]. Here, I’ve worked Tuesday through Saturday… for [nearly] seven years.
Being able to have regular, usually contiguous days off enables staff to have a “weekend”, even if that weekend isn’t on Saturday and Sunday, to care for their families and tend to hobbies outside of work. Even in the rare case that staff elected to work seven days a week, they still seemed content with their time at the dining hall: “I never have any problem [that would require union intervention] because I work sometimes seven days a week, but the benefits are so great over here. I think, actually, that’s better than from my old job”, explained FSA-F.
Opportunities to build relationships and grow one’s career at Dartmouth Dining expand this freedom and flexibility. SUP-B explained to me how he was able to use an opportunity for a promotion to switch from another Dartmouth Dining venue to ‘53 Commons and find a better schedule in the process—switching from day to night shifts allowed him to send his daughter off to school and pick her up all before starting work. This change was facilitated by a strong and evolving relationship with Dartmouth Dining, and built on decades of this sort of treatment—SUP-B went on to describe how he himself had spent afternoons in the dining hall as a child while his father worked. Understanding and support of staff’s families helps overcome what Hochschild describes as a “time bind” in service work (2007, 1); staff do not have to choose between their personal and professional responsibilities to keep life “fun and meaningful”. (I explore this relationship further in the next section.) This was echoed by another supervisor, SUP-N, who had worked at several restaurants in the local town before coming to ‘53 Commons:
SUP-N: I worked there, I worked at [two other local restaurants] and I randomly pick up shifts over at [local restaurant] across the street.
Jordan: Still?
SUP-N: Not right now, I… [collects thoughts] they needed me to pick up overtime, so I put that job on hold because I still need a day off.
Jordan: So you’ve been everywhere around town.
SUP-N: Almost. I haven’t worked at [three other local restaurants].
Jordan: Would you like to?
SUP-N: No. No, I’m sticking with Dartmouth. Dartmouth pays me well, treats me well. It was the first time I’ve had my superiors actually encourage and push me into a leadership, almost management, role so that—to me—speaks a lot of volume. SUP-N: Because I haven’t had people like look at my potential and just be like “Okay, we want you as a supervisor, we want…” [SUP-Q] was very adamantly encouraging me to fill out for the supervisor role… she had told me that they were going to be published, and she was like, you should go and apply. And I did, because I had my boss see potential in me for that.
We might describe this generally as staff members being able to put down roots—to have trust that they would be able to navigate life changes like starting a family or the COVID-19 pandemic without having to worry about moving outside of Dartmouth Dining. Many of the people I interviewed could look ahead to retiring at ‘53 Commons years down the line without anxiety over having to switch jobs or save money.
One source of stability and enjoyment for staff which I hadn’t predicted was the nature of foodservice work itself. Two staff members I interviewed, FSA-B and FSA-R, had come into FSA roles at ‘53 Commons to get a break from the stress of managing money and employees as business owners in their previous roles. FSA-B turned down a management position to “just work” before she retired; FSA-R enjoyed the support a large organization could offer after going “three years at a time without having a day off” and found the dining hall a way to get a fresh start without relocating. These FSAs took pride in their work, having the opportunity to stay busy on the serving floor while maintaining opportunities to interact with people as a union steward or a friendly face.
Even something as simple as working around good food enriched staff members’ experience. FSA-P was able to put more into his work because he didn’t have to manage shopping and cooking for himself every day. Other staff members felt more empowered to support students with dietary needs
(allergies, diets, etc.) because their own needs were being accommodated in the dining hall between healthy food offerings and allergy accommodations.
Being able to look forward without anxiety as a staff member in ‘53 Commons, whether that’s towards your next meal or all the way to the end of your career, means you don’t have to focus as much on that planning ahead and can invest in making the present moment more meaningful. This foundation makes it easier to build relationships with other staff members and with student diners and helps the dining hall look more like a home, which leads into my second theme.
Family and home
The dining hall functions as both a found family for staff and a home away from home for students, fostering emotional ties that enrich the work experience. For much of history, the task of preparing and serving food existed in the domestic sphere (Byrd 2016, 26). Many staff and students at ‘53 Commons grew up being served food at home, by family members and loved ones. Many staff grew up in the local area, and want to make Dartmouth as welcoming and special to students and their coworkers as it has been to them for their whole lives. Others—including many student diners—encounter the dining hall as the first place they are regularly receiving or serving food outside of their family/childhood home. In this way, we can begin to understand how ideas of family and home are projected onto the dining hall by staff, and how seeing the foodservice workplace through these lenses makes working in it more meaningful.
Between its colleges and medical centers, their staff, and the businesses that support them, staff described Dartmouth as fueling the Upper Valley area in which it is situated, its employment opportunities tying the community together:
FSA-B: One of the ladies I work with, we’ve been friends since we were in fourth grade. … She’s like my sister. She irritates me a little bit sometimes, but it’s ‘cause we know each other. … You know [another FSA] who does the register? That’s her ex-husband…
Jordan: So it’s really tight-knit in terms of the locals.
FSA-B: Yeah, because, yeah, it’s really tightening a lot of these— I’m going to tell you that probably 10 of these people have worked [with or for] me in my past restaurants, in my past careers. [An admin] and I have known each other since he was 16. … Like, there’s just so many of us.
Many of the people I interviewed were directly related to other people at the dining hall, or were second- or third-generation staff at the college. SUP-B told me how “it’s kind of revolutionary for me to think that I’m now supervisor at the same building my dad was a FSA” as he reflected on growing up in the dining hall in the same way his daughter is now. Even though ‘53 Commons is an extension of the college, we might come to see it as a sort of family business for these staff members, with which they have a connection that goes beyond a career.
In other cases, the dining hall becomes a found home and its staff a found family. Many staff are immigrants to the United States, or moved to New England following work. CHF-E put this most succinctly in my interviews:
I mean, I, I don’t have any family up here. All my family lives like 2000 miles away. So like, [Dartmouth Dining] is kind of my family. I know that … if I was in dire straits and needed something, I know that I could call on some of the managers and some of the workers that I’ve made friends with.
And then like the students, I mean, I have a 26-year-old son. So the students are all younger. … I’m getting to the age where, I don’t know, you guys are kind of my kids, if that makes sense.
Many other staff members used family dynamics to describe their relationships with students and staff in the dining hall. They viewed coworkers as siblings or relatives even though they weren’t genealogically related. Younger staff were more likely to view students as siblings or friends; middle-age staff related to them as children or nephews/nieces; and older staff as grandchildren. The converse applied as well, with staff describing themselves as everything from step-sibling to parents, grandparents, or occasionally even a “funcle” (fun uncle) in the case of SUP-N.
Anthropologists recognize this as a “new kinship” which has developed out of the modern workplace (Richardson 2006). This kinship is based not on genealogy, but on “relatedness” which “looks to the ways people forge ties of familiarity with each other through everyday exchanges, through identification, through shared practices” (Richardson 2006). It is primarily founded upon exchange, with which the dining hall is ripe, as food, work, kindness, and care are shared among community members.
Most interesting to me was that these familial roles weren’t static, but were constantly being re-negotiated. I suspect this was in large part due to the unique age dynamics between staff, who may spend the majority of their working life in the dining hall; and undergraduate students, who are mostly aged 18 to 24. Staff members would became parents and send their own children off to college over the course of their tenure at Dartmouth Dining; they might take on different responsibilities in the family as they changed responsibilities at work, which we saw above in the case of SUP-N’s promotion. Staff members reflected on their own upbringings and experiences in college or the foodservice industry to figure out how they could best offer care to students. This is reflective of the engagement that defines emotional labor – staff focus on the emotional outcomes (comfort, safety) they are hoping to elicit in students. They accomplish this through both “surface acting”, changing how they talk to students based on situations and levels of kinship; and “deep acting”, making the dining hall into a place where they could genuinely feel those emotions (Hocshchild 2003).
Many staff members mentioned international students in particular when explaining what they hoped to do for students. They understood that students coming to Dartmouth from abroad were especially estranged from their own families and cultures, and were especially interested in helping them approach Dartmouth Dining as a home away from home. In fact, staff members may have been particularly suited to this cause. FSA-R described to me how the international students he’d met “are used to dealing with multi-generational interactions regularly” and how the cultures they bring to Dartmouth might open them up more to connecting with staff members than fellow students from the US. Where it might be challenging to introduce oneself to other students coming into Dartmouth, the service encounters between staff members and incoming students offers several doors to building more meaningful relationships. It is hard to avoid interacting with staff within the dining hall—as of the time of writing, you need to be checked ino by a cashier to enter ‘53 Commons, and have to order food at several meal stations—and these small exchanges of payment and sustenance offer opportunities to exchange care and comfort as well. SUP-Q had immigrated from China, and explained how her rusty Mandarin was a key component to this process:
So when I’m [interacting] with a Chinese student, like an Asian student, more often they were telling me… how much they miss their home. Especially the Chinese students; they automatically switch to Mandarin so we can speak the same language without thinking, which for me is not that easy. (I mean, I lost a little bit [of fluency], but I still speak very good Chinese.) So we talk about a lot back home and they feel very connected to the dining hall. I saw them come more often. … Because they feel more familiar with whatever [is] here, they feel more comfortable. Because at the very beginning you get very nervous. You don’t know where to go. If you find someone [who] can speak your language, can understand you a little bit more, and you feel more comfortable, then you come more often, then you find other people also very friendly.
SUP-Q went on to explain how a meaningful connection with one staff member might help these students open up to the entire dining hall:
And then they found that the other employee, even the American employee, they are very friendly. They [aren’t initially] friendly because they just don’t know each other. But once they can make the connection, they felt more comfortable. And I saw there was one Chinese student that was making really nice connection with [FSA-B] another time. … It’s very interesting. At the very beginning, I don’t think that they feel comfortable to ask a question. But once they feel that the other side is very friendly, they become more willing…
Intimate relationships are built on comfort and trust. We saw how staff feeling comfortable in their jobs encourages them to put down roots and rely on one another; now, we also understand that it motivates them to create comfort for students. SUP-Q’s orientation towards students as “a parent trying to understand everything” helps her navigate this. These dynamics blur the lines between personal and professional life; I heard stories of staff inviting students home for the holidays when students couldn’t make it to their own families, or exchanging ingredients that were hard for students to obtain in their own kitchens.
Treating students like family or the dining hall as a home also helps with conflict resolution, both among staff as well as with students. Being occasionally upset was a natural and expected “part of being in the service industry,” as CHF-E explained. “You take [a bad day] out on the person that is the least threatening to you: your relationship, your partner, they’re the least threatening because they’re going to be there no matter what, usually.” I took this to mean that closer relationships at the dining hall were able to endure more strain, and that expressing dissatisfaction could sometimes even be reframed as a sign of trust. Coming at students from an angle of care and support meant that supervisors almost always assumed good intentions or miscommunications rather than malice when they had to step in for rule-breaking. (Generally, however, staff described negative interactions as few and far between.) SUP-H described the dining table as “a sacred space” that was largely the same between the home or the dining hall, one where fighting had no place and at which “the most important thing you can do is feel connected”. He was able to reflect on he wanted to bring to ‘53 Commons from his own family and what he wanted to leave behind (“I get yelled at a lot at the dinner table, too, deservedly”). Relationships in the dining hall were forged in trust, and “where there is trust, we can expect familiarity” and work together, according to Richardson (2006).
Crossing the counter
Staff at ‘53 Commons actively ‘cross the counter’—both literally and figuratively—to form connections with students, challenging stereotypes and fostering mutual respect in the process. In interviews, staff members frequently described meaningful interactions with students, everything from small talk to emotional support, as central to their job. I pushed back on this a bit. Yes, these interactions make your experience what it is, but “I don’t think it’s required for [everything] to work in terms of getting people fed”, I’d say. I wanted to understand how these encounters of emotional labor came to be so prevalent and important to the culture of the dining hall.
I came to learn that it hadn’t always been this way. Much of the current dining administration had followed one senior staff member from the University of New Hampshire, starting in 2016. They found the dining services and culture to be old-fashioned and unforgiving. “I really wanted to come here because I thought I could bring a lot of this cultural stuff with me into a program that felt incredibly dated at the time when I arrived here. Like, wow, how can this be college dining and Ivy League school?” as DIR-S put it. Even the facility was physically different. In a previous life, the ‘53 Commons building had been a food court, with stations acting as distinct restaurants. Kitchens were closed off such that only food and shouts could be exchanged between preparation and serving areas; meaning chefs and cooks could barely communicate with other staff—let alone with students. Byrd (2016, 42) describes this arrangement as a structural segregation, one which risks rendering the service worker and their work invisible. The open kitchens of the dining hall literally break down these walls, creating constant opportunities for learning and discussion.
In my observations, staff went out of their way to answer questions about the food they were serving—allergens, ingredients, sources, and the like—or help students navigate their digital menu boards. One cook, FSA-F, took special pride in encouraging students to try new foods—“and if you try one piece, you’re going to love it!” she told one student who claimed to hate pumpkin. “And she come back and said, ‘I want that again!’”. Another cook at a sauté station (FSA-Z) explained how once he got to know repeat customers, he’d keep an eye on their plates to make sure they didn’t get accidentally taken. These small acts of care only amounted to a few minutes each day, but staff held onto them, and would share a variety of anecdotes in each interview I conducted.
While wasn’t fully clear to me how the shift happened (since only staff which tolerated the change stuck around long enough to chat with me), Dartmouth Dining successfully transitioned into a customer-service-oriented culture. While I acknowledge potential risk of only seeing and connecting with the most personable staff members, I would use the term “people person” to describe the large majority of staff I saw and worked with over the course of this research. Many staff members came from backgrounds not specifically in foodservice, but all sorts of service work: nursing homes, phone service centers, even special education classrooms. CHF-Y told me about opening his own restaurant on a hiatus from university foodservice:
And about a month into it, I realized, not that I didn’t care about the food, but it wasn’t where my passion was. My passion was with the people. And that’s one of the really fun things about this job, is on a Thursday night at 6:45 when there’s a thousand people shoulder-to-shoulder and you get to see everybody. And everybody’s more or less having a good time, and they’re excited about what they’re about to eat and it’s just a good energy.
This passion for customer service and customer experience manifests in different ways for different people. Some staff were content just to answer questions or give a quick hello as they dished out food. Others enjoyed making personal connections with students over their tattoos, hobbies, or other aspects of their cultural backgrounds. I got to witness CHF-E striding confidently through the serving area during Halloween dinner, a model lightsaber emitting electronic hums and beams of red light onto her head-to-toe Star Wars costume (down to brown contact lenses) and the limbs of the students she passed by. When I later interviewed her, CHF-E told me how much it meant to her to get waved at by (or to spar with!) Star Wars fans in costume, but how much more meaningful it was to get waves from those same students on an ordinary day. “Like, even… if they see me… out in a different location than ‘53, you know?” This two-way pattern of care also applied when staff provided emotional support to students who were struggling to keep up with the stress of college life. “When I’m overworking myself or looking tired or something—like, I’m not doing good—they’ve started to pick up on me and actually check in on me because they care about me”, explained SUP-N. Perhaps from prior experiences or their own preconceptions of the job, FSAs seemed to be aware of stereotypes of service workers as background figures and surprised when these stereotypes weren’t realized in the dining hall. (In fact, the job title of Food Service Associate itself was renamed from “counter worker”, a change I suspect was made to better encompass the customer-oriented approach to service.) As SUP-B put it:
I kind of find a lot of meaning into when people take the time to remember you, or that you wouldn’t necessarily expect; you know, someone stops and say hi, and it takes me off guard sometimes, but it really makes me feel like I’m noticed, you know, sometimes. I don’t feel like I’m vain in the way that I want people to, like, notice me all the time. I just find that I’m surprised sometimes by the people that notice me.
Neither did stereotypes staff held towards students hold up in these interactions. Entering his job a year ago, FSA-R worried he would be perceived as “less than” by students, and often surprised them with his knowledge of various languages or successful efforts to learn five names a day. In making conversation across the serving counter of the salad bar, FSA-R was also crossing invisible divides between service workers and prestigious Ivy League students:
Well, I think that people generally think that [service workers are] not educated, they don’t care, there’s no reason to learn anything about them, have any kind of connection with them kind of thing. … I was really, you know, not sure how Dartmouth students were going to be. And I have to say that Dartmouth students are super friendly, super sincere. You know, if one of us as an employee drops something on the floor, there’s 10 students that rush over to help and clean it up. … So that really surprised me that they take the time to say those things and do those things and to be helpful. Because I would have thought… that most students would have been too busy or thought they were way above that, to come and do those things. So it’s really sort of renewed my faith in the youth of America that that happens.
These moments of connection not only enrich the individual experiences of staff and students, but contribute to a larger sense of community within ‘53 Commons. Each act of engaging with the culture of care and contributing affective labor erodes the barriers to having similar exchanges in the future. In this way, the dining hall becomes a space where figurative walls are constantly being deconstructed.
Conclusion
Limitations and Future Work
I acknowledge several methodological limitations in my work. First and foremost, while I worked diligently to avoid personal bias by discussing potential conflicts of interest and assumptions I might have made with my professor, classmates, and interlocutors, my personal experiences as a frequent diner at ‘53 Commons were central to my fieldwork and analysis. While I leveraged existing professional relationships with staff to conduct my initial interviews, I snowballed outward from there to encounter fresh perspectives from staff members I hadn’t spoken to before. Still, while I ended up working with a diverse group of staff members across various positions and levels of experience/superiority, I also understand that the limited time I had to conduct this work (over the course of approximately 6 weeks) meant I may have not had the opportunity to make enough connections with staff members to ensure a representative sample. I would suggest that future ethnographic research at ‘53 Commons take place over a longer period of time and explore different sampling methods, including more random sampling/outreach. Because ‘53 Commons is so large in terms of its staff and physical facility, future studies should also aim to incorporate more perspectives, including those from students and student workers and staff members who do not interface with students on a daily basis (as was the focus of this paper). I am also interested in understanding how ‘53 Commons broadly relates to the university foodservice industry, and would suggest that studies look comparatively across schools including the University of New Hampshire, at which many staff worked previously and brought culture from.
Reflection
In this study, I was able to uncover general themes about how a subset of staff at Dartmouth’s ‘53 Commons find meaning in their work. I came to understand how the stability and benefits of university foodservice empowered staff to plan for their future and enrich the present as they put down roots, often in the form of long-lasting connections with coworkers and students. These connections were often framed through the lenses of family and home, and centered around exchanges of food and care. And a culture of customer service beyond food service guided interactions to be mutually beneficial for staff and students alike, breaking down barriers. Through my fieldwork, not only came to see the dining hall as a space rich with meaning, but had the opportunity to experience that kinship for myself and engage with the emotional labor taking place there. Having established relationships with my interlocutors through this work, I now greet and am greeted by name every time I enter the dining hall. I’m able to have conversations that go beyond small talk about the weather and academics, and learn more about the life experiences and culture of the staff members that care for me on a daily basis. By their invitations, I connected with several staff members on social media, one of whose encouraging messages to students now appears in my feed every few days. Another interviewee delivered me a thank-you notes for inviting her to participate in this research, alongside a holiday card and pod of chocolate mix. Without their support I would not have been able to complete this study. I am deeply grateful to all of the people at Dartmouth Dining who I had the privilege of working with, and who have worked tirelessly to support me over my four years at college.
References Cited
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Carpenter-Song, Elizabeth A. “Introduction to Qualitative Research Design.” Lecture, Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, September 24, 2024.
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Appendix
De-Identification of Participants
Participants were assigned a single random letter to identify them, and an additional three-letter identifier to loosely describe their position.
Managerial and supervisory staff: SUP-B, SUP-H, SUP-N, SUP-Q
Food service associates & cooks: FSA-B, FSA-F, FSA-I, FSA-O, FSA-P, FSA-R, FSA-T, FSA-X, FSA-Z
Chefs and culinary managers: CHF-E, CHF-Y, CHF-V
High-level, directorial staff: DIR-L, DIR-S, DIR-G
Non-full-time employees: NFT-C, NFT-U
Codebook
This table of codes was inductively developed over the course of qualitative data analysis in ATLAS.ti.
| athletes | Dartmouth undergraduate student athletes |
| care | Care towards students, staff, and the space |
| comfort | Comfort existing or as created in the dining hall |
| community | The local community and its interaction with the Dartmouth College community |
| connection | How staff relate to students through shared culture and experiences |
| convenience | Making campus dining more convenient for students |
| cultureshift | How the culture at ‘53 Commons has changed; particularly, over the past 8 years |
| entitled | Students acting entitled towards staff and not showing appreciation |
| family | The sense of family which exists within the dining hall |
| familyhere | Staff members’ relatives or ancestors at Dartmouth |
| goodjob | Finding dining work enjoyable; particularly as a result of job benefits |
| graduate | Maintaining relationships with students post-graduation; not related to graduate students or alumni |
| greek | Greek organizations and general party culture at Dartmouth. Alcohol and intoxication |
| help | Staff offering support to students |
| home | The sense of home which exists within the dining hall |
| intl | International students at Dartmouth |
| latenight | Pertaining to late night dining and late night shifts (after dinner) |
| meaning | How staff broadly find meaning in their work |
| myfamily | Staff’s family outside the dining hall |
| myfood | One’s personal relationship with food |
| negotiation | Negotiating roles and boundaries as a staff member |
| pplppl | Abbreviation of “people person”. An orientation towards customer service |
| role | What one does in the dining hall |
| roots | Relationships and logistics staff members form as a result of job security |
| smalltalk | Superficial small talk between staff and students |
| space | Describes both the physical facility and feelings/hopes ascribed to it |
| specialstaff | Moments in which (students make) staff feel special |
| specialstudent | Moments in which (staff make) students feel special |
| trouble | Conflict and tensions in a job at ‘53 Commons and how they are handled; particularly between staff and students |
| unh | The University of New Hampshire, at which many staff worked prior to Dartmouth Dining |
| union | The local union of which most FSAs and cooks are members of |
Consent Document
The following passages were presented as the main content of a consent document before all semi-structured interview in order to obtain informed consent. It is adapted from a template provided by Professor Carpenter-Song (2024, “Writing a Research Proposal”).
This research project is being conducted by Jordan Mann from the Anthropology Department at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA. It is a study of how service staff members at Dartmouth’s Class of 1953 Commons dining hall relate to undergraduate student diners and, through those relationships, relate to the broader Dartmouth College community, primarily through daily interactions.
Your participation is voluntary. Participation involves an interview no longer than an hour, the duration being communicated up front by the interviewer. You may choose to not answer any or all questions. With your permission, the interview will be audio recorded and processed using machine learning algorithms. You may request that the recording be stopped at any time. The audiotapes and transcriptions will be destroyed at the end of the project.
The information collected will be maintained confidentially. Names and other identifying information will not be used in any presentation or paper written about this project. An anonymized, high-level summary of information will be presented to ‘53 Commons.
Interview Guide
The following 45-60 minute semi-structured interview guide was used as a basis for semi-structured interviews, and informed the direction of shorter informal interviews. Questions were asked one at a time; some were grouped together on the same line to indicate opportunities for immediate follow-ups. Not all questions were addressed directly, but the general topics outlined below were covered in all interviews.
Preamble
Hey, [NAME], thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m Jordan and I wanted to take [AS SCHEDULED] or so minutes of your time to learn about your experiences at ‘53 Commons for my ANTH 18 class (Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology).
With your permission, I’d like to record this interview. Also—only if you’re comfortable—I’d also like to use generative AI tools to help me transcribe and summarize what we chatted about. These will only be seen and listened to by me, and when using this info I’ll keep your name and any private information that you’re uncomfortable sharing confidential—I’ll give you my contact info at the end if you think of anything later. Also, if you want to take a break or stop at any time, just let me know—I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, I’m just here to listen and learn.
Overview of Work & Interactions
What work do you do here? What is your job title?
Tell me about your interactions with undergraduate student diners on a day-to-day basis.
Could you please describe the last time you interacted with a student for more than a few moments?
What interactions with students are the most meaningful to you?
What are your shifts?
How do your interactions with students change over the course of a shift? Week? Term? Year?
How have your interactions with students changed over the course of your time here?
Work Background & History
Where have you worked before coming here, and what brought you to Dartmouth?
How long have you been at ‘53 Commons? In the Upper Valley?
In what area do you live? What’s your commute like?
Satisfaction & Tension
What parts of your job do you enjoy the most?
What parts of your job do you enjoy the least?
What are some of the biggest strains on you in this job?
Meaning & Community
What does this job mean to you?
What is the “Dartmouth Community” to you?
What’s your favorite dining holiday/event and why?
Values
What does food do for you?
What does food do for the people you serve?
Is there anything else I should know about your experiences at ‘53 Commons?
Who else should I talk to? Where should I observe?
What else should I ask them?
Conclusion
Thanks so much for sharing with me. I’m going to transcribe and summarize this recording and use what I’ve learned in my ANTH 18 research! If you have any questions or concerns, or have more information to share later, here’s my contact info. [PROVIDE CONTACT INFO].
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