PREFACE

Many books are reported by their authors to have a long history. This book
is an exception to the general rule. But, as with all things, one can look back

to a beginning of sorts and tell a story. Here is a story of this book. In 1987 I

came up to Columbia University from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to give a

talk. In the evening, I was to meet the chair of the sociology department, Ron
Burt, at his apartment. From there we were going out for dinner. I was late

getting to his apartment. I had already arrived at the conclusion that coming
to Columbia at that time was a mistake, and I compounded the problem by
making a series of bad decisions all evening. Fear of the subway led me to try
to take a taxi. But I wasn't very successful. Now I find it somewhat amusing
to watch tourists in New York City hail a taxi. They have a certain hesitancy

that seems to invite taxi drivers to pass right by them. Back then it wasn't
funny, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't seem to get a taxi to stop. Inability

to hail a taxi led me to decide I might as well just walk. And I had a long way
to go. Burt's apartment was on Riverside Drive. It was a cold and wet night,

and the wind off the river made walking up the sidewalk especially painful.
A light rain, almost sleet, cast an eerie silence on the street. As I walked up
Riverside, I saw few signs of life. The neighborhood was deserted.
I finally arrived at the building, entered through the first set of doors,

found Ron's name, and pushed the buzzer. As I was talking to him on the
house phone, a shadowy figure appeared at the outer door and started to
come in. I don't remember much about what he looked like. I remember
thinking then that I should try to get a good look so I could pick him out of a

police lineup, but I didn't want to let him see that I was looking at him. He
was wearing a dark raincoat. I briefly saw a large hat covering his face. As I

reached for the door, waiting to be buzzed in, I positioned myself to block
his entry. The door buzzed, I slid to the right, opened it, and tried to slide

through. Behind me I could hear him saying something. As I got through the

door, his hand reached out and grabbed it. I knew that I needed to stop him
from entering the building, and so slashing at his arm, I broke his grip on
the door, slammed it shut, and raced for the elevator. Luckily, the elevator

was waiting on the first floor. Looking back through the door, I could see
that he had his hand back through and that, somehow, he had managed to

push the inner door open. The elevator door closed and I went up to the

ix
 "

x Preface

tenth floor. I pushed the buttons for floors 11 to 14. I figured that this way,

the elevator would continue to go up before it went back down to the lobby,

giving me more time to find and get into the apartment. As it turned out, it

was no problem finding the apartment. There were just two to a floor, and
my host's name was on the door. He opened right away and I sped in, relieved

to be safe but also still extremely worried.

During the first few minutes we were in the apartment, I told Ron about
the guy who had broken in and how I had feared that he would follow me up. I

was especially worried because I was afraid he might have thought I had seen
his face and therefore had motivation to figure out what floor I had gone to.

I knew that Ron had little children, and I was worried that I might have also
put them at risk. I felt bad that I hadn't made sure that the door was really
closed behind me. Ron seemed concerned, too, and asked me to describe

the intruder. I did the best I could — but there was not much to say. The coat
and the hat obscured most of his personal features, and I really hadn't gotten

a good look at his face. But, somehow, I had said enough for Ron. He went
to the phone and made When he returned, he said that we needed to
a call.

get moving since we were late. On the way down the elevator, thought saw I I

him fumbling for his wallet. I thought I should follow his lead and so shifted
my wallet from my back to my front pocket , for extra safety. The door opened
to the lobby. Directly in front of us was the intruder; he hadn't followed me
up, but he had waited for me to come down. As I stepped back, Ron stepped
forward and (I believe) handed him some money.

"I'm sorry," he said. "He didn't know who you were. You scared him.
"That's okay," he said. "I tried to keep him out of the building, but
he just pushed me away. It was my fault."

That was the first doorman I ever met.

It would be eleven years before I returned to Columbia. When I came back
to New York, I was a little more sophisticated, but not much. The city had
changed. No longer did it seem (to me) reasonable to think that every corner
was a potential minefield replete with crack- crazed killers. The crime rate

was lower; the city was in And this time, instead of criminals
a renaissance.

everywhere, I saw doormen everywhere. On the street where our temporary

apartment was located, there were always at least four doormen out at any
one time. In our building we had doorman service from 4:00 p.m. until
midnight. Within the first few days, the doormen learned our names. They
recognized my kids and started to keep an eye on them. And they were
 Preface xi

exceptionally polite and respectful. In some ways, I found them obsequious

and it bothered me that they were seemingly so oriented to my comfort.
More disturbing was the attitude that the other residents — mostly Columbia
faculty — seemed to have toward the doormen. It was hard to put my finger
on it, but they seemed to adopt (or fall into) a paternalistic frame when
talking with the doormen. They would refer to them by their first name; in
turn, they were almost always addressed as "Professor." I noticed this and
it made me uneasy, but I could not exactly understand what was bothering
me — the doormen, the tenants, or their joint performance.
At first, I found my new colleagues difficult and arrogant for no obvious
reasons. I spent a lot of my time trying to understand why Columbia pro-
fessors were so difficult. The real problem that one faces when trying to

explain something is to identify the features of the context that are unique. It

couldn't be that I found Columbia professors arrogant because they taught at

a prestigious Ivy League university — since I had not found other Ivy League
professors to be so problematic. Whatever caused their arrogance, it had to

be something unique either to Columbia or to the city. There were a number

of competing explanations that I considered, but by the end of the first

month, I had developed an elegant theory. Their arrogance was the result of

the doormen.

The logic was simple. Doormen, as with all people, need to feel good
about what they do. Putting myself in their shoes, it seemed obvious that

I would feel better about serving really important people than ordinary
people. And it seemed obvious to me that the higher the status of their

residents, the higher would be their own status. Consequently, my theory

went, for inchoate and unarticulated self-interested reasons, each doorman
had a personal interest in elevating the status of the people who lived in his

building. Columbia professors, under this model, were being bombarded

each day with undeserved status "gifts." My idea was that after a while —
how long was unclear to me — the faculty actually started to believe that they

deserved such status, that they really were important people. I thought I was
observing a whole new arena for the Matthew effect.
1
It didn't take long to

i. The Matthew effect is the idea that prominent individuals benefit and marginal individuals
suffer as contributions of similar quality are evaluated differentially depending on the status of
the contributor. Merton, "The Matthew Effect in Science"; Zuckerman and Merton, "Patterns of
Evaluation in Science"; Cole and Cole, Social Stratification in Science.
xii Preface

generalize this theory to all New Yorkers, most of whom I had also found
arrogant and difficult to get along with.
This was a pretty theory, but obviously wrong. First, initial impressions
notwithstanding, Columbia professors are no more arrogant than other pro-
fessors. Second, New Yorkers are nicer than most people, and, in any case,

most New Yorkers do not have doormen opening doors for them. And, finally,

I misunderstood the nature of the work that doormen do, their experiences,
their aspirations and hopes. While it is also true that doormen's status is

in some part conditioned by the status of their tenants, the conditioning

effect is less strong than I imagined. And over the years, I came to better

understand my colleagues, those who are arrogant and those who are not.

But my interest in doormen did not leave. One could say that this project is a
product of that interest.

While written in the first person for ease of presentation, this book is in

many ways a collaborative enterprise. Much of the work was done in the

context of an introductory class in sociology — Evaluation of Evidence — at

Columbia University. I had been thinking abstractly for some time about
the feasibility of a large-scale collective class project that would involve
a multi-method, multi-level design. The desire to make use of multiple

kinds of data and the desire to design a multi-level study played a large
role in the decision to study doormen. There were, as well, independent of
intellectual reasons, some pragmatic issues that also had to be confronted
in designing a collective study for college students — especially a study that
actively involved extended hours in the held, observational data collection,
sampling, surveying respondents, and in-depth personal interviews.
Paramount in the pragmatic decision to study doormen — again, not con-
sidering the deeper intellectual issues discussed subsequently — was the
issue of risk. There is in sociology (and one supposes, as well, in everyday

life) a general distaste for the ordinary. Most people would indeed find it

more interesting to study heroin addicts, gangsters, petty crooks, denizens

of the subways, or prostitutes — the "stuff" of much ethnographic research —

but it would not have been prudent. Those on the margins of society live

and work (if they do) in places that are dangerous. Sending students with
little field experience, and often little urban living experience, out into the
underworld was impossible. Instead, I needed to identify a population of

"interesting" people who were easy to recognize and safe to talk to, who
could be found in safe neighborhoods, and who could complete their in-
CHAPTER 1

Interpersonal Closeness and Social Distance

What's the strangest thing to happen here, in this building? I don't know. Having you come and

interview me. That's pretty strange.

D
JL \j esidential doormen can be found in most major world cities, but
like bagels, they are quintessentially New York. While
1
it surprises New
Yorkers, for whom doormen are a critical element of their sense of self

and place, no one has thought to study them or the larger social ecol-

ogy of the lobby, where tenants and doormen meet. 2 But for those living
elsewhere, such neglect is less surprising, for as noted in the preface —
either for reasons of personal biography, prurience, or (generally) accu-

rate perceptions of marketability — sociologists since the 1960s considering

field-based projects tend to study heterodox populations: gang members,
sidewalk booksellers, prostitutes, junkies, micro -criminals, and so on.
There are some exceptions to this general attraction to the unusual, and

1. Paris has, by contrast, concierges, who are different from doormen since they reside in their
buildings. In Italy the same function is filled by amministratore, typically residents who are assigned
their role by building owners. In California, Arizona, and other states where gated communities have
blossomed, security guards, rather than doormen, man the gates. In London, as well as other major
some residential units have doormen, but these exceptions aside, one finds a population
U.S. cities,
of doormen only in New York. Hereafter, rather than sing the cumbersome phrase "residential
doormen," I talk about doormen. Doormen have been a part of the city for a longtime. Consider the
following from a New York Times article, "New Yorkers Who Idle for Their Living," that appeared March
6, 1927: "New York is full of those who 'stand and wait' — not mere idlers but men for whom standing

and waiting is a remunerative job. They are to be seen mostly on the sidewalks, sometimes beneath
a gay arched awning and also within the plate -glass doors of Persian carpeted halls; and their brass
buttons, gold braid, and gorgeous uniforms add a note of color to the city streets. In these ornamental
figures survives the livery which once danced attendance upon grande dames of the carriage era."

2. Note that Jerry Seinfeld (perhaps one of the better active social scientists) devoted a whole
show to the subject, "The Doorman" (first aired, February 23, 1995)- Other comedians centered in
New York City have elaborate doorman routines A Canadian film company has produced a
as well.
documentary on doormen, following the workdays of four men, inAll Visitors Must Be Announced.

1
2 Chapter One

these are often occupational studies such as this, many of which also focus

on workers in the service industry. There are, for example, outstanding

studies of airline flight attendants, bill collectors, cooks, holistic health

workers, milkmen, Hollywood composers, and even cosmetologists in nail

salons. 3 In these studies, sociologists often focus on and reveal the careful

management of personality in front- room settings, often in sharp contrast

to the tensions, conflicts, and disgusts that make up the more expressive
backroom behavior; 4 careful discussions of the negotiated order; 5 and deep
insights into the strategies and tricks of the trade that people develop to get

by.
6
Likewise, there are a number of excellent ethnographic accounts of com-
plex settings similar to the lobby, for example, the hospital waiting room, the

factory floor, public bathrooms, lounges, laboratory life, and street corners. 7

But overall, given their distribution in the population, everyday workers in

everyday occupations and everyday contexts command less attention from

3. Among numerous other studies, see Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Fine, Kitchens; Bigus,
"The Milkman and His Customer"; Faulkner, Music on Demand; Kleinman, Equals Before God; Mars
and Nicod, The World of Waiters; Whyte, "The Social Structure of the Restaurant"; Zerubavel, Patterns of
Time in Hospital Life; and Kang, "The Managed Hand." There is a much longer tradition in sociology of
studying the "ordinary" worlds of people, and this book is closer in spirit to this tradition than much
contemporary sociology. Here, for example, one would consider the studies of "Middletown" (Lynd
and Lynd, Middletown), "Kent" (Moreland, Millways of Kent), and "Yankee City" (Warner and Lunt,
Life of a Modern Community) as the key references.
The Social
4. The distinction between the front and back is an analytic convenience introduced by re-
searchers following Goffman as if it were real, rather than simply a shift in standpoint. There is no
foundation, in other words, to assume that either the back or the front contains behaviors that are
more authentic, revelatory of personality, deep, honest, or natural. Individuals may come to feel that

they are more authentic in the back room — that is, they may define their front-room interactions
as somehow put -on, in contrast to the back — but both are shows. Goffman, The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life.

5. By the "negotiated order" is meant understanding how interaction shapes and is in turn shaped
by structure; that is, the process by which micro -interactions become patterned overtime, congealing
into social structure and cognition thereof. In this context, following the argument developed by Fine
in his work on occupational cultures, Kitchens, the key issues taken up are, first, how structural
constraint shapes possibilities for understandings of both doormen and tenants and, second, how
doormen (and tenants) jointly define the production of quality service. The idea of the negotiated
order is developed more explicitly in Strauss, Negotiations. One can think that the promise of multi-
level analysis is to reveal, for multiple sites, the negotiated order(s) operative.

6. By "tricks of the trade," sociologists refer to the cluster of unspoken procedures that allow

one to get by, typically those elements of the work process that are sacrificed when workers "work
to rule," as in a labor action, but also the social -psychological orientations that individuals bring to
bear on the world of work.
7. Zerubavel, Patterns of Time in Hospital Life; Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent; Humphreys, Tea-
room Trade; Whyte, "The Social Structure of the Restaurant"; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life;

Liebow, Tally's Corner; Anderson, Streetwise; Duneier, Slims Table.

 Interpersonal Closeness and Social Distance 3

social science than might be warranted. 8 Why this is the case is considered
subsequently. But first there is a prior question: Why study doormen?
One answer by analogy might be as follows: Recall the time before there

were ice makers and plastic ice-cube trays coated with a miraculous sub-

stance that allows ice to just drop out. Instead, ice cubes were released from
the grasp of sticky metal containers by wrenching a lever that fractured the
ice, breaking its grip on the sides of the tray. As a child, I was always inter-
ested in looking at those fractures in the ice, which revealed the structure of
the cube in ways hidden under the sheer gloss of uniformity. In order to see

new things, one has to shatter the old ways of seeing, and, for this, one needs
a lever of some sort; doormen are my levers. By looking closely at one job,
one set of relationships, and one setting, the goal is to reveal the patterning

of the fractures that make up the larger social structure (s) in which we are

embedded. Like all standpoints, the fractures revealed with this lever differ
from those revealed by others and remain only partial. But the intent is that

they will reveal processes, dynamics, and models useful for understanding
other diverse contexts and problems.

TENSIONS
A second answer can be more specific. As implied earlier, doormen can
provide a strategic lever for understanding social structure for a number of

reasons. First, while many workers in the service industry have sporadic

contact with individuals from different social strata, doormen have repeated
interactions with the social elite over long stretches of time, typically years.

In this context, status signihers are highly developed and subtle, as doormen
and tenants make claims with respect to the nature and meaning of their
relationship. Consequently, analysis of the patterning of doormen- tenant
interactions at the micro -level yields insight into the expressive nature

8. But this is a common problem in sociology, where much energy is devoted to understanding
less than .00001% of human experience; at the macro-level, for example, social movements and
revolutions. But micro-level studies are in this regard just as problematic, tending to ignore the
continuity principle that governs most of our experience — the simple fact that what happened just
before is likely to continue to happen, for example, our experience that as we are driving down
the highway, the car behind us is likely to be behind us in the second after we last looked, or our
experience as we walk down the street, which is that the street is likely to remain below our feet, which
will continue to move in the same direction, in a landscape unchanged in the last minutes, and so on.
Since nothing can be said about it, there is a similar tendency to avoid the routine in social science.
4 Chapter One

of distinction, social distance, and social class in contemporary American

society. Beyond this, doormen are a paradigmatic example of a new occupa-
tional group, best captured as the "professional working class," revealing the

complex ways in which social class in the United States is refracted through
the lens of professional rhetoric.
Second, doormen have to develop and act on theories about their tenants
in order to do their job. In this sense, good doormen are also good soci-
ologists. Yet when doormen act on the basis of these theories, they often

inadvertently induce and solidify ethnic and racial cleavages operating at

the macro-level. How doormen get and do their jobs; how doormen manage
guests, tenants, and time; and how doormen think about their role, career,

and the world of the residential building turn out to reveal much about
the macro -structure of race and class in the United States. In this regard,

doormen are like police, whose theories about crime induce strategies for

policing that tend to induce arrest rates that confirm their orienting the-

ories. Third, the study of doormen reveals something about the grammar
of everyday life. This book focuses on this grammar — the unspoken rules

that organize social interactions, shape decisions, and motivate behavior.

One of the arguments of this book is that one can best see social gram-
mar by focusing on tensions and contradictions in interaction that appear
when viewed from multiple standpoints, typically across levels. 9 Since this
is rather abstract, it might help to focus by considering, by way of example,
the following small set of contradictions:

• Getting a job as a doorman is both impossible and too easy. Doormen

jobs are so hard to get that most people who apply never get past the door.
But doormen never wait for their jobs and perceive that they just stumble
into them by chance. Why are jobs both so easy and hard to get?

• Most doormen do not feel that they are racists, and are not racist, but
in almost all buildings, blacks and other minorities who come to visit are

9. Analysis of classificatory kinship systems may provide an appropriate model. One could, fol-
lowing Levi-Strauss, consider only the normative rules governing alliance and descent. Alternatively,
one could, following Homans (among others), only consider observed exchanges from a single stand-
point. Better would be to analyze the full spectrum of relations from all standpoints simultaneously.
The value of the latter approach is that asymmetries and contradictions at the micro -level are shown
to be resolved at the macro-level, congealed into an enduring structure, which, while not cognitively
accessible, is real. Levi-Strauss, Elementary- Structures of Kinship; Homans and Schneider, Marriage.
Authority, and Final Causes; Bearman, "Generalized Exchange."
 Interpersonal Closeness and Social Distance 5

treated quite differently than whites. Why do doormen block access to their
buildings to minorities more than for others? Does this have something to

do with how they got their job?

• Most doormen are bored much of the time, and most tenants see door-
men doing nothing. Yet when tenants need them, the doormen are more
often than not busy. At the same time that doormen say they are bored,
they report that their jobs are extremely stressful. How is it that they are

both too busy and too idle? How do doormen manage to project to tenants

an eagerness to serve, even if they cannot serve them exactly when tenants
believe they need service?

• Everyone worries about the "Christmas bonus." Is it a gift, a shakedown,

or neither? Why does the bonus generate perverse incentives? Do tenants
free ride on their neighbors in order to give larger, not smaller, bonuses
to doormen? Tenants are worried about their position in a distribution

of tenants. While doormen prefer large bonuses to small ones, they do

not shift their behavior in response to bonus size, all things being equal.
Doormen are constrained in their response to the bonus by commitments
they have to an idiosyncratic interpretation of professional behavior. Is this

why signaling fails?

• For doormen, the claim to professional status is central to their sense

of self. The formal rules for their job imply universalism, yet doormen try to
induce tenants to develop idiosyncratic preferences, many of which contra-
dict building policy. Thus, the delivery of professionalized service requires

that doormen act differently to different tenants and take an active role in

shaping tenant preferences. How do doormen balance on the tightrope of

delivering personalized service and maintaining formal commitment to the

norm of universal service?

• Doormen say, and many tenants agree, that their main job is security,

but few doormen can ever recall doing anything that was security related,
except for protecting tenants from the behavior of other tenants. Why is

security the central trope for describing their core role, when it plays the

most trivial part in both tenant and doorman everyday experience?

• The doorman union was notoriously corrupt, yet wages and benefits
for the doormen in the union put them among the elite of the working
class. Doormen in residential buildings help tenants prepare for strikes —
to replace them — and therefore appear to act as scabs. Likewise, tenants
6 Chapter One

align themselves with doormen against management. How does this strange

pattern of alliance develop? Is the history of union corruption, now ended,

positively associated with higher wages?

These and other tensions and contradictions provide some of the raw
material for this book. From an analytic perspective, such tensions provide

the sociologist the seams through which one can enter the world of the other.

In the absence of such tensions, one has only a clear gloss of normative

prescriptions, as if skating on an ice-skating rink moments before it has

been opened to the public was revelatory of the bump and grind of the
morning rush to work. To make sense of the world, in the end, requires an
eye for and sensitivity to friction, for friction helps reveal the underlying
grammars that organize social life.

SOCIAL DISTANCE, OR UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS

The central problem around which all of the tensions described earlier

revolve is how doormen and tenants negotiate interpersonal closeness in

the context of vast social distance. Doormen are close to their tenants but

socially distant. They know a lot about their tenants: what they eat, what
movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too
much, work too much, play with their children, abuse their partner, have
kinky sex, are generous or tight, friendly or sour. They infer much of their
knowledge from both direct and indirect observation typically extending

over many years. Tenants realize that doormen know a lot about them. In talk

about their doormen, they try to neutralize the impact of this knowledge in
a number of ways: as an expression of their "dependence," by incorporating
doormen into the personal or familial sphere, 10 or as a necessary by-product
of ensuring the safety and security of the building. At the same time, tenant
knowledge of doormen as persons who live lives outside of work is typically

10. Tenants often refer to the doormen in their building as "part of the family," in much the same
way that others come to think of their pets as part of the family. Some readersmay find this imagery
unkind. But the rhetorical device "they are like a part of the family" for both pets and doormen is
too common to ignore. Tenants do not see doormen as animals, but the claim that they are part of
the family, obviously patronizing, is not different from similar claims they make with regard to pets,

their young children's friends, and so on, and is stated in the same way. I believe it performs the
same "function," which is to rhetorically draw the doormen into the personal sphere, thereby making
"natural," and thus neutralizing, the knowledge that they are perceived to have.