Abstract
Collaboration during aesthetic production is inherently complex, involving difficult-to-articulate aspects of aesthetic judgement as well as relational questions that are inherently power-laden. Particularly in situations where actors do not share background conditions or judgement criteria, aesthetic collaboration poses conceptual and practical challenges. Through an in-depth case study of a French haute cuisine programme in Shanghai, China, we propose a relational-epistemic approach to aesthetic collaboration, in which aesthetic judgement and relational positioning mutually shape how chef trainees come to understand their creative products. Specifically, aesthetic collaboration was shaped by whether participants understood their mutual relationships as antagonistic or integrative, and whether they considered aesthetics as a matter of objective knowledge, cultural tradition or co-construction. Based on our results, we explore the implications of the relationalepistemic approach in understanding organizational aesthetics, especially in the context of the culture industries and haute cuisine specifically.
Aesthetic production within the culture industries requires actors to articulate difficult-to-express features of work, to ‘embed aesthetic properties into tangible and intangible’ products and services (Carlucci & Schiuma, 2018, p. 38). Working with aesthetics is key to innovation and success in the culture industries (Montanari, Scapolan, & Gianecchini, 2016), demanding sensorially and symbolically dense collaborations among creative producers (Elsbach & Flynn, 2013; Jones, Svejenova, Strandgaard, & Townley, 2016; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018). The sensory and expressive aspects of aesthetics are inextricably linked with the relational, symbolic and power-filled dynamics of meaning-making (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2002; Montanari et al., 2016). Haute cuisine is emblematic of the challenges of aesthetic production (Slavich & Castellucci, 2016), requiring technical mastery and skill (Stierand, 2015) and drawing upon symbolic meanings that are power- and status-laden (Burrow, Smith, & Yakinthou, 2015; Gomez & Bouty, 2011; Slavich, Svejenova, Opazo, & Patriotta, 2019). Master chefs must combine technical mastery and artistic expression to produce cuisine that can be appreciated within an evolving culinary field.
The challenges of aesthetic production are exacerbated when aesthetic expertise is collaborative (see Elsbach & Flynn, 2013; Hardy, Lawrence & Grant, 2005), particularly when collaboration traverses geographic and cultural boundaries (Azmat, Ferdous, Rentschler, & Winston, 2018). A far cry from the imagined ‘lone artist’ (e.g. Jones, 1996), aesthetics in haute cuisine develops in relations of apprenticeship and collaboration that are deeply hierarchical (Burrow et al., 2015), even as such relations seek to promote creativity. Novel practices by up-and-coming chefs from diverse geographic backgrounds may be interpreted as demonstrating creativity and mastery (Koch, Wenzel, Senf, & Maibier, 2018), as challenging established hierarchies by a cultural maverick (Svejenova, Mazza, & Planellas, 2007) or, alternatively, as demonstrating ignorance or ‘bad taste’. Similarly, framing culinary work as artistic passion versus exploitative labour may have implications for how collaboration is experienced (Burrow et al., 2015; Fine, 1996). Based on the importance of understanding aesthetics in terms of the relational dynamics central to processes of aesthetic production, we pose the research question: How do actors in the context of heterogeneous aesthetic backgrounds collaborate around aesthetic production?
We address this question in the context of haute cuisine through a qualitative study of the Institut Paul Bocuse, a renowned French culinary institute. The Institut’s recent establishment of operations in Shanghai, China, raised issues of aesthetic collaboration to the forefront of organizational concerns. In this site, French and Chinese chef trainees were brought into interaction around questions of aesthetics that were both technical and cultural: Should beef be bloody in the middle? What is the proper type and amount of seasoning? How should French and Chinese chefs resolve questions of aesthetic preferences? Actors confronting such questions wrestled with epistemic (how to judge aesthetic quality) and the relational (who has the authority to judge and for whom) issues. The epistemic and relational complexities of collaboration in haute cuisine provide an ideal setting for understanding the multifaceted nature of aesthetic collaboration.
To understand this issue, we situate our approach within emerging discussions of organizational aesthetics, posing core issues around aesthetic collaboration and specifically how aesthetic knowing and asymmetrical power relations lead to complex relational-epistemic dynamics. Next, focusing on haute cuisine, we note how aesthetic expertise relies on technical, cultural and creative elements that become points of tension during haute cuisine’s internationalization, adding urgency to issues of aesthetic collaboration. We then report the results of a twelve-month qualitative study of gastronomic training among haute cuisine chefs 1 in Shanghai, focusing on issues of aesthetic collaboration. We discuss the contributions of our study for a relational-epistemic approach to aesthetic collaboration, integrating issues of aesthetic knowing with the power-related issues of cultural authority and judgement.
A Relational-Epistemic Approach to Aesthetics
Literature on aesthetics in organizations has noted both the uniqueness of aesthetic awareness (e.g. Creed, Taylor, & Hudson, 2019; Ladkin, 2018; Strati, 1992; Styhre, 2008; Taylor, 2002), and the difficulty of articulating aesthetics vis-a-vis instrumental or technical aspects of organizing (Islam, Endrissat, & Noppeney, 2016; Toraldo, Islam, & Mangia, 2018). Aesthetic production involves technical skill and virtuosity (Marotto, Roos, & Victor, 2007) where instrumental and aesthetic elements intertwine (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018); yet, aesthetics is not reducible to these elements (Tomlin, 2008). While aesthetics, which deals with the senses (Küpers, 2013), is ubiquitous across organizational settings (Strati, 1992), aesthetic aspects are particularly salient within the culture industries or artistic production (e.g. Styhre, 2008). In these sectors, conceiving, creating and communicating aesthetic elements is essential to core operations (e.g. Endrissat, Islam, & Noppeney, 2016; Jones et al., 2016).
In such contexts, communicating aesthetics falls upon the age-old problem of ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’, or ‘taste cannot be disputed’ (see Wicks, 2009), that aesthetic judgements involve subjective and sensory reactions that are not reducible to objective reasons (Kant, 1790/1951). Knowing the objective features of high-quality wine is not equivalent to tasting wine, although the two are related in complex ways (Shapin, 2012). For producers, aesthetic collaboration is both necessary and problematic. Despite the folk wisdom that taste (i.e. aesthetic judgements) cannot be discussed, doing so is not only common but fundamental to aesthetic collaboration (Harter, Young, & Rawlins, 2008; Montanari et al., 2016). While aesthetics is elusive, it remains a source of communication, socialization and convention (Creed et al., 2019), and is deeply relational in nature (Montanari et al., 2016). Objective criteria guide but do not replace aesthetic judgement, making articulation of aesthetic features perennially difficult (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018; Toraldo et al., 2018). This difficulty involves two related features, which constitute the analytical lens for this study.
First, aesthetic collaboration involves epistemic difficulties resulting from the subjective nature of aesthetic experience, and from the difficulty of putting aesthetic experience into words (Ladkin, 2018; Toraldo et al., 2018). By epistemic, we refer to the fact that aesthetic judgement claims to understand something about the world or at least a subjective experience of the world. While aesthetics involves knowledge claims (Kant, 1790/1951), it is not verifiable through objective criteria, despite attempts to fix conventions around aesthetics. This elusiveness poses a challenge to aesthetic collaboration.
Second, because actors must bridge subjective judgements to co-produce aesthetically coherent and creative works (Islam et al., 2016), aesthetic collaboration implies a relational aspect. By relational, we refer to how actors ‘derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction’ (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 287). Aesthetics scholarship highlights epistemological issues arising from the imaginative, reflexive and critical possibilities of aesthetic knowing (see Ladkin, 2018), but tends to overlook relational aspects of aesthetics in collaborative settings. In the absence of objective and independent evaluative criteria, social relations serve to define and bridge individuals’ sensory experiences of aesthetics (see Classen, 1993).
Because the relationality of aesthetics involves evaluative aspects as well as negotiation (e.g. Creed et al., 2019), it is inextricably caught up in dynamics of power and legitimacy (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003; Slavich et al., 2019). Aesthetics grounds cultural capital, working instrumentality to establish status (Bourdieu, 1984; Gomez & Bouty, 2011) and masking relational processes as reified norms. Within aesthetic collaboration, power relations are embodied in subjectively felt judgements of taste (Eagleton, 1990; Jay, 2005). In the context of internationalization, aesthetic choices reflect power asymmetries in global cultural economies, where they often follow lines of colonial or geopolitical influence (Peterson & Anand, 2004; Pinney & Thomas, 2001). Yet, while aesthetic criteria can reproduce geopolitical relations of domination (e.g. Loomba, 2015), for example, these often form part of complex relational processes of negotiation in which hybrid and novel cultural forms result (e.g. Azmat et al., 2018; Islam, 2019). Although organizational scholarship has acknowledged the power-laden relational aspects of cultural production, including within haute cuisine (e.g. Gomez & Bouty, 2011), we know little about how different aesthetic traditions, brought together within asymmetrical relations of power, manage the micro-interactions of aesthetic collaboration. In sum, the epistemics of aesthetics, because of its embeddedness within conventions of evaluation and relationality (Montanari et al., 2016), is subject to relational processes involving power, as well as resistance (Alcadipani & Islam, 2017; Sorsa, Merkkiniemi, Endrissat, & Islam, 2018).
We refer to this way of understanding aesthetic collaboration as a relational-epistemic approach because of the inseparability of these two aspects of aesthetics in practice. The relationality of aesthetics is shaped by the epistemic slipperiness of taste and, conversely, relational positions depend on negotiations of epistemic authority, referred to as ‘expertise’ in the production and dissemination of aesthetic goods. Rather than studying aesthetic norms within established cultural fields, the movement of aesthetic production to new contexts provides an interesting laboratory to observe the subtleties of relational-epistemic practices. As argued below, haute cuisine, a paradigmatic example of cultural capital and the display of ‘good taste’, provides an ideal site for examining this issue because of the internationalization of the field and the deeply embedded sensory histories of place (Classen, 1993) that underlie differences in local tastes (both broadly aesthetic and specifically ‘culinary’ varieties).
Haute Cuisine and Collaborating Around Aesthetics
The haute cuisine sector involves ‘high end’ gastronomy, with top-rated chefs and restaurants (Slavich & Castellucci, 2016) and institutional recognition in the form of Michelin stars and other symbolic capital (Bouty, Gomez, & Godard-Drucker, 2015; Gomez & Bouty, 2011). Chefs at this level of gastronomy are noted for their creativity (Svejenova et al., 2007; Svejenova, Planellas, & Vives, 2010) yet are also subject to deeply-held norms of commitment that lead to strong conformity pressures (Burrow et al., 2015; Gill & Burrow, 2017). Change in haute cuisine tends to be elite led (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2005) and heavily reliant on notions of ‘authenticity’ (Carroll & Wheaton, 2009). This context, despite the appearance of well-known ‘mavericks’ (e.g. Svejenova et al., 2010), is unlikely to favour micro-negotiations of norms and deviations by newcomers, and is likely to punish norm violations (Di Stefano, King, & Verona, 2014, 2015).
Against this highly normative and status-intensive background, current literature has moved between ‘macro’ issues of elite-led culinary movements and the dynamics of scale, category boundaries and acceptance (e.g. Rao et al., 2005) and ‘micro’ issues of individual chef innovation and creativity (e.g. Svejenova et al., 2007, 2010). Some works around artistic legitimacy (Rehn, 2012) and lineage from a ‘master chef’ (Dion & De Boissieu, 2013) bridge micro-macro issues by exploring how culinary excellence is consolidated. Moreover, practice perspectives (e.g. Bouty & Gomez, 2010; Gomez & Bouty, 2011) broach power issues in haute cuisine by discussing cultural capital and the relational legitimation of practices. Yet, because this literature has not examined interactions between groups with very different taste norms, the relations between aesthetic knowledge and intergroup relations remains limited (see Sutton, 2010), and group norms are largely taken for granted as aspects of tradition (e.g. Fauchart & von Hippel, 2008), institutional legitimacy (Rao et al., 2003), or cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984 ; Gomez & Bouty, 2011).
The aesthetic dimension of haute cuisine, although acknowledged (e.g. Stierand, 2015), reinforces calls to explore micro-processes of judgement in a literature largely focusing on innovation and emergence (e.g. Gomez & Bouty, 2011; Rao et al, 2003; Svejenova et al., 2010), and professional knowledge diffusion, normalization and socialization (e.g. Burrow et al., 2015; Di Stefano et al., 2014). Maintenance, diffusion and innovation studies focus on highly encoded knowledge and valuations (such as Michelin stars) that act as evaluative guides (Bouty et al., 2015; Gomez & Bouty, 2011; Slavich & Castellucci, 2016) in the consolidation of shared knowledge within a field.
Aesthetic collaboration, by contrast, becomes problematic when working across culinary backgrounds, where norms such as the basic mixture of tastes and the compositions of meals diverge. In such situations, codified knowledge is shot through with pre-codified, embodied intuitions about how to experience certain tastes in certain ways. To return to the wine example, within a western context, institutional codes establish quality criteria for wine, such as acidity or flavour (Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, Waskul, & Gottschalk, 2010), but this is only possible against the background of a longer cultural history of wine drinking (Shapin, 2012). Absent such a history, actors would be less able to rely on accepted codes and would have to struggle with taste experiences in a ‘rawer’ form. Analogously, the movement of haute cuisine across distant cultural borders highlights the challenges of deep aesthetic divergences, both as an epistemic problem (i.e. that of aesthetic judgement) and as a relational problem (i.e. that of establishing authority of judgement).
Haute Cuisine in Shanghai
The above-mentioned divergences characterize the French-Chinese gastronomic relationship. Although western gastronomy in China is not new, Chinese embracing of western cuisine is much more recent. Moreover, an increasingly heterogeneous international restaurant scene has emerged in Shanghai (Farrer, 2014), accompanied by a French haute cuisine that is aesthetically distinct from local cuisine yet considered a source of ‘soft power’. New gastronomic restaurants cater to groups with high cultural capital, such as Chinese businessmen and white-collar professionals (Farrer, 2014). The demand for French cuisine, even when many customers prefer the taste of Chinese cuisine (Hsu, 2005), suggests an association between culinary consumption and class aspirations. Yet, haute cuisine restaurants have also integrated Chinese styles, for example, sharing dishes at the table. In some high-end restaurants, western chefs adopt aesthetic elements from Chinese chefs, such as the examples of the ‘use of superb, fat-layered Chinese pork’ and of Chinese high-end restaurants that propose ‘seared foie gras’ (Farrer, 2015, p. 122).
In this context, western culinary schools in China and the demand of Chinese chefs for study abroad aimed to create a generation of Chinese haute cuisine chefs. Within this field, the epistemic and relational aspects of cultural expertise constitute ongoing concerns among actors in this field, who deal with the challenges of aesthetic collaboration in daily practice.
Data Collection and Method
Our analysis derives from a broader qualitative research project at the Institute Paul Bocuse, created in 1990 in greater Lyon to train students in culinary arts and hospitality. The research project’s wider objective was to explore knowledge and practices in the culinary field and their adjustment abroad. Early on, we became aware of the particularity of culinary knowledge with its mix of technical mastery and difficult-to-articulate creative and aesthetic expressions; within a context of cross-cultural interaction, the difficulty of aesthetic collaboration became a lingering issue for reflection, from which we derived our research question.
Background of context and site
In 2011, the Institut Paul Bocuse, in association with the Shanghai Institute of Tourism, inaugurated a restaurant school in Shanghai, involving trainees from Chinese and French bachelor programmes to spend six-month assignments at the restaurant school. The French trainees were responsible for teaching the basics of haute cuisine and restaurant service to their Chinese counterparts; at the same time, they were supposed to learn from their cultural experience and exchanges. In this sense, the cross-cultural aspect of the training co-existed with the status of the Institute as a kind of cultural ambassador for French cuisine. During the observed training periods – May 2013 to April 2014 – thirty-seven Chinese participants passed through the school, trained initially by seven French chefs and seven maîtres d’hôtel, followed by five other chefs after the first six-month period. An executive team of seven members supervised the restaurant school – the director, his associate, a training manager, a sous-chef, a pastry chef and two maîtres d’hôtel. We were given access to the entire site for observation and interviews by the Institut Paul Bocuse and were invited to meetings. Our data included interviews, non-participant observation, informal discussions, surveys of Chinese participants, photos, reports and field notes.
Interviews and informal discussions
A total of 46 semi-structured interviews were conducted in four successive rounds between May 2013 and October 2014 in China and France (see Table 1). The pre-study research in 2011 provided a broad idea of the school and its structure and goals, to formulate the interview protocol and design for later rounds. Because the direct experience of aesthetic collaboration was between the French and Chinese trainees, we focused our subsequent data collection there. However, the directors also participated in day-to-day activities in the kitchen, and were culinary experts, so they could provide valuable synthetic points and anecdotes that were useful for understanding interactions during the training and in their interaction with the other actors (with the exception of two top directors who were located in France, and whose interviews we excluded). Interviews were conducted in either English (the lingua franca of the programme) or French. Because both authors are English/French bilingual, subsequent analyses were carried out in the original language and translated only upon writing up the results. Translations were carried out by one author and verified by the other; any discrepancies in this process were discussed until consensus was reached. The interviews lasted an average of an hour. The interview protocol for the participants contained questions about interactions and communication among the French and Chinese trainees and the experience of interacting across cultures.
Data Collection Table.
Surveys of 37 Chinese trainees (17 chefs and 18 maîtres d’hôtel) concerning their integration in the restaurant school (June 2013) – China.
17 surveys of Chinese chefs (feedback of the training as chefs; summary) (April 2014) – China.
18 surveys of Chinese maître d’hôtel (feedback of the training as maîtres d’hôtel; summary) (April 2014) – China.
Open-ended surveys
In addition to interviews, we conducted surveys with the Chinese participants. The open-ended surveys were meant to collect qualitative information about how the students understood the atmosphere and process of the training programme, as well as the interactions with the others. We felt this step was needed because we had noted that, during interviews, although confidentiality was assured to all participants, some of the Chinese trainees seemed hesitant to elaborate on their opinions of the experience, and often gave short and affirmative answers. Speaking with the maître d’hôtel, a Chinese native who had studied at the Institut, he attributed their reticence to ‘a question of culture, they’re not used to giving contrary opinions’ (field notes, 2013). By allowing written responses with time to formulate nuanced opinions and less pressure than in face-to-face questions, we hoped to gain detailed perspectives on both sides. Questions included items about their feedback on the training, what they found easy and difficult about interactions, and how they felt about the ideas and practices of haute cuisine.
Site visits, photos and videos
Observation played a fundamental part as we settled our understanding of collaboration during training. We conducted two weeks of non-participant observations of daily activities within the restaurant and in the kitchen, one in May–June 2013 and the other in April 2014. Observations were conducted by the first author, who took field notes during each observation period and compiled these at the end of each observation; detailed notes were also taken post-observation during meetings in which note-taking was impossible or cumbersome. We used these field notes in our analyses and coded them together with the interviews and surveys.
The first author also received authorization to take pictures or to do videos, which were taken as complementary to the field notes, as part of an overall attempt to document the site in multiple ways, and with the intuition that visual and aesthetic aspects may be difficult to describe in words. For instance, suspecting that students could be reticent to discuss power asymmetries or personal expression, we examined and discussed on-site photographs to suggest relational features (e.g. space, non-verbal gestures) or culinary choices (e.g. hybrid cooking). These visual artefacts were taken as supporting documentation and were used as a subjective stimulus to ideation, so we did not code them along with the textual data (see Rose, 2001). However, because they were useful as heuristics to our own theorizing, we include examples below for illustrative purposes. Our data sources and how each source is used in our analysis are detailed in Table 2.
Data sources and their use in the analysis.
Analytic strategy
After fieldwork and data collection, we open-coded our data, including interviews, field notes/observations and open-ended questionnaires, to identify recurrent themes. We analysed our data with NVivo10, using an iterative, abductive approach for analysis and theorization (Timmermans, 2012) moving between data and the emergent structure of theoretical arguments (Locke, 2001). Our coding strategy began with a general concern around culinary knowledge and practice in an international context (French and Chinese) and the associated relational and epistemic issues. Beginning with a broad question about knowledge transfer, this initial coding included sentences, words and descriptions of the different forms of transmission of knowledge between the French and the Chinese participants, as well as how groups related to each other’s positions as interaction partners.
However, as it became evident that the more general issue of knowledge was deeply linked to differences in the sensory experience, aesthetic judgements and practices among trainees, we narrowed our focus to these experiences specifically. We adapted our focus to understanding practices of aesthetic production, and particularly how these were dealt with in the complex relational context of collaboration. Through a ‘constant comparison’ between these analyses and background literature, we concluded that how chefs drew upon aesthetic knowing and collaborating around aesthetic practices was not easily explained by discussions of ‘knowledge’ in the culture industries. Moreover, re-focusing on aesthetic production allowed dialogue with relational (e.g. Montanari et al., 2016) and power (e.g. Gomez & Bouty, 2011; Slavich et al., 2019) perspectives within culture industry scholarship, increasing the explanatory potential of our analysis. Consequently, we shifted our research question to direct our analysis towards aesthetics, focusing on a relational-epistemic analytical approach to aesthetic production.
From this focus, our first-order codes (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013) were used to formulate theoretical groups and higher-level nodes. These centred around how the actors treated knowledge (the epistemic aspect) and how they related to the others in their collaboration (the relational aspect). Regarding the former, we were led to differentiate between three ways of approaching aesthetic collaboration – as objective, authoritative and ‘thing-like’ views of cuisine (which we referred to as an ‘objectivist’ epistemic position), collaboration based on cultural or meaning-based understandings of cuisine (which we refer to as a ‘culturalist’ epistemic position), and collaboration involving a mutual constitution of cuisine as an inter-subjective project (which we refer to as a ‘co-constructionist’ epistemic position). Next, examining the relational positions taken in collaborations, we coded for a broad array of responses corresponding to what we termed an ‘antagonistic’ relational position, in which the French and Chinese trainees viewed each other’s aesthetic experience in oppositional or asymmetric terms, and an ‘integrative’ relational position, in which their experience was treated as equally valid in the process of aesthetic interaction. Although for heuristic purposes we present the relational positions as nested within epistemic orientations, we do not consider one of the dimensions as primary. Rather, ceteris paribus, we treat the epistemic and relational aspects in a symmetrical way, a point we elaborate further at the end of the paper. Figure 1 demonstrates the overall data structure and shows the aggregate classifications and themes from which we developed these oppositions and the relationships between them. To illustrate particular examples from the data, we elaborate on this structure in Table 3 in the Appendix.
Data structure.
Results
In this section, we present the diverse positions adopted around aesthetic collaboration, and how they characterized the chefs’ daily interactions. These interactions established the relational positions and aesthetic authority of the participants, influencing who listened to and learned from whom, and when aesthetic collaboration was considered successful. Despite background premises of the school, in which ideal notions of French cuisine ostensibly guided the programme, relational-epistemic positions were not stable over persons, but appeared in moments of collaboration in which relations shifted and could be remade.
Articulating the epistemic aspects of aesthetics with the relational positions allowed us to build a framework around relational-epistemic standpoints that were based around oppositions within (1) the objectivist epistemic position (the relational-epistemic standpoints of participative access versus dismissive exclusion; (2) the culturalist epistemic position (the relational-epistemic standpoints of what we termed a civilizing mission versus cultural code switching; (3) the co-constructivist epistemic position (reflecting relational-epistemic standpoints that we termed hybrid fusion versus cultural confusion).
Participative experience versus dismissive exclusion: aesthetics as objective knowledge
In what we term the objectivist epistemic position, aesthetic knowledge is considered as facts about what constitutes proper gastronomy and how to achieve it. Relating to each other from an objectivist epistemic position involves positing proper procedures and inhabiting (or not) a role of one who ‘knows’. When this epistemic position is articulated together with an antagonistic relational standpoint, the results in a relational-epistemic position of ‘dismissive exclusion’, and when articulated with an integrative relational position, collaboration results in a ‘participative experience’.
The objectivist epistemic position was institutionalized in the training programme’s formally stated goal, that of promoting cross-cultural contact to transfer know-how from the French to the Chinese trainees. While this formal goal was not always realized in practice, the objectivist epistemic position was observed among both French and Chinese participants. For instance, the Chinese participants often understood their task as adapting to outside practices to learn French cuisine in an authentic style. As Meihua, a Chinese participant, expressed it:
In my school I just learned a little bit, but here I can learn more French cooking, so it’s kind of given me some bases. I have learned how to work, how to cook, how to do good service, all the standards and what goes around. (Meihua #46)
The idea of ‘bases’ suggests building foundational knowledge, rather than a cultural crossing. Knowledge is characterized as standardized (‘how to X/Y/Z’, ‘good service’, ‘all the standards’). Meihua acknowledges learning as a valuable career skill but not as a cultural or negotiated order. Taking this position valorized Meihua’s learning experience while legitimating the underlying conception of cuisine as objective knowledge.
Gao, another Chinese chef, similarly described, ‘I learned how to cook French food and it was a good opportunity. I also learned how to cook French food with the technique of low temperature and how to make a beautiful dressing’ (Gao, survey #7). Like Meihua, Gao focuses on specific techniques (‘low temperature’) and uncontextualized judgements (‘beautiful dressing’). This position appeared at moments where tacit or explicit deference to technical authority was paramount, e.g. ‘As far as I know, she speaks softly most of the time and she has the patience to teach me things. She is very enthusiastic, thank you very much’ (Ruohan, survey 8). Such a posture reflects an integrative relational attitude, even as it establishes an epistemic hierarchy.
As a collaborative process, we noted from field notes that aesthetic collaboration was built around the technical aspects of cuisine that provided common referents, but with diverse relational implications. In some cases, an attitude of participative tutelage was apparent, as noted in the field notes:
Amelie explains to Yuming how to cut a puff pastry (pâte feuilletée). She demonstrates the movement first. The student panics a bit at first and does not reproduce the movement, but she encourages him and says ‘do not worry’. Yuming cuts the pastry under Amelie’s gaze. (field notes, 2013)
The power relation here is clear, and Amelie’s practices remain unquestioned, but her authority is expressed as encouraging and supportive. Authority over aesthetic judgement remains asymmetric, and the collaborative relationship is one of ‘formatting’. In such cases, the integrative position involved a sense of mutual recognition, and the non-stigmatization of junior status. Active learning was considered as entrepreneurial or opportunistic, and the students described themselves as actively seeking knowledge while selectively using the most valuable insights.
The presupposition of objective knowledge, however, also meant that Chinese participants could leverage this ‘correct’ knowledge to exert authority during collaborations, given the French trainees’ inevitable departures from their own norms. In such moments, the aesthetic authority of the techniques served to challenge the French chefs. As Jacques describes:
I cut the sauce, I mean I put too much butter, too quickly, and there is Wendy coming up behind me and she says ‘ah, you better start that sauce over if you want to be able to serve it’. I look at her and I say ‘you sure?’ and she says: ‘yeah, if the chef sees that he’ll kill you – go ahead, I’ll get you some eggs’. You see so, voila, she pulled that on me. (Jacques #37)
In this moment Wendy has turned the tables on Jacques, a reversal made possible by the presumption of objectivity that proceduralized and depersonalized the technique. As Marc, a chef, noted, ‘My [Chinese] partner told me I had to do this or that sauce – “you must do that” – he said. Sometimes he even says “today you haven’t done what you should” and it’s true, “ok it’s my fault, I’m sorry, it’s my fault, it’s true”’ (Marc #43).
The expectation of passing along culinary practices as directly as possible was also evidenced in the practices, gestures and positioning of participants, which often mirrored the relational-epistemic standpoints of the actors. Figure 2 illustrates these visually by contrasting different collaborative positionings observed during the training, where Figure 2a highlights the aesthetic authority exerted through the objectivist epistemic position.
Relational Standpoints for Aesthetic Collaboration.
In Figure 2a, Paul demonstrates the preparation of a foie gras to the Chinese chef, Kexin, who stands slightly behind and looks over his shoulder. Paul is explaining the de-nerving of the foie gras, which Kexin will subsequently attempt. While the exercise is participative and engages both partners, a clear line is established where the ‘correct’ result depends on its conformity to the French foie gras. When, for example, a Chinese colleague at another table chopped the foie gras into bite-size cubes, a line was crossed, and the French chefs were visibly distraught.
Unsurprisingly, the ideal result of the objectivist position was a dish that was visually and aesthetically identical to a traditional French dish. Figure 3a depicts a beef dish prepared by Chinese chefs. The meat and vegetables are consistent with French norms, and the plate indistinguishable from traditional haute cuisine.
Gastronomic Aesthetics as Objectivist, Culturalist, and Co-constructionist.
Yet, because the aesthetic aspects of this dish, with separated ingredients and specific flavours, are seen from this position as objectively correct, failure to reproduce these dishes often gave rise to an antagonistic rather than integrative position, primarily by the French participants. The Chinese trainees, in this view, were accused of lacking knowledge or know-how and beginning from zero. To illustrate the antagonistic relational standpoint, Isadora, a French trainee, described her collaborative experience with the Chinese participants:
They had no idea about what was an occidental (let alone French) restaurant. We really had to start with basics, integrate them into service processes, client communication, language skills. It was a lot to learn all at once. (Isadora #36)
The idea that the Chinese participants lacked ‘basics’ ignores the possibility that they are working from a different background, assuming a lack of background and a tabula rasa. Such statements were often articulated with a presumption of superiority, discounting the Chinese trainees’ abilities:
We’re in a gastronomic restaurant, so first of all they don’t understand gastronomic culture. They have some, you know, rice and all that, but they don’t have our gastronomic culture and since we’re at a level of excellence which is very high, it’s true that this is not in their customs, like eating with a fork and knife. We told them how to lay these things out, but with them, it’s like there’s a huge gap in their understanding, of the gestures and the protocols. (Louis #24)
While the comparison between cultures might have suggested some form of dialogue or recognition, the offhand, dismissive style (‘rice and all that’) frames the other culture’s knowledge as mere noise. The language of absence (‘not in their customs’, ‘huge gap’) suggests non-recognition of alternatives and a framing of difference as lack.
More common in relatively uncontroversial situations, the integrative relational position was frequent during straightforward operations, whereas difference in nuances of flavour or composition tended to incite antagonistic positions. In the antagonistic standpoint, collaboration difficulties around tacit aesthetic elements (although still considered objective knowledge) were more apparent. Given that under the objectivist position, a shared external reference acted as a condition of possibility for collaboration, divergences are by definition problematic and deep differences test the tolerance of the actors involved, moving them towards an antagonistic position.
While the Chinese trainees were less vocally critical than their French counterparts during interviews, they often bristled against their treatment in practice, for example, in the repartition of tasks. In our field notes, we noted resistance to engage in more ‘menial’ parts of the gastronomic collaboration:
The chef looks angry and begins to sulk when a trainer gives him potatoes to peel. He explains that this is not stimulating. Although he doesn’t talk back to the trainer, he makes his displeasure obvious through his body language. (field notes 2013)
The Chinese chefs occasionally demonstrated moments of discontent that signalled antagonisms. As one anonymous Chinese trainee noted of her French counterpart, Lily:
She has a very bad temper. She gets angry very easily and she insults us easily [. . .] She is unable to respect people, she only shows our defects. It would be great if she could change her professional and personal behaviour. (Evaluation sheet n°3)
This sentiment was repeated by another anonymous Chinese participant, ‘She does not teach in a good way. She is not able to explain clearly. This is why we learned only by looking at what she did.’ (evaluation sheet n°5). Because, from the objectivist standpoint, aesthetic norms remain unquestioned, personal attributes (e.g. temper) are mobilized to explain imperfections of style or implementation, as expressed in a comment about Samuel, ‘Sometimes his temper suddenly shifts. One of us made a small mistake and he became very angry. Sometimes he even makes mistakes himself’ (evaluation sheet n°10). Not questioning the objectivity of the gastronomic practices, it is still possible to question authority within the relation (‘he makes mistakes himself’).
Perhaps because of this propensity for conflict around the indisputability of aesthetic knowledge, participants searched for ways to integrate cultural differences and divergent aesthetic codes. Xinyue, challenging the asymmetry of epistemic authority, one day confronted the French chefs, saying: ‘Listen, you’re annoying me with your occidental cuisine; I’d really like to just do things in my own way’ (field notes 2014). Such statements suggest a different relational-epistemic standpoint, emphasizing plural aesthetic standards and cultural differences, as we discuss below.
Code switching versus civilizing mission: aesthetics as cultural code
In contrast to the objectivist position, the culturalist epistemic position framed aesthetic standards as cultural codes, and collaboration as a process of working across cultural boundaries. When the culturalist epistemic position took an antagonistic relational standpoint, we termed the resulting relational-epistemic position as a ‘civilizing mission’, while its articulation with an integrative relational position resulted in a ‘code switching’ relational-epistemic position.
The culturalist epistemic position involved viewing haute cuisine within a wider system of meanings and practices, embodied in actors’ ways of experiencing and producing gastronomy. It recognized culture, without a dynamic view of cultural construction, so that each tradition appeared as a reified set of culinary norms. The dialogue required to collaborate around these norms implied relational-epistemic standpoints distinct from those of the objectivist position, involving recognizing and exchanging across cultural systems.
Recognizing the vast culinary traditions in both French and Chinese culture did not prevent asymmetric power relations in practice during the training process. Rather, in its antagonistic form, the culturalist position assumed a lack of wider knowledge (or ‘culture’) on the part of the other, often with the French trainees claiming that the Chinese lacked a wider cultural or civilizational background and required increased cultivation or enculturation. We term this attitude to aesthetic collaboration the civilizing mission, combining a recognition of the importance of culture with an asymmetrical view of the value of particular traditions. The concept of ‘civilizing mission’ (mission civilisatrice) is common usage in French and relies on an antagonism because it does not recognize the legitimacy of the pre-existing codes of the other culture. As Marie expressed it, learning the French style of cooking involves more than a simple teaching of recipes:
It’s not only techniques, it’s an entire savoir-faire in fact, a knowledge of culinary life but also a ‘savoir-être’ (way of being) in the kitchen, and they don’t always have the same codes. (Marie #7)
We note here that the specific practices of food preparation (‘techniques’) are subordinated to a wider notion of taste and even a ‘way of being’, differing across cultures. Notably, Marie links this way of being with the concepts of ‘codes’, a linguistic metaphor. This ‘savoir-être’ is seen as rooted in historical tradition and elevates mere technique into an art form, rendering it meaningful, as Mia, one of the French trainees, notes:
We teach them the history of French cuisine, the evolution of the different types of service that exist, the signification of the wines, in short, everything. All that is around the arts of the table and the restaurant, in the end. (Mia #26)
Recognizing difference between cultural meanings in the civilizing mission involved attempting to pass along a way of life, an aesthetic and cultural horizon of meanings. However, the one-sidedness of this passage rendered collaboration tense, with moments of mutual frustration, where the inexplicability of aesthetic judgements led trainers to resort to personal attacks and leveraging of power asymmetries. For example, Theo describes the travails of his civilizing mission vis-a-vis Haotian:
When Haotian works with me, we fight, so much, so much, so much, because we disagree about everything – the cooking, seasoning, etc. I chew him out (je l’engueule), he chews me out sometimes, but he understands that I am stronger than him, even if he doesn’t accept it, he doesn’t agree, but he knows I don’t give a damn, he has to do what I want. (Theo #39)
Theo takes this position in a moment of frustration over collaboration, demonstrating overt aggressions and a presumption of a civilizing mission. Nevertheless, it was clear that the Chinese participants arrived with an array of artistic and traditional practices invoking alternative aesthetics, and that these would not be easily assimilated to ‘training’. In some cases, these alternative aesthetic modes became apparent when Chinese chefs were given space to experiment and work together; one such moment is noted in Figure 2b, in which a tightly chopped and mixed dish (in the Chinese style) is improvised by two chefs, Tiantian and Yuxue, taking the opportunity to experiment on their own.
As a comparison to Figure 2a, Figure 2b depicts a collaborative practice in which neither actor ‘shows’ the correct way to the other. Perhaps because of the autonomy of this exercise, the chefs could collaborate without a norm of hierarchy, within a mutually understood aesthetic frame of reference. In a similar example, during a farewell banquet prepared by the Chinese trainees, the French counterpart noted the different but equally elaborate aesthetic forms as compared with the Bocuse training:
It was their own style of food, but they could really do gastronomy, it was really well placed on the dishes, beautiful, while we were thinking of desserts, they were thinking of decoration, they had made decorations out of vegetables. (Laura #33)
The relation between aesthetic and categorical distinctions (‘desserts’ versus ‘decoration’) suggests the entanglement of conceptual codes and aesthetic experience. However, this quote valorizes the diversity of such experiences in a way that was not visible in the civilizing mission standpoint. The ability to appreciate distinct aesthetic choices as valid illustrates what we termed code switching, or the ability to communicate across aesthetic boundaries and the webs of cultural meanings that make aesthetic experiences meaningful.
Participants often used code switching to distinguish between cuisines, without giving a clear judgement as to relative worth of each code. As Alex, one of the French chefs, described his relation and interaction with the Chinese chefs:
They ask about certain flavours, notably cheese, also salt, of which they use very little, the spices that we use in France, the balance between flavours, voilà, but even by the end of the training, there are certain products that they. . .that they do not like, (Alex #31)
In its more integrative form, the culturalist position led participants to seek understanding of the underlying lifeworlds within which given aesthetic preferences made sense, and shift between codes when needed. From this perspective, it was this network of ‘common sense’ that set the cultures apart and the ability to communicate across common sense that brought them together. Jean, one of the programme directors, described the need for openness among French participants toward alternative ‘interpretations’ of gastronomy:
For my [French] students who were, who are passionate about French cuisine, I use the example of a ‘côte de bœuf’. For a chef it is a sacrilege to serve a côte de bœuf well done. I ask them ‘what do you do if a patron orders not only a côte de bœuf that is well done, but in addition he would like it served with chocolate?’ At the beginning many said ‘oh no, I don’t serve that, chef, imagine a côte de bœuf, one does not do that to a côte de bœuf.’ But eventually they understand that working internationally is to make concessions to the rules and the habits that are ours, because we must understand those in front of us, in a business you never succeed if you don’t adapt. I am happy to have passed on this message. (Jean #2)
The principle of code switching also implied a two-way learning between cultures as each learned the other’s code:
We teach them the French savoir-faire, and they, somehow, transmit to us a bit of their own Chinese savoir-faire. Their fashion of working, their way of doing the Chinese service. (Florence #30)
Code-switching was thus prevalent in moments where the trainee status of both French and Chinese participants was emphasized. As Amelie, notes in an interview, ‘We make Chinese food too. It is more of an exchange, they teach me things and me, I teach them things’ (Amelie #16). Her quote is revelatory because it shows an openness to ‘exchange’ while not retaining a difference between ‘French’ and ‘Chinese’. In this kind of exchange, a mutuality becomes visible that was occluded by the asymmetric relationality of the civilizing mission. However, both standpoints rely on viewing aesthetic knowledge as culturally rooted, rather than objective practices.
Read in this sense of mutuality, the frustrations of aesthetic collaboration can be understood as the trainees’ struggle to interact with another tradition, and to some extent, with their own. Almost reiterating Theo’s above quote, Leo’s story of tensions nevertheless reveals an additional moment of reflexivity where his own aesthetic struggle becomes apparent:
‘No, not that size, not like that! If you don’t like it, do it anyway!’, but then she just put the knife on the plate and started to leave, what, huh?. . . It’s not easy because we can’t be like in France, where they just yell at you, say anything they want. . .and so me, that’s not, I mean, on the contrary we’re trainers, that’s useless, that’s what I had to go through in my internship, it was nothing but bad experiences. (Leo #41)
Leo’s initial tirade about the aesthetics of baking reveals itself as a recognition of having to deal with the other (‘we can’t be like in France’) but even more, leads him to see his own mistreatment (‘they just yell at you’), to understand his aggression as the repetition of an aggression that had happened to him. Finally, he stumbles over the need to find some new relation that remains out-of-grasp (‘and so me, that’s not, I mean, on the contrary’).
The culturalist standpoint thus maintains plurality but with tensions apparent at the level of the relationship, as can be seen in the aesthetic production as well. Contrasting with Figure 3a above, with its clear lines and separations, we note in Figure 3b how a Chinese chef, making the same plate, conceived the vegetables in a Chinese ‘figurative’ format, what one might call a traditional French plate but with a Chinese ‘accent’. In this plate, we interpret the traces of codes that persist as interlocutors attempt to speak each other’s language.
The co-existence of plurality was particularly evident in the personnel’s own self-cooked meals, which had some autonomy from the formalized training. In these moments, as noted in the field notes, both French and Chinese styles were present and appreciated, and the Chinese chefs often taught specific styles of Chinese cooking, from highly intricate cutting patterns to distinct forms and timings of cooking ingredients.
Discussing the issues of mutual acceptance, one of the Chinese trainees, Zhang, expressed this idea as ‘I think that it is important to know each other and help each other. And learn to work together.’ Summarizing the sentiment of mutual understanding and collaboration, Xuan likewise noted, ‘I believe we will make progress together.’
In sum, differently than in objectivism, the culturalist position recognized collaborative practices against background conditions of meaning, where relating requires engaging across code systems. This acknowledgement opened possibilities for questioning one’s own aesthetic codes, yet permitted cultural essentialism and a ‘civilizing’ mentality. Both possibilities rested upon the continued presumption of aesthetic practices as ‘belonging’ to one or another culture, a presumption called into question in the below relational-epistemic standpoint.
Hybrid fusion versus aesthetic confusion: aesthetics as co-construction
While the culturalist position acknowledged multiplicity in haute cuisine, its focus on plurality did not imply interdependence as generative for aesthetic production. In contrast, the co-constructionist epistemic position focused on interactions between the French and Chinese trainees, resulting in hybridizations and mingling across different cultural code systems. Co-constructionism combined with the antagonistic relational position to produce an ‘aesthetic confusion’ standpoint, while it combined with an integrative position to produce a ‘hybrid fusion’ relational-epistemic standpoint.
Relationally, co-construction positioned actors as interdependent and their productions as situated creations, rather than expressions of expert or cultural schema. In such co-constructions, aesthetic collaboration generated new practices that differed from either tradition. Our field notes showed many instances of small technique exchanges, for instance, with Chinese chefs demonstrating how to chop fruits and new ways to cut meat to achieve precision and regularity and emphasizing that cuts should involve a sense of harmony. Following the example of the beef plate above, Figure 3c shows the transformation of the same plate to illustrate hybridization. The vegetables, beyond a creative formation, are chopped and mixed in a style evoking Chinese dishes. The beef is chopped into pieces, with morsels of bread stuffing in cubes, facilitating use of chopsticks. While Figure 3b remains a French plate with an ‘accent’, Figure 3c seems neither French nor Chinese, but an aesthetic innovation.
Such sharing of practices involved a relational attitude toward aesthetic collaboration that allowed back-and-forth exchange, as noted by a Chinese participant about her colleague Mia:
If I have any question or idea, I can ask or share with her. Together we can talk about it and find a solution if necessary [. . .] She likes to communicate with us. She is really concerned by us and she always ask about our opinion. (evaluation sheet n°12)
We refer to Figure 2c to illustrate this kind of collaboration, where hierarchical (Figure 2a) or group-based (Figure 2b) differences are muddled in a group collaboration where it is difficult to separate the individual contributions.
We term hybrid fusion the integrative relational-epistemic standpoint where collaborators see hybridization as a creative result of interaction and a generator of innovation. For instance, a French chef noted improvisation as the ultimate goal of teaching, with the mark of mastery as the ability to deviate: ‘We’re out of vinegar – so what, now, who knows, we put honey, we put mustard, we put a bit of oil, we put dill, and voilà – that’s what they want to learn, I believe’(Marc #43). In moments like these, marked by small setbacks (‘out of vinegar’), hybridity constitutes a moment of problem-solving through improvisation.
The ability to creatively use ingredients, modify practices or change the material properties of artifacts (e.g. cutting food into cubes or cooking more fully) was an often-unexpected outcome of interactions. These produced novel ideas which become moments of debate, for instance, about the level of spiciness and amount of peppers in dishes. As Harry notes, ‘When we make food, it’s really an exchange, because we’re together with the Chinese students, and they teach us things and me, I also teach them’ (Harry #42).
Moments of improvisation or deviation often arose from necessity, a survival technique of bringing one’s own experience to a problem: ‘When cooking vegetables with oil, we shake the pot in the Chinese way because we need to cook it in a short time.’ (Jiangguo, survey 10). Such changes also resulted from tensions between the collaborators, negotiated in micro-interactions. As noted in the field notes (2014), ‘A trainer asks a Chinese student to bring a large plate for the sole. The student was skeptical; giving him a strange look and says that it’s not a good idea, the plate is too big for the fish and it will not be pretty.’ Such micro-moments provided unexpected occasions to reconfigure practices or find negotiated settlements.
Yet, beyond such ‘necessary’ improvisations, sometimes novel mixtures were created and acknowledged as conscious choices to engage in innovation. For instance, a new or unknown ingredient (e.g. foie gras) provided a ‘blank slate’ where embedded cultural practices could create creative assemblages that did not always follow French tradition:
We’re doing a foie gras with a red wine reduction, maybe something they’re not really familiar with but they like the product – they prefer if it’s cooked with spices or an apple. (Paul #4)
From the perspective of the Chinese participants, the potential for hybridization was recognized, drawing out and modifying elements from French cuisine. As Riyue, one Chinese chef describes:
I would like to do a Chinese sauce but I would change it a little bit because some people do not like the real Chinese sauce so we need to do something different. (Riyue #44)
Ultimately, while adopting Chinese styles was usually not considered as part of the learning content, such hybridizations crept into practices, leading to innovations that used elements of French cuisine while reinforcing previous ways of experiencing cuisine:
The tastes and textures, they adapt ‘à la chinoise’, so it’s pretty funny to see in the school the adaptations of the French techniques that they do to produce Chinese tastes. (Sophie #6)
These unexpected pedagogical reversals led to innovation by the Chinese participants, who creatively articulated elements of their training with previous knowledge in a process of hybridization. When such innovations were recognized for their creativity, the result was highly pleasing:
It was like an ice cream cone. He put the shrimp in the cone and a mango mousse on top of it so it was like an Italianized cream with mangoes and shrimp. It was something that really wasn’t traditional to France or to China. Even if it was a little bit sweet-and-sour which is more common in Chinese cooking than it is in French cooking. It was fun, it was like an ice cream cone, and it was nice. He then went to see the clients if they had liked it and he came back with huge smile on his face because the client said that the association of different flavours was excellent, was well balanced, and the textures were really interesting. (Paul #4)
At times, these mixtures were recognized as a ‘two-way street’, where both traditions learned from each other and were able to creatively work with their traditions as a result. As Anne, one French chef, describes it, ‘Above all, it’s the French who have evolved, who have learned to propose more Chinese style food, there is much more. . .more. . . more mix or fusion in the food’ (Anne #20).
Although many cases of hybrid fusion were present, and involved new gastronomic creations, such hybridization was also often looked down upon and seen as a distortion of tradition. As one senior member of the Institute noted, what is described as culinary ‘fusion’ should be considered ‘confusion’. For this reason, we termed aesthetic confusion the antagonistic relational-epistemic standpoint in co-construction, where mixture is seen as error, confusion or noise.
To illustrate, some participants considered co-constructions as a kind of culinary ‘bricolage’ resulting from haphazard and uninformed practices. The resulting mixtures were novel but were not considered innovative or creative:
I told them ‘design me a plate’. At the time it was funny, they made all sorts of things. . .a duck plate in the shape of a duck, because they are very figurative in Chinese cuisine, or a duck with breadcrumbs or carrots shaped like flowers, lilies placed all around the duck because to them, the décor must be figurative. (Marie #7)
In this case, the French chefs recognized the novelty of the gastronomic creations, but dismisses them as ‘funny’, distancing herself (e.g. referring to ‘them’) and minimizing the importance of decoration as ‘figurative’. Such conclusions often referred to plates with a strong connotation as ‘French’ cuisine (e.g. foie gras). Similarly, some co-constructions were seen as attempts to sneak in traditional tastes, diagnosed as a distortion or lack of understanding of the plate:
They have a tendency to add sugar and they like to caramelize things like in the sauces. They put in sugar to make it a little bit sweeter, or honey, or that kind of thing. (Lily #18)
In this context, sauces were particularly subject to accusations of wrongful mixture; perhaps symbols par excellence of the dilemmas of fusion, the sweetness or savoriness of sauces seemed at times like a metonomy for the wider issue of cultural mixture. Echoing Lily’s opinion but in relational terms, Marc notes how fusion processes can go awry:
Sometimes his sauce was just amazing while mine was just a simple sauce. . . voilà . . .so we tried to change things but couldn’t make it happen, we tried to do things like ‘chinese-french’, or ‘french-chinese’, using each other’s techniques, but it really didn’t work. (Marc #43)
Such co-constructions were recognized as attempts at cultural mixture, but when they ‘worked’, they were often experienced as moments of discovery and engagement in one’s craft. The Chinese chefs reported a desire to express creativity through hybridization, with a creative mixture of traditions:
I want to learn more about French food, because when I worked there, I thought the food was beautiful and not just about eating. It was like a picture. I think it would be interesting if I could mix the Chinese food and French food. (Xuexue #45)
The tension between doing things ‘correctly’ and the recognition of novelty and creativity in hybridization was felt at the level of food preparation, but also as a wider question of why and how gastronomy was to operate in an international context. The Chinese participants were especially conscious of this international opening, and were intent to find solutions that were culturally versatile:
Today in Shanghai there are a lot of foreign people and a lot of food styles in restaurants. We can’t just make Chinese food for the Chinese people. We need to take other styles, I think it is important. And if you know more things, you can change the dish, you are not obliged to cook them traditionally. (Meihua #46)
As such, the valorization of fusion was implicitly linked to the importance of an ‘international’ attitude in which cultural mixture was a valuable adaptation to new markets.
In sum, the aesthetic acceptability of gastronomic hybridization was largely a function of the relational positions taken by the participants. Standpoints of inclusivity, when combined with an epistemic premise of co-construction, framed fusions as creative and aesthetically productive. Lacking such a relational support, however, fusions were seen as derailments of correct procedure, or relapses of previous knowledge, which would slip into the new dishes and lead to confusion. Such aesthetic judgements were then closely related to the relational presuppositions of the participants, along with their beliefs in the possibility of co-constructing new aesthetic possibilities.
Discussion
Our findings inform our research question of how actors collaborate around aesthetics, highlighting the heterogeneity of relational-epistemic positions and their relations to conformity, plurality, or hybridity. How aesthetic collaborations unfolded in practice had implications for the kinds of cuisine that was produced and how it was evaluated, as well as the relative status of the actors involved in aesthetic production. While collaborations were embedded in a status order that privileged ‘traditional’ French gastronomy, actors adopted different standpoints regarding their relationships, reinforcing or attenuating power asymmetries in practice, and combining with tacit ideas about gastronomic aesthetics to shape collaboration. Considering culinary practices as objective rules enabled either authoritarian or more benign learning approaches, while seeing them as cultural conventions supported a ‘clash of civilizations’ attitude but could also ground diversity-oriented visions of code-switching. Finally, a view emphasizing mutual co-constitution supported hybridizing and novelty-seeking practices, while risking a loss of bearing and cultural confusion.
Our relational-epistemic approach complements discussions of cultural production emphasizing either the socially contested nature of categories (e.g. Rao et al., 2005; Slavich et al., 2019) or sensorially embodied experience (e.g. Islam, 2019; Küpers, 2013). Both negotiated and felt, how actors’ aesthetic creations take shape in relation to others is of key importance in aesthetic collaboration (Harter et al., 2008; Montanari et al., 2016). Neither merely cultural category nor ‘immediate’ experience, the relationality of aesthetic production entangles embodied judgement and relational negotiation. Though analytically distinct, the relational and epistemic aspects are mutually intertwined in the practices of collaboration. We schematize and illustrate our relational-epistemic approach to conceptualizing these heterogeneous approaches in Figure 4.
Conceptual Model of Relational-Epistemic Framework for Aesthetic Collaboration.
As shown in Figure 4, the relational standpoints (antagonistic versus integrative) and the epistemic assumptions regarding the aesthetic knowledge (objectivist, culturalist, co-constructionist) form the analytic components composing the different relational-epistemic positions. Analytically separated for heuristic purposes in the analysis, in a given empirical situation they are co-extensive and intertwined in practice. We did not assign primacy to either the relational or the epistemic dimension a priori, and suggest that they are likely to mutually influence each other processually in a given situated context. The result of this process is likely to be a heterogeneity of possible standpoints such as described as the oppositions at the right of the figure. These standpoints are not reducible to either relational positions, such as would be implied in status-based or cultural capital views of aesthetics (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984); nor are they reducible to epistemic differences or forms of life, as culture-based views would imply (e.g. Avorgbedor, 2003). By theorizing these two elements together, aesthetic collaboration bridges the embodied and social aspects of aesthetics without reducing the one to the other. We discuss the implications of this bridging approach below.
Contributions to organizational aesthetics
By examining diverse relational-epistemic positions, our study opens room for theorizing around the nexus of aesthetics and group relations. When aesthetic knowledge was considered as objective and thing-like, views of participation and competence were imposed across the groups with little regard to group differences, either valorizing the attempt to integrate such knowledge or dismissing non-integration as incompetence. When aesthetics was considered as a part of French or Chinese culture, awareness of differing cultural codes either led to heightened group-based distinctions or alternatively, sensitivity to the need to code-switch across boundaries. When aesthetics was viewed as a co-construction among all members and cultural mixture was countenanced, it was seen either as a form of innovation and creative emergence or as a cultural cacophony interfering with authentic culinary transmission.
Our study contributes to the literature on organizational aesthetics and more specifically on aesthetic production and the relational nature of aesthetic experience (Creed et al., 2019; Marotto et al., 2007; Montanari et al., 2016; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018). This literature has noted that aesthetic aspects of organizing are challenging, in part, because of the difficulty in articulating and collaborating around aesthetics, and has searched for mechanisms by which members make sense of experiences to support collaboration (e.g. Islam et al., 2016; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2018). From a more critical perspectives, scholars have drawn on Bourdieu (Gomez & Bouty, 2011), linking authority over aesthetic claims to cultural capital that reflects power differences. This power view considers aesthetics as embodying status struggles against the background of wider group identity differences (Wasserman & Frenkel, 2011, 2015). Seen in this light, aesthetic judgements are political because they express power hierarchies while veiling these under an ideological cloak of ‘pure’ experience (Eagleton, 1990).
A result of these two parallel but distinct approaches to aesthetics is that the first tends to reify experience and thus subject itself to the power-based critique, while the latter leaves unexplained how relational aesthetics is achieved in practice and experienced by actors (see Jay, 2005). Aesthetic collaboration brings together power relations and lived experience, requiring a critical theory of aesthetics that takes power asymmetries into account while not reducing experience to power. Tensions between the collaborative aspect of cultural production and its function of maintaining distinction are expressed through the different relational-epistemic standpoints in our findings. Faced with the intractability of discussing taste, and the practical frustrations of deciding when a plate tastes ‘right’, actors may look to group differences to explain, simplify or explore such frustrations. Our approach thus allows issues of power to enter interactional moments of aesthetic collaboration without determining a priori what will result from those moments.
More broadly, however, our focus on aesthetic collaboration connects collaboration literature, both general (e.g. Hardy et al., 2005; Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2002) and specific to cultural or artistic collaboration (Elsbach & Flynn, 2013; Harter et al., 2008; Montanari et al., 2016), with questions of aesthetic articulation that are at the core of culture industries (Endrissat et al., 2016). Focuses largely on identity negotiations (Elsbach & Flynn, 2013) or discursive constructions (Hardy et al., 2005), and even embodied (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2002) or artistic (Montanari et al., 2016) dynamics, the aesthetic dilemmas of ‘discussing taste’ are largely overlooked in current literature. As aesthetic production reaches across ever more diverse populations and involves producers from diverse areas, understanding how aesthetic collaboration is possible in such settings is likely to gain importance.
Contribution to organizational studies of haute cuisine and the culture industries
Our broader contribution to organizational aesthetics takes a particular shape in relation to the haute cuisine field specifically. In relation to the broader theme of the special issue on the potentialities and paradoxes of organizing food, our study explores how actors collaborate around the aesthetics of food production despite the apparent paradox of having to communicate the inarticulable. Faced with the fact that actors regularly do put taste into words and gestures (Toraldo et al., 2018), how they do so and how this shapes their organizing is an important area for exploration.
As noted above, haute cuisine scholarship has devoted much attention to categorization processes (e.g. Rao et al., 2005) and the search for novelty amid institutional norms (e.g. Slavich et al., 2019; Svejenova et al., 2007, 2010). Creativity perspectives highlight mastery or artistry (Dion & De Boissieu, 2013; Rehn, 2012) but occlude the elusive nature of taste and the struggle between actors whose embodied experiences of gastronomy do not match. In such situations, embodied aesthetic experience, status hierarchies and broader cultural flavour traditions are concentrated into relational moments where actors must figure out what a plate should taste like.
Given Koch et al.’s (2018) recent suggestion that creativity in haute cuisine should be considered in aesthetic terms, an immediate concern is how to articulate embodied experience with the broad and established literature on macro-level categories, a concern that has been echoed among scholars of haute cuisine in terms of taking into account emotions (e.g. Gill & Burrow, 2017) and intuitions (Stierand, 2015). Our approach is to begin not with the ‘internal’ experience of aesthetics, which is then ‘expressed’ socially, but with the relation in which aesthetic experience is given meaning, suppressed, enforced, or translated.
While we make this point in the context of haute cuisine, our contribution can be broadened to the culture industries more generally, in which conceptions of individual artistic creativity (e.g. Rehn, 2012; Svejenova et al., 2010) alternate with sociological accounts of legitimacy and category dynamics (e.g. Rao et al., 2005; Slavich et al., 2019), as well as power (Gomez & Bouty, 2011). We believe that a third approach is possible. This approach acknowledges the aesthetic experience inherent in producing creative products, without reifying embodied experience as a source of creativity beyond the social. It embeds aesthetic production in relational dynamics and makes visible the resulting persistence of power, normative control and even domination, without thereby reducing aesthetic experience to a reproduction of social norms. We argue that it is precisely in the moments of aesthetic collaboration, where actors struggle both epistemically and relationally to collaborate around aesthetics, that the tensions between lived experience and macro structures of group domination and power can be felt (see Sutton, 2010). While these power positions are realized in everyday practices, these also provide moments where relations can be remade and mutual understanding reached. Our study provides a point at which the problematic of discussing taste and the question of power can be fruitfully studied together, and in which their dynamics, normally occluded under institutionalized norms, may become more visible in their heterogeneity.
Future Research and Conclusions
Our study has focused specifically on collaboration around the training and production of haute cuisine; however, the complexities of aesthetic collaboration are more broadly bound up with issues of cultural reproduction and mixture, which involve hybridization across cultures and culture-related power relations (Frenkel, 2006). While the relational-epistemic approach is not specific to cuisine, the historical differences between French and Chinese gastronomic contexts in terms of culinary norms and symbolic legitimacy (e.g. Farrer, 2014, 2015) made this setting ideal for examining relational-epistemic positions. Our central research interest was not in cross-cultural collaboration per se; however, in light of the dearth of qualitative and observational research in cross-cultural research (Karasz & Singelis, 2009) our study points to how such methods can reveal difficult-to-measure aspects of cultural interactions. Most importantly, it gives a cautionary note to approaches that would reify cultural traits, as we point to how actors interactionally negotiate diverse relational-epistemic positions in practice (see Gertsen & Søderberg, 2010).
Beyond studying geographical dispersion in haute cuisine (see Slavich et al., 2019), examining aesthetic collaboration across geographies is relevant to the project of understanding culture as a site of relational struggles for meaning (e.g. Frenkel, 2006). While cross-cultural research often obscures power relations, as Earley (2006, p. 169) notes, understanding cultural interaction requires ‘mid-range theories having a more direct application and explanation for organizational phenomena in a cultural and national context’. Our relational-epistemic perspective allows for studying background power relations in practice, while not foreclosing the agency of actors within these situations to reframe or put aside standpoints of domination in moments of aesthetic collaboration. The implication for cross-cultural research is to study cultural relations in practices without hypostatizing culture or removing it from the larger power dynamics that characterize aesthetic collaboration.
Our study thus opens research possibilities around the relational and epistemic bases of aesthetic collaboration across cultures. While our site involves a relatively explicit set of aesthetic norms, most situations of aesthetic collaboration likely involve aesthetic norms that are less well articulated. In such situations, misunderstandings and power struggles may be more pronounced. The dynamics of aesthetic collaboration are likely to be context-dependent, where some collaborations revolve more strongly around epistemic questions and others foreground power and cultural capital. While we treat the two dimensions as co-constitutive, future research should explore how these two dimensions interact in practice, and the conditions under which one takes precedence over the other.
For instance, while the students in our study consented to and derived value from adopting culinary norms, this is often not the case. The diffusion of cultural forms is often imposed, rather than invited (Loomba, 2015), or imposition and invitation are intertwined in complex and dynamic ways. Over time, the rise of localized adaptations and diffusion change the relative cultural capital of high-status products like French cuisine. It is likely that the changing forms of aesthetic hybridization, fusion or innovation affect taste judgements and the relative power relations of different cultural traditions. Such long-term dynamics would best be addressed by longitudinal or process research.
How aesthetic collaboration occurs, how it is translated across wider meaning systems, and how it is co-constituted into new forms of cuisine, is deeply dependent on how groups relate to each other as actors, along with the epistemic difficulties involved in communicating across boundaries. As organizations increasingly work across diverse forms of lived experience, however, understanding such forms of collaboration will be increasingly important, conceptually and practically.
Footnotes
Appendix
Examples of the Aggregate Theoretical Dimensions.
| Implicit epistemology | Relational-epistemic standpoint | Illustrative data extracts | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data by/observations of French participants | Data by/observations of Chinese participants | ||
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They had no idea of what a French restaurant was. They did not know what forks and knives were, what it was for and how to use them. We had to teach them everything from the beginning. (Sophie #6) I said to myself ‘oh well, we are in a school, it’s ok if we waste a bit of foie gras’ so I showed them how to do it. The verrine and the much more complex dishes that they didn’t know how to do, they didn’t understand it. From there on, they really began to understand their position. (Leo #41) We contribute to give them, through this apprenticeship, techniques, habits and customs of French cuisine. It will allow them to develop their behaviours, their tastes and the love of this kind of job. So the transfer is real and efficient but it is a real challenge. (François – executive –male) ******** They’re able to copy things better than anyone, like, when they have to do chopping, it’s much better than all the French students, that’s for sure. . .for example, with pastries, when it’s about measuring, when it’s very precise they are much stronger than us, so simply, when they’re given a task with rules and it is well targeted and precise, they are better than the French students, for sure. (Theo #39) So when we were at brunch for example, they did the dessert trollies, they cut the cake and they cut the pieces of beef and they serve the wine by themselves and they knew how to open the bottles of wine. They were capable of serving the table by themselves and of asking for the dishes to the chef. (Lily #18) |
[The French chef] teaches me how to have organization and how to work fast, I learned a lot about French food with her. (Yusheng – Chinese Chef – Survey 12) The Chinese students are excellent at copying and repeating things. This is why they are very good at cutting vegetables and meats and in pastry. Indeed when you do pastry, you have to respect a lot of rules and they like that. (researcher field notes 2014) Amelie is always very organized in her work. I learned a lot with her. I like her because she is my teacher. She gives me pleasure to learn French cuisine. (Jingjing – Chinese maître d’hôtel – survey 3) ******** I learnt to be professional, to take care of the quality, to always smile and show my competences to the guests. When I have a problem, I am always looking for a solution now. (Fengshu – Chinese maître d’hôtel – survey 4). In my school, I just learnt a little bit, but here I can learn more French cooking, so it’s kind of given me some bases. I have learnt how to work, how to cook, how to do good service, all the standards and what goes around. (Meihua #46) Yes, I really progressed with him. Sometimes, in order to be more efficient, we discussed the techniques we wanted to use. Like that, each other’s opinions were listened to and put forward. (Chenglong – Chinese chef – survey 14) |
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We showed them, they paid a lot of attention and afterwards they did it as well as us, sometimes even better than us. So in fact, there was really no problem in the restaurant school for the service because they could reproduce the necessary gestures. (Anne #20) _____________________________________________ What we needed to do was to transmit the tastes, the flavours, the texture, a whole way of understanding the French Haute Cuisine, with its rules, its customs and its recipes. (Marie #7). We taught them the history of French restaurants, the evolution, the different types of service that are possible, the significance of wine, in short, everything. . .that revolves around the arts of the table and the restaurant in the end. (Lola #34) To introduce them to certain flavors, notably cheese, notably salt, which they use quite rarely, the spices that we use in France, the equilibrium of the flavours. . . voilà, but even by the end of the term, there were certain products that they didn’t like. (Alex #31) ******** They told us that they will teach us a lot but it is true, they taught us about wine and coffee and everything. Yes, I have learned a lot. How to do the service perfectly. Maybe they taught me to work with foreigners. Because it’s different to work with Chinese and the foreigners. (Mingming #8) We transmitted to them the French savoir-faire, those, for their part, transmitted to us some of their Chinese savoir-faire, their way of working, their way of doing it. (Isadora #36) ‘Is my chicken done?’ – this kind of judgement is what you must teach them, aesthetic judgements, taste judgements. (Paul #4)______________________________________________ |
_________________________________________________ One Chinese student has to realize a cocktail after the explanation of the French maître d’hôtel. It is a Margarita. She adds all the ingredients one after the other then at the end she adds curacao, which is not in the initial recipe. When the maître d’hôtel asks her why she did it because the taste is not good, she explains that for her a real Western cocktail has curacao. (research field notes 2013) I have added ketchup on the top of the viennoiseries because I thought it was better and much nicer. I did not think it would not be good. The chef was not pleased at all and he did not understand why I added ketchup. (Xuexue #45) The Chinese students had to create a dish with 3 ingredients: polenta, lamb and pesto. The result was not good. Some of the polenta were to thick, others too fluid, others without salt, and the decoration of all the plates was nonexistent. Concerning the lamb, it was not enough or overcooked. (Research field notes 2014) ******** Sometimes the sauces from China are very strong and the French sauces are not strong at all. We have to find a balance between the two kinds of sauces. It will make something delicious. (Riyue #44) I learnt a lot about French cuisine at IPB, like styles of dishes, different sauces and different ways of cooking. I have a broader knowledge of cuisine now. (Lina – Chinese chef – survey 3) I learnt more knowledge about meat: how to distinguish bad or good meat, how to cook the meat, how to distinguish if the meat is mature or not. It will be very helpful for me if I cook French or Chinese meals. (Ruohan – Chinese chef – survey 8) _____________________________________________ |
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Sometimes, it’s true that they had the tendency to put sugar and they caramelized things, for example, in the sauces. They put sugar so it would be a bit sweeter, or honey, that kind of thing. (Amelie #15) Once the Chinese students did doughnuts with tempura. It was more or less Chinese style with an apple inside but it was served with a French dish. It was a little bit weird. (Harry #42) They don’t have at all the same approach, about taste, about the flavours, oh là là! One day, Liu put sugar instead of salt in the pesto, it was just horrible! (Lily #18) ******** And with him (the Chinese chef), I’ve learnt many little tricks, with vegetables and other things, what works and what does not work. . . You can add a lot of oil and a lot of peppers. (Theo #39) It’s above all the French who have evolved, who have started to propose more Chinese kind of food, there is much more, more mixture or fusion around the food. (Laura #33) From time to time, they take more freedom; they try to do something. . . fusion. They do it their way, they try to ‘frenchify’ some recipes or vice versa. (Paul #4) Yes, certainly go ahead, make a fusion, mix a bit of French technique and a bit of Chinese. We’re here exactly for fusing ourselves). Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and. . .that one, it worked, yes, it worked. (Marc #43) |
I would like to do a Chinese sauce but I would change it a little bit because some people do not like the real Chinese sauce so we need to do something different. (Meihua #46) For an exam, I had to do a boeuf bourguignon but my way. Instead of doing it the French way, I tried the Chinese one and the result was very surprising. It was a boeuf bourguignon but with a Peking Duck sauce. (Ruoshan – Chinese chef – survey 9) One day I wanted to be creative. I did a chocolate sauce to put with the fish. It was a fried cod and I put a circle of chocolate on it and I added Chantilly. (Cheng – Chinese chef – survey 2) ******** When I cook, I really like to create new dishes where I mix French and Chinese cuisine. For instance, I cook a cod the French way and I add some soy sauce, sesame oil and lots of Chinese ingredients and Chinese steamed rice and it tastes really good. (Xuexue #45) I want to learn more about French food, because when I worked there I though the food was beautiful and not just about eating. It was like a picture. I think it would be interesting if I could mix the Chinese food and French food. (Riyue #44) Today in Shanghai, there are a lot of foreign people and a lot of food styles in restaurants. We can’t just make Chinese food for the Chinese people. We need to take other styles, I think it is important. Moreover, if you know more things, you can change the dish, you are not obliged to chef them traditionally. (Mingming #8) |
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback, as well as the organizers and the participants of the 12th Organization Studies Summer Workshop for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the members of the Institut Paul Bocuse for their participation.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.