Table of Contents

Searching for the American Dream -- It's in the Neighborhood: Race, Place, and the Importance of Culture -- Word of Mouth and Getting Your Foot in the Door: Qualifications, Recruitment, and the Path to a Fast Food Job -- Day Off, Nothing! The Work's Got to Be Done: Flexibility and Work Time -- Pop-o-matic Grills and Redefining Skill: Technologies and Divisions of Labor -- It's Hard to Get These kids to Smile: Managing the Fast Food Personality -- Problems on the United Nations Team: Ethnic Conflicts and Interactions -- Up the Ladder or Down: A Question of Mobility -- Flipping Burgers in a Melting Pot? Looking Ahead to a More Multicultural Society -- Appendix A: The Respondents

Reviews

With the publication in 1993 of sociologist George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society, the word "McDonaldization" became part of our vocabulary, usually used to describe prolific spread and mind-numbing sameness. Ritzer's ideas were further promulgated by subsequent titles such as McDonalidization Revisited by Mark Alfino, et al.; Barry Smart's Resisting McDonaldization; and, most trenchantly perhaps, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Talwar (sociology, Penn State, Berks Lehigh Valley) offers us a less bleak perspective on fast food restaurants by examining the employment opportunities they represent for newly arrived immigrants in this country. The homogeneity decried in these other volumes here gives way to ethnic complexity, as restaurants (and their corporate owners) respond to local demographics. What appear to be dead-end jobs to those born in the United States are, in fact, just a rung in the ladder of upward mobility for ambitious new Americans. Intriguing and well researched, Talwar's argument is recommended for all libraries. Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Talwar, a sociology professor at Penn State-Berks Lehigh Valley, took a job in a Brooklyn, N.Y., Burger King to study the recent flood of immigrant employees in fast food restaurants. She also interviewed more than 100 employees (mostly Asian and Latino migrs) of New York-area McDonald's and Burger King franchises in ethnic neighborhoods. Here, she compares these fairly new sources of employment with the more traditional unskilled jobs in immigrant-run groceries, restaurants and other mom-and-pop enterprises, exploring why immigrants increasingly turn to fast food jobs and whether these jobs lead to English fluency and useful mainstream skills or are a dead end. Much of the text is Talwar's description of fast food life and her interpretations of the employees' survey responses and behavior. Missing are the first-person stories and real conversations that usually enliven the participant/observer genre even the extended survey answers seldom go more than one paragraph, and Talwar seems loath to let the workers speak for themselves without adding her own analysis. While she provides an unusual inside look at the pan-ethnic environment, hierarchies and racial conflicts of immigrant neighborhood fast food chains, her approach, as well as her sometimes facile observations ("It is interesting that [recent Chinese immigrants] Paul and Tina view McDonald's as foreign when the general public has long viewed Chinatown as foreign") deaden what might have been an engrossing and original study. (Mar.) Forecast: Readers of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) will reach for this, undoubtedly hoping for more social analysis. Once word gets out that it doesn't measure up, though, sales will fall flat. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.