Where ‘The Rules Don’t Apply’: Organizational Isolation and Misbehaviour in Elite Kitchens

Abstract

Abstract In this article we elaborate on the connection between organizational isolation and misbehaviour. Drawing on 47 interviews with elite chefs we make a twofold contribution to the misbehaviour literature. First, we conceptualize misbehaviour amongst chefs as a potentiality engrained into the geography of the kitchens they work in. Drawing on Smith (1987), we call this ageography of deviance. Through this concept we show that misbehaviour can be inscribed into a place, through structures that create feelings of invisibility, alienation and detachment. Second, we make sense of chefs’ misbehaviour by using Turner’s theory ofnormative communitas. Via this framing misbehaviour is cast as a ritualized component of an anti‐structural way of being, where the kitchen is simultaneously apprehended as an instrument of social withdrawal and a symbol of deviance around which the community pivots. Through these contributions we help to crystalise the relationship between organizational isolation and misbehaviour, particularly in the context of chefs and kitchens.

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