Topic: Coffeehouse culture. Specifically employees and patrons who remain in the store for extended periods of time. If I have to get more specific, I'll choose between big corporate coffeehouses or smaller, non-franchised shops.


Sources:
Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1989.

Roseberry, William. “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States.” The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating. Ed. James L. Watson, Melissa L. Caldwell. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 122-143.

Schultz, Howard, Dori Jones Yang. Pour Your Heart Into it: How Starbucks built a Company One Cup at a Time. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

Simmons, John. My Sister's a Barista: How They Made Starbucks a Home From Home. London: Cyan, 2004.

Clark, Taylor. Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.

Reflection: I read the preface to The Great Good Place and was pleased at what I found. The preface to the book seemed to be like a preface on my diving into the subject of coffeehouse culture. The author, Ray Oldenburg, is a sociologist and wrote this book at the end of the 1980s. The greatest advantage to this book is that right away the author indicates that coffeehouses are a place of culture. To be more specific, he proposes that coffeehouses in the U.S. are the only outlet for sharing culture with others in an informal setting. I think that his prospective is going to help me a lot because his study of coffeehouses is academic, and almost completely in line with the type of study that I will end up conducting, in that he is focusing on what exactly the culture is inside of a coffeehouse, what types of people can be found there, and what impact the culture inside of a coffeehouse has on the greater culture in America. One aspect that is both an advantage of the timing of this book is that it was written almost twenty years ago. One the one hand, the ideas might be a bit dated and not pertain to the corporate culture that has arisen in the form of Starbucks-like coffee franchises; on the other hand, his ideas might actually be a great prediction of what coffeehouses were to become. So, it will help me if I can find more current evidence that proves him correct, because this will help me to conclude that any of his predictions that haven't occurred yet, might still be possible. Even if I decide to narrow my focus to corporate coffeehouses, I still think that this book would be useful because it would provide an example of what franchise coffeehouses are attempting to create. The difficult part of this project is going to be reading through all the material I have found, or at least segregating the relevant chapters from multiple texts.