The cafe as affective community space: Reconceptualizing care and emotional labour in everyday life

Abstract

The importance of cafes in fulfilling certain political, cultural and social functions has long been acknowledged in the social sciences. Despite this interest, there has been relatively little empirical or theoretical work which explores the intersection between the idea of the cafe and the concept of care as understood in social policy and practice. In particular, there has been little work that considers the social value of sites such as cafes, especially in deprived areas, and the role they may play in the day-to-day lives of people who use them. Through a detailed case study of a cafe, we examine the meaning of community, family and home in terms of the affective connections that places like cafes entail. We argue that powerful forms of everyday care work may be found in such sites, and we advocate for greater awareness in social policy of the complex and multilayered nature of emotional labour in this context.

Keywords

emotion work home place social exclusion therapeutic landscapes

Introduction

The importance of cafes in fulfilling certain political, cultural and social functions has long been acknowledged in the social sciences. In relation to political life, the cafe ‘has served variously as cradle of an emergent bourgeois public sphere […] site of revolutionary proletarian mobilization […] and bohemian respite’ (Simpson, 2008: 202). Sociologists have identified the major contribution of cafes in the development of civil society in Europe (Habermas, 1989) and in providing a ‘third place’ of social vitality between work and home (Oldenburg, 1999). Laurier and Philo (2005) investigated the cafe ‘as a distinctive site of communality, social ordering, sociability, conviviality and civic life’ (p. 3), and the role of pavement cafes and ‘cafe culture’ in providing opportunities for urban public social life has also been explored (Montgomery, 1997). Others have pointed to the importance of the interstitial status of the cafe, particularly as a place that exists between the public and the private, where the ‘“alone” and the “together” are confused […] and the boundaries between them amorphous’ (Shapira and Navon, 1991: 122). Public spaces in general have drawn attention from policy-makers and researchers in recent years in terms of their perceived links with health and well-being, particularly in areas of high deprivation and in terms of the relationship between ethnicity and public space (www.jrf.org.uk/public-spaces). Whilst the emphasis has been on ‘open’ spaces such as parks and markets, the role of ‘closed’ public spaces such as cafes in mediating social encounters and creating supportive friendships has also been highlighted (Dines and Cattell, 2006).

Despite the interest within the social sciences, there has been relatively little empirical or theoretical work which explores the intersection between the idea of the cafe and the concept of care as understood in social policy and practice. In particular, there has been little work that considers the central role that the cafe may play in the lives of people who are otherwise marginalized and socially excluded. A notable exception is Moallem (1999), who uses the term ‘affective community spaces’ to describe the cafes and snack bars in her study. It is in part through explicating Moallem’s idea of affective community space in detail that the present paper makes a contribution. Also of significance for the present paper is the work of geographers in focusing on the importance of place and space in relation to health and care. The concept of ‘landscapes of care’ has been deployed by geographers as ‘a framework for unpacking the complex relationships between people, places and care’ (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 736). This and earlier work, including the related concept of therapeutic landscapes (Williams, 1999; Martin et al., 2005) ‘has begun to articulate care through the differing, and sometimes surprising, social spaces that enable caring interactions’ (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 738). For example, Conradson (2003) develops the notion of ‘spaces of care’ through his research in a drop-in centre, adopting a broad definition of care ‘as the proactive interest of one person in the well-being of another and as the articulation of that interest (or affective stance) in practical ways’ (p. 508). The present paper presents the cafe as another such surprising social space.

The idea that cafes can play a vital role in community life and specifically in the well-being of people who are otherwise marginalized is evident from the range of not-for-profit community cafes that exist. The ‘Unity Cafe’ in Camden, London, for example, is self-funding and extends the notion of day services to provide non-subsidized paid employment for people with learning disabilities (Mickel, 2010). The ‘Cafe of Good Hope’ in Lewisham and ‘The Caring Cafe’ in Catford are other examples of how the idea of the cafe has been appropriated in innovative ways in order to meet particular objectives of formal service or charitable provision. Whilst these are undoubtedly ‘cafes that care’, these are not the sites with which this paper is primarily concerned. Similarly, although the gentrification of ‘cafe society’ and the rise of Starbucks and Costa type cafes are important developments, the homogenized facades and standardized practices of these chain outlets (Simpson, 2008) are not the focus of interest in the present paper. Rather, the focus of this paper is on cafes that exist as commercial enterprises in areas of high social deprivation, which have no formal agenda in terms of ‘caring’ for their customers, but which nonetheless serve as ‘affective community spaces’.

The present paper will draw substantially on qualitative materials from a case study of a cafe undertaken by the authors, together with commentary from the small body of relevant empirical and theoretical work that has been carried out by others. In the next section we explore the relevant literature on conceptualizations of community, the cafe and care as the three key, interrelated elements in understanding the cafe as affective community space.

The cafe as affective community space

Community and cafe life

Community is a ‘confusing concept’ (Clark, 2007: 4) through which we are confronted by ‘many possibilities and paradoxes’ (Day, 2006: 25). Yet, despite difficulties with the concept, community remains a common point of reference for many constituencies including policy-makers (Crow, 2011) and can still be regarded as a unit idea in sociology (Day, 2006). Beyond acknowledging its complexity and the potential dangers in utilizing the concept of community in our analysis, we do not intend to offer an in-depth account of their precise nature. These can be found elsewhere (see, for example, Day, 2006 and Clark, 2007). We are instead interested in how particular notions of community can help in our analysis of the cafe as a social space and the meaning it has for those that use it. In their influential analytical framework, Bell and Newby (1971) presented three ways of conceptualizing community: community based on geographical propinquity; community as the local social system; and the idea of communion based on close social ties that exist across and between places.

The social sciences have traditionally been dominated by a focus on the first of these conceptualizations: community as geographical closeness, particularly at the scale of neighbourhoods (Larsen et al., 2005). More recently, however, the community research agenda has been concerned with the ‘death of distance’ in social life, and the impact of technologies such as the mobile phone and the internet. The compression of space by time – for example, through the use of instant communication such as email as opposed to postal mail – has led to uncertainty about the notion of ‘places’ and how we might relate to them (Massey, 1994). However, there is ‘power geometry’ in terms of the complex differentiation between social groups and their relationship to time–space compression (Massey, 1994: 149). Whilst the shift of community from the spatial to the social may be true for the affluent and mobile, the importance of face-to-face communication, propinquity and neighbourliness in the reproduction of social ties remains as crucial as ever for the less well-off (Clark, 2007). It is argued that there is a need to refocus on types of community that are no longer as visible as they once were, especially working class groups and the poor (Allan and Phillipson, 2008: 170). Further, there should be a shift away from the binary distinction between the social and the spatial to explore the fluid interaction between these two categories, with a ‘nuanced account of connected lives in contemporary society’ (Clark, 2007: 29). In this sense, Day’s (2006) definition of the transformed central meaning of community is most pertinent:

‘to speak of community is to speak metaphorically or ideologically’ (Urry 2000: 134) about what it is that different sets of people are trying to achieve, in the face of a reality that seems to be increasingly fragmented, fluid, and chaotic. (p. 25)

In relation to policy-making, the pursuit of community as an ideal, and the identification of the absence of community with a range of social problems has been an ongoing theme (Crow, 2011), not least in relation to community care policies of the 1980s. In researching the experiences of mental health service users in the community, Pinfold (2000) revealed that the binary variable ‘isolated or integrated’ was unhelpful in capturing the complexity of people’s experiences of post-asylum landscapes of care. For many service users, ‘the therapeutic benefits of living in the community may rest in a personally located middle-ground lying between independence and dependency or between isolation and integration’ (Pinfold, 2000: 206). Places such as cafes, which have the capacity to contain opposite elements such as ‘together’ and ‘alone’ (Shapira and Navon, 1991) can in this sense be understood as spaces that may be constitutive of care in a number of contexts. Moallem (1999), for example, observes how cafes and snack bars have become ‘spaces of social and community care’ for immigrant communities (p. 161). It has been noted by observers of cafe life that the idea of ‘the regular’ is central to the care in this context. Of third places such as cafes, Oldenburg observes that ‘Absences are quickly noted, and those present query one another about an absent member’ (1999: 39). Being a regular customer thereby creates a ‘noticeable absence’, which in turn ‘answers the kind of lack of community that is formulated when someone becomes ill or dies in their house and nobody noticed’ (Laurier, 2002: 8). In essence, people care if regulars are there or not. In the section that follows, the potential of the cafe as an affective space that is realized through its ambiguity is explored in greater depth.

The cafe as a third place and ‘home from home’

In their case study of a Tel Aviv cafe, Shapira and Navon (1991) conceptualize the cafe as an ambiguous setting and as ‘an intermediate institution located between private and public space’ (p. 122). The cafe is a private and protective space compared with the world around it, but it is also a public space when compared with the home spaces of its customers. The relationship between public and private spheres of the cafe is fluid, with opposite elements merging together: ‘The cafe is revealed to us, then, as a place where the formal is entwined with the intimate, closeness with estrangement, reservation with cooperativeness, aloofness with sociability’ (Shapira and Navon, 1991: 122).

This emphasis on fluidity reinforces the idea of places and the social interactions they encompass as ‘processes’ rather than static entities (Massey, 1994: 155). The significance of the fluidity and in-between status of the cafe is also captured by Oldenburg in The Great Good Place (1999). Oldenburg produces an in-depth analysis of ‘the third place’ between work and home which rejects the notion of it merely as a site into which people escape from the stresses of work and/or home. Instead, he defines the universal characteristics that third places such as cafes share and emphasizes their unique value. Firstly, the possibility for informal and intimate relations is created by virtue of the neutrality of the space offered by third places. Secondly, the third place has a social ‘levelling’ impact in which it can offer an experience for customers based on equality rather than differentiations based on status or wealth. A further key characteristic of third places is the presence of playfulness in which ‘joy and acceptance reign over anxiety and alienation’ (Oldenburg, 1999: 38). Oldenburg stresses that the third place is ‘typically plain’ and perhaps even seedy (pp. 36–37) and this plainness of appearance serves a number of functions, including repelling ‘the transient middle-class customer’ (p. 36) and discouraging pretension. There is therefore a class dimension to third places. Strikingly, Oldenburg highlights the way in which overt commercialism and modernity, whilst clearly not incompatible with running a thriving establishment, are incompatible with third places. The cafe as a third place can therefore be contrasted with gentrified chains of cafes such as Starbucks which – like McDonald’s – tend to be sociofugal spaces where communication between people is suppressed (Ritzer, 2004).

Perhaps of most relevance for the present paper is how third places are ‘often more homelike than home’ (Oldenburg, 1999: 39) by virtue of the way they ‘root’ people and their warmth (warmth being a necessary prerequisite for a third place). The affective or emotional dimension of third places is therefore at least as important as their effective function. Moallem (1999) emphasizes how the ‘homey atmosphere’, as well as the food and cultural notions of hospitality in the cafes she studied are all key to the blending of affective and effective spheres in which a small, entrepreneurial space becomes ‘an affective community space’ (pp. 163–164).

However, in emphasizing the home-like nature of cafes and other third places, we are conscious of the danger of idealizing ‘home’. Home in the care literature is complex and problematic, especially when analysed in relation to the retreat of welfare, the consequent shifting geographies of care (Martin et al., 2005) and the focus on home as a gendered site of care (Milligan and Wiles, 2010). The idealized home in Oldenburg’s work can instead become, for women caregivers in particular, a ‘place of struggle’ (Williams, 2002: 147). Central to Moallem’s (1999) analysis of affective community spaces is Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour, which Moallem uses to illuminate ways in which sexual and racial divisions of labour are legitimated by the disjunction between effective and affective spheres. The concepts of care, emotion work and emotional labour are explored in greater depth in the next section.

Care as emotional labour and emotion work

Conceptualizations of care have historically been both gendered and spatially defined because of the strong associations between care, women, the family and the private sphere of the home. Care work by women in the public sphere, particularly in occupational groups such as nursing and social work, has been understood as extensions of the private sphere of women’s work. Awareness of the danger of certain experiences being lost in dualisms such as private–public is hardly new: ‘As Margaret Stacey has noted, a conceptual framework which separates reproduction from production, private from public, home from work, leisure from labour will inevitably fail to confront experiences which transcend such divisions’ (Finch and Groves, 1983: 14). The complexity of identifying boundaries and intersections in care work has been highlighted in recent research, in which the articulation of work and non-work is analysed along dimensions such as ‘love or money’ (Lyon, 2010).

The present paper is concerned with forms of caring that are located in spaces that are ambiguous and that are not easily designated as either public or private. Whilst defining the nature of that care work is potentially conceptually challenging, for our purposes it is its fluidity and complexity that is important. Just as the public–private are blended together in cafes, so potentially are different forms of the affective dimensions of care; conceptualized in Hochschild’s work as emotional labour and emotion work.

Hochschild’s twin notions of emotional labour and emotion work can be mapped across the public and private spheres respectively. Emotional labour is ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ (Hochschild, [1983] 2003: 7). It is ‘sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value’ (p. 7, emphasis in original) and it involves the enforced expression of emotions that may not be felt by the individual concerned, often at the instigation of employers. Emotional labour can be observed in cafe chains such as Starbucks in the form of rationalized and standardized ‘performance of friendliness’ by service workers (Simpson, 2008). Hochschild defines ‘emotion work’ as ‘the same acts done in a private context where they have use value’ (p. 7, emphasis in original). Emotion work is therefore not formally prescribed by employment roles but is used autonomously by the individual concerned (Hochschild, [1983] 2003: 7). In this sense, emotion work is identified more closely with the ‘informal’ care associated with the home.

The concept of emotional labour has been utilized in the care and nursing literature to expose less visible aspects of care work (see for example, Henderson and Forbat, 2002). For Staden (1998), caring as emotional labour in nursing is encapsulated in the phrase ‘alertness to the needs of others’ (p. 147). However, Bolton (2000) argues that the concept of emotional labour does not encompass those gestures in nursing that are altruistically motivated and which can be described as ‘gifts’. It is argued that Hochschild’s ‘emotion work’ more adequately encompasses this aspect of care work. Bolton argues that understanding the emotional complexity of nursing therefore involves drawing on both ‘emotion work’ and ‘emotional labour’. In work especially relevant to the present paper, such blurring between domains has been alluded to in a case study of waiting service in a restaurant, where the service provided ‘is neither purely personal, nor simply mechanical and impersonal; it is personalised’ (Crange, 1994: 694, emphasis in original). The use of the term emotional labour in the present paper captures the sense in which the care work of the cafe depends on its survival as an effective business. However, our findings also reflect the emphasis on emotion work and gifts as emphasized by Bolton and others. Before presenting our findings we give a brief account of the methods used in our research.

Methods

The liminal, or ‘in-between’ status of social spaces like cafes can render them difficult to research. As Oldenburg (1999) observes, ‘Rare is the chronicler who has done justice to those gathering places where community is most alive and people are most themselves’ (p. 20). It is therefore significant that the starting-point for our research was the lived experience, as customers of the cafe, of two of the co-authors, Dawn Talbot and Gerry Bennison. Dawn and Gerry are mental health service users with active experience over many years in the service user movement. They are also long-standing customers of the cafe that is the focus of this study, and it was conversations about their experience of the cafe and its apparent importance for many customers, including them, that led to the research. At their suggestion, Jo Warner started visiting the cafe on a regular basis from 2007. The research is therefore part ethnographic, in that many of Dawn and Gerry’s early observations of the people, their activities and practices in the cafe prompted questions which informed the interviews that were undertaken and formed the basis for the ideas in this paper.

Our goal in conducting this research was to understand more about the customers who use the cafe and the people who work there, and how they experience the cafe as a social space. However, we have been equally conscious of the many issues raised by our work together as academic and peer/ community researchers, and specifically the complexities of power that have been evident. There is little scope to explore these issues in depth in this paper, but many of our experiences are accurately reflected in the work of others and we particularly favour the account given by Edwards and Alexander in which (writing from the perspective of academic research) they, ‘review the multidimensional political and practical tensions that weave themselves through notions of community as well as positioning peer researchers as insiders and/or outsiders’ (2011: 270).

In our reflections on the experience of working together on this research we acknowledged that, to a degree, we had all felt apprehensive as well as excited. For Gerry and Dawn, there were fears about the power of academics to belittle or ignore their intellectual contribution or being perceived as a ‘burden’ in terms of issues they might raise as service users, such as through intermittent absence through illness. For Jo, there were fears about the breakdown of professional–personal boundaries through working closely with Gerry and Dawn as colleagues, and the loss of control this might entail for her. These initial suspicions were challenged over time as our relationships evolved and as we became more trusting of one another.

The label of ‘service user’ became less defining in terms of Gerry and Dawn’s role in the research, and their identities as social researchers became more prominent. They conducted most of the interviews as we felt this would help participants to share their experiences, since they would already know Gerry and Dawn as fellow customers. This proved to be the case. However, over time we observed how their status as ‘insiders’ changed in subtle ways as customers began to identify them with Jo and by extension with the University. For one customer, this became an issue in the closing stages of the research, as he linked the University with authority and, in turn, to social services and to the Benefits Fraud Office.

Jo became less concerned about ‘blurred boundaries’ and as the research continued she became more of a familiar face in the cafe, though not to the extent of becoming an ‘insider’. We think this was largely due to her association with the University as an institution (as suggested above). Our shared intellectual interests, curiosity and sparking of ideas became more central to our relationship and the tensions in our roles became secondary concerns. In the latter stages of the research our conversations were characterized by warmth and the language of friendship. Over time we have built trust, which is a prerequisite for collaboration. However, we would argue that the problem of power in this type of research is only ever provisionally resolved and in order for collaboration to be sustained, we need to be alert to where power, and therefore control, is located.

The cafe is located in a high street in one of the most deprived wards of the UK (Communities and Local Government, 2007). In terms of its outward appearance, it conforms to the unpretentiousness or ‘plainness’ emphasized by Oldenburg in his characterization of third places. There is a plastic table and chairs outside, mainly for people to smoke at. The name Anita’s Cafe on the shop sign is in bright yellow on a green background and the large windows are unshielded, allowing a clear view into the cafe from outside. Inside, the cafe contains an assortment of plain chairs and tables laid out in various configurations with a large kitchen at the back of the room and a serving hatch in-between. The serving hatch is brightly decorated with photos and notes and personal memorabilia belonging to Anita (the owner) and regular customers. There is a long menu on a chalk board with special offers of various kinds. A cup of tea costs forty pence.

Verbal consent was obtained from Anita to interview her and to approach customers in the cafe for interviews. Ethical approval for the research was obtained from the University of Kent, together with a small amount of funding to cover interview transcribing costs. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were undertaken in all (including two interviews with the same individual), the bulk of which were carried out by Dawn and Gerry. All interviews took place in the cafe itself, and while most were undertaken in private space out of earshot of other people, some developed into group interviews, where customers would talk to one another during the interview. This was particularly the case at busy times. The two waitresses in the cafe declined to be interviewed. The significance of the absence of their perspectives from our account, particularly as it relates to forms of emotional labour and emotion work, is discussed later in the paper. To protect the identity of participants, all interview material was anonymized and pseudonyms have been used throughout this paper, including the name of the cafe.

Over repeated readings of the qualitative materials by the co-authors, particular themes were identified and assigned codes. Broadly speaking, we followed the approach first advocated by Strauss (1987), of open, axial and selective coding. However, we were also mindful of the potential pitfalls in segmenting the accounts given by participants and remained ‘sensitive to the storied quality of many qualitative data’ (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996: 54, emphasis in original). Through this process we identified four main sets of themes and these are explored in the following sections.

The cafe as affective community space: Four sets of themes

Four major themes from the qualitative materials help to elucidate our understanding of the cafe as affective community space. Firstly, we describe how the owner Anita sees her role and we show how the concepts of emotional labour and emotion work are useful in understanding the care work that takes place in the cafe and the formation of it as an affective community space. Secondly, we briefly describe who uses the cafe and its importance in providing cheap and nutritious food. Thirdly, we explore how the cafe is homelike and operates as an extended family for customers. Fourthly, we analyse how the nature of the cafe as an affective community space involves the promotion of a set of values that are explicitly non-judgemental.

a. ‘A social sort of job’: Emotional labour and emotion work in the cafe

The significance of Anita’s role in the cafe is hard to over-state; as one customer observed: ‘Anita is the cafe’ (Interview 6) and as Anita herself comments, ‘If you took me away from here then it would be totally different.’ When explaining what she likes best about running the cafe, Anita highlights the links between the needs of her customers, her willingness to create a particular atmosphere in the cafe, and the appealing nature of her work:

… it doesn’t feel like a job. I’ve made it sort of like quite a family sort of like fireplace to come in and everybody knows my family and my friends come in. It’s sort of like … It’s more like a social sort of job. You know, and there’s lots of people coming in, you get attached to the customers and, you know, we’ve got a lot of people with learning difficulties and, you know, people who haven’t got any family and stuff like that and sort of they almost amalgamate into being your own family in a way. (Int. 2)

Anita’s motivation for running the cafe comes from the nature of her relationships with customers and the transforming effects of this on both her ‘job’ and the cafe as a social space. Anita’s relationship with her customers also comes with the same kind of emotional obligations associated with family life, in that ‘I think if I ever gave it up I’d feel so guilty too’. In this sense, Anita acknowledges that running the cafe can be a burden at the same time as being something she has always aspired to:

… it was just like a little dream, sort of like to have a little you know, burger van in a lay-by, but obviously I got the bigger dream, I got a cafe. But I don’t know if it’s a bigger dream sometimes. It can be a hindrance and a nightmare.

In terms of creating an atmosphere in the cafe that resembles family life and ‘home’, almost all of the customers that we interviewed identified the personal attention given to them as key. Of particular importance is the way Anita and her staff remember everyone’s names and details about their likes and dislikes.

… at first I didn’t come in on a very regular basis. I just popped in but … what really struck me was I hadn’t been in here for months and I walked in and Tanya [waitress] said ‘tea no sugar isn’t it?’ And I thought how did she remember that with all the people who come in the cafe? So […] I started coming here sort of on a regular daily basis at that time. (Int. 6)

Also key to establishing regular customers is the fact that the cafe is ‘a place to just be’ as well as a place of consumption. Anita points out that not all cafes operate in the same way: ‘As soon as they’ve finished their cup of tea a lot of cafes will walk up and they’ll take the cup away if you’re sitting there with an empty cup’ (Int. 2). A number of customers also contrast her attitude with the way other cafes operate: ‘Anita doesn’t mind how long you sit with a cup of tea, unlike other … some cafes you feel you just eat and go’ (Int. 6); ‘Even if you just come in for a cup of coffee you don’t get chucked out half an hour later […] They don’t say sorry you’ll have to go’ (Int. 8); ‘… she [Anita] don’t kick you out if you sit around here all day’ (Int. 4).

Anita’s approach to ‘customer care’ appears to be derived from two main sources and these are illustrated in the extract which follows. Firstly, her professional background and experience in the catering industry means that she is confident about the ethos that she wants to promote in the cafe and she trains her staff accordingly. This is the ‘effective’ sphere of her work, concerned with running a successful business. But Anita also draws on the ‘affective sphere’ in terms of emphasizing her strong feelings of empathy towards her customers:

And I think you don’t feel intimidated when you walk in. Everyone smiles and says hello and you’re treated like a person and not like … You know, like you walk into some places and they’re sort of like oh yeah what do you want? But in here, you know, all my staff are trained to be nice to the customers, you know, because at the end of the day they’re who pays the bills and the wages so … And I think it makes people feel like … You know, so we get a lot of people coming on their own. Now I couldn’t walk into a cafe on my own. […] I mean because I’ve been in this sort of game all my life, you know, that’s one of the important things that was always drummed in to me, you know, like to smile at people and make eye contact and to … you know, to talk to people. (Int.2)

We see here how emotional labour and emotion work as understood by Hochschild ([1983] 2003) are blended. It is important to note that Anita’s staff do not have her autonomy or control and are working for a wage. Anita trains her staff to smile, make eye contact and be nice to customers, recognizing them as the people who ‘pay the wages’. In this sense, the work of waitresses in the cafe may more closely resemble the management of feelings associated with forced expression and waged-labour in the workplace – Hochschild’s emotional labour. Since they were unwilling to be interviewed, we were unable to explore this with them. For Anita though, the ‘emotion work’ associated with the home and with family, and all of the obligations that go with that, blends with the emotional labour required to generate an income and run a business.

b. The customers and cafe food

The cafe has as many as thirty regular and frequent customers, some attending on a daily basis and others attending on a particular day or days each week. Almost all of the customers we spoke to live within walking distance or a short bus ride from the cafe and are therefore ‘local’ in that sense. There are customers with chronic illness who regularly meet in the cafe because ‘… we might be on the way to the hospital for a check up about something so it’s very handy for that, you know?’ (Int. 10). Anita categorizes her customers according to the day of their visit and what is happening on those days in the world outside the cafe, and from this she deduces what their needs may be:

Monday [market day] we can get like some, you know, throw backs of the market like customers, different customers … Tuesday we … I can’t really think. Wednesday we get a lot of people, because they get their benefits on a Wednesday, a lot of the youngsters … so we get a lot of the single mums and people like that come in. Thursday is sort of more pensioners’ day … Sundays is quite a relaxed chill out day and we get a lot of nice people come in you know, quite regular on a Sunday. We normally get the hangovers in the morning and the families in the afternoon. (Int.2)

From this short account, we get a sense of how the cafe is enmeshed in the social, spatial and economic environment around it. Importantly, what all of the customers at Anita’s seemed to share was that they were surviving on low incomes, often benefits or a state pension, and a large number were unable to cook for themselves.

So, as well as the friendliness and emotional warmth on offer, the cafe delivers care at the most basic level in terms of meeting nutritional needs. Crucially, the food is good value for money, whereas ‘… everywhere else is more expensive’ (Int. 1). But the food is also valued because it is wholesome and fresh: ‘I think food comes first; quality of the food. Vegetables, not just fish and chips or burger and chips … And fresh vegetables’ (Int. 1); ‘I mean there are other places where it is all pre-heated and pre-cooked. It loses some of its quality’ (Int. 4). Personal attention in terms of food preparation was also a factor: ‘I mean I like my food very, very hot […] And if it’s not as hot as I like it they will do it again for me’ (Int. 8). One chronically ill customer who lives opposite the cafe has lunch delivered every day:

She was living on ham sandwiches for two years so … You know, and she’s really perked up and that’s sort of like a nice benefit in a way. You see her quite a frail old lady always in her dressing gown and now she’s all up and dressed, brushing her hair … (Int.2)

This enjoyment in seeing the physical benefits of a good diet based on her cooking was clearly an important matter of pride for Anita: ‘I mean if you have a look at George’s belly now since he’s been coming here his belly’s got bigger and bigger so he’s eaten well!’

c. Noticeable absences: The cafe, loneliness and family life

The idea of the cafe as an extended family as expressed by Anita is echoed by her customers: ‘It’s a family kind of thing, isn’t it, that you feel part of everything’ (Int. 6); ‘They’re like a family … They’re like you’ve known them forever … And there’s always a smile’ (Int. 7). The special significance of the cafe in the lives of some customers is exemplified by the accounts given by two of its daily regulars, Sheila and George.

For Sheila, the cafe is ‘my second home’ and Anita is her best friend and ‘like a sister I didn’t have’. Sheila goes to the cafe every day, sitting in the same seat by the serving counter, ‘To talk to Anita. And do my crocheting and all.’ Sheila had been in a long-stay hospital for people with learning disabilities for a number of years before it closed down when she was 21 years old. She lives alone in a ground floor flat and has visits from formal carers twice weekly. If the cafe were not there, she says that she would stay at home, but ‘I get lonely on me own if I stay home’ (Int. 3).

For George, the cafe serves a central purpose in providing a friendly place to go every afternoon. A mental health service user for over forty years, George sees the friendliness of the cafe as central but he also identifies the way that it can offer privacy as important. For George, it is these qualities in the cafe that resemble those of family life and he is sensitive to the subtle interaction that takes place between customers in judging the desire for privacy:

Sometimes I like my own space, you know, like I like to read the papers, spend time on my own, you know. Sometimes you like company but you like your own space […] Well you know when to leave people alone don’t you? You know, you recognise the signs when they want talking to or … […] So it’s a close knit family, you know, so … Yeah, a family. (Int. 1)

Anita and the cafe also play a key role in rituals normally associated with family life, including providing Christmas lunch and birthday teas – such as George’s sixtieth. The role of the cafe therefore extends well beyond the boundaries normally associated with the effective sphere of a commercial enterprise, so that it more closely resembles an extended family.

The cafe is seen by everyone we interviewed as offering a ‘place to be’ as an antidote to everyday loneliness:

There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time in here, you know, for company, you know, because some people live alone and they […] just sit here and have a cup of tea because they’re lonely people, you know. I mean it reminds me of that song, Eleanor Rigby. (Int. 1)

But perhaps the most important sense in which the cafe operates as an affective community space is in terms of making absences noticeable (see Laurier, 2002: 8): ‘… if people don’t come in Anita will try and find out why they don’t come in. If they’re not well and if they’re in hospital she phones up the hospital and she goes to visit them as well’ (Int. 11). It is perhaps awareness of the importance of this function of the cafe that prompted one customer to observe:

If she left or closed it down … I think it would be a sad day for [this area] personally. I think there would be a lot of people devastated. I know that sounds a bit dramatic and people may think, well, it’s only a cafe. It’s not just a cafe. (Int. 7)

d. ‘The cafe is for everybody’: Social ordering and managing risk

From the interviews we conducted it became clear that conduct in the cafe was governed by a largely unspoken code that was observed by all the regulars and upheld by Anita. The importance of such codes of behaviour in cafe life has been observed in other studies (e.g. Shapira and Navon, 1991). Some rules in Anita’s were concerned with basic behaviour such as swearing, but there was also intolerance for discriminatory or oppressive behaviour. This was explicitly linked with an emphasis on ‘unconditional regard’ and Anita’s willingness to listen to people’s problems, as indicated by these two customers: ‘… if a person’s got problems she will listen, even though she might find it boring to hell but she will listen to what you’ve got to say and she won’t condemn …’ (Int. 4); ‘Like as Anita says, the cafe is for everybody. You know, no-one’s any different when they come in here, we’re all the same’ (Int. 11). A number of customers were able to provide clear examples of incidents where the code was firmly upheld, such as when some customers were instantly barred for using the term ‘retard’ to a regular customer. One customer (Int. 6) was keen to point out that it was unusual to feel comfortable in a cafe as a woman on her own, but she did in Anita’s. Other customers were also able to reflect on their personal experience of stigmatizing attitudes elsewhere, in contrast with the unconditionally accepting atmosphere in Anita’s:

You go in some places and obviously we’re big people and you walk in and it’s quiet. You know; all that. And it’s not … you’re not stupid, you know why. And there’s many a time when I’ve gone in places and I won’t eat because I get a bit self-conscious. But you walk in here and there’s always a friendly atmosphere. (Int. 7)

Another aspect of the code of behaviour that was in evidence in the interviews was related to the management of risk events in the cafe. Again, this was linked by respondents to Anita’s listening skills and her apparently non-judgemental approach to customers.

Anita is very understanding. You know, she’s got a lot of patience […] And if she feels somebody is [acutely mentally] ill she will try and coax them and try and understand where they’re coming from and, you know. I mean sometimes there was a fight in here, somebody was very ill, had a fight in here and he was banned, you know […] people didn’t want him in here because of his violence and because he was ill and that was the best thing Anita could do for him until he went into hospital. When he came out of hospital he was well again and Anita understood that and invited him and gave him a hug, you know, and welcomed him back. (Int. 1)

The emotional labour in evidence in this incident demonstrates the fluid nature of the care work Anita is engaged in and the way it sometimes more closely resembles that of professional care workers.

Conclusion

The ideas discussed in the present paper are important on a number of levels, but in particular they contribute to our understanding of the concept of care and how ‘care work’ is undertaken in everyday and mundane ways in sites not normally associated with caring, by people who have no formal or informal responsibility or duty to care, and in ways that are invisible to virtually all but those that are directly involved in the relationship. In contrast to the ‘Big Society’ of community discourse in current government policy, and its concern with rolling back the state and the transfer of Whitehall powers to ‘active citizens’, affective community spaces are characterized by the small, the everyday and the humane. The Big Society agenda emphasizes ‘dutiful’ aspects of helping others, but as others have pointed out, this is not really why people do it (McCabe, 2010). An overwhelming sense of, and shared value in, simply ‘getting along’ (Philo, 2004), together with the noticeable absences that they produce, is what characterizes affective community spaces.

Central to our argument is the idea that it is the cafe as a space that is constitutive of the care that takes place there. The role of the owner Anita, whilst clearly pivotal, is defined by the cafe and the nature of it as a space. Her care work is embedded in the effective dimension of the work of the cafe, in the serving of food and the provision of a place ‘to just be’. In this sense our study contributes to the reconceptualization of care from a ‘caringscapes’ perspective in terms of advocating ‘a more flexible way of viewing care location that encompasses both spatial and social relationships’ (Phillips, 2007: 119). Particular spaces have been constructed – for example, the home as a place of emotional security and the hospital as alienating – in ways that underestimate the complexity of the social and symbolic meaning of certain spaces, both for individuals but also along class, ‘race’, age and gender dimensions (Martin et al., 2005). Vital forms of care that are central to people’s lives happen in places that are neither work nor home, public nor private.

An ethic of care that more closely approximates one we might expect to see in formal care services is, we would argue, perhaps more in evidence in sites such as Anita’s cafe. The current context of shifting paradigms of care in which ‘a generic notion of care has been superseded by specialisation depending on the client or service-user group’ (Phillips, 2007: 121) suggests new and important configurations. Risk aversion in organizations in the formal care sector has resulted in ever-more bureaucratized services; with the result that ‘care practice’ is dominated by documentation rather than direct work with service users. The atmosphere of risk and managerialism that now pervades relationships between professionals and people who use services makes certain emotional attributes associated with caring very difficult to achieve. As Neuberger (2005) observes, ‘the cumulative effect of a risk-averse culture results in an erosion of simple human kindness’ (p. xii).

Human warmth and empathic listening, a non-judgemental stance, are increasingly superseded by – or mediated through – rationalistic and bureaucratized assessments of risk, care planning and other fragmentary responses to the human experience (Phillips, 2007). Ironically, in some caring professions such as social work, this has been dubbed the masculinization of care work. Just as Moallem concludes that her case studies, ‘point to new spaces of be/longing and citizenship’ (1999: 166), we argue that the case study presented here equally exposes important and normally invisible modes of caring, belonging and citizenship. As argued by others (e.g. Henderson and Forbat, 2002), we suggest that there needs to be greater awareness in social policy of the complexities and multilayered nature of emotional labour, and as importantly the fact that such care takes place in ‘surprising’ spaces.

Just as caring spaces such as ‘home’ have been problematized and the dangers of idealizing them exposed, there is clearly a danger in idealizing affective community spaces such as the cafe. From Gerry and Dawn’s perspective, whilst egalitarianism was evident in the cafe from their early visits, it became apparent over time that there were potential inequalities in terms of certain customers becoming ‘favourites’ and receiving more support than others. Gerry and Dawn see the cafe as reflecting Anita’s personal and emotional needs and, judging from her interview, she was largely unaware of any possible negative effects of this for vulnerable or less ‘likeable/deserving’ customers. Whilst the cafe offered social space that compared favourably with features of care available in formal services, it also lacked the ethical frameworks or codes of ethics that might protect some individuals from exclusion.

Finally, we argue that the invisibility of the care that happens in affective community spaces such as the cafe makes such sites – and therefore also the people who use them – particularly vulnerable in times of change. The chief threats to cafe life are economic, and potentially arise from two directions: recession and regeneration. The threat of recessionary forces to a business such as Anita’s is obvious; as one of her customers observes: ‘business is business’. Dines and Cattell (2006) have highlighted the potential threat from regeneration policies to open public spaces such as parks and markets – including ‘micro public spaces’ such as cafes (Mean and Tims, 2005). Dines and Cattell (2006) identify two key issues. Firstly, the social value of public spaces can be undermined by the focus on economic factors in regeneration policies. Secondly, the importance for people of the ‘unexceptional’ public space is often overlooked in regeneration policies in favour of particular design criteria, or the dominance of what Oldenburg might call, ‘the middle-class preference for cleanliness and modernity’ (1999: 36). As emphasized by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in their series on the subject, valued social spaces ‘are often banal in design, or untidy in their activities’ (www.jrf.org.uk/public-spaces). An emphasis on purely commercial imperatives shifts the focus of cafe activity towards a mode of performance and the ‘individual display of lifestyle for others’, and away from a focus on sociability and ‘collectivistic group belonging’ (Simpson, 2008: 197). In essence, regeneration for the cafe as a social space can result in ‘the gradual replacement of cafe life by cafe lifestyle’ (Simpson, 2008: 197, emphasis in original).

Footnotes

Author biographies

Jo Warner is a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Kent and has research interests in risk, mental health and social welfare. Recent publications include ‘Smoking, stigma and human rights in mental health: Going up in smoke?’, Social Policy and Society, 8(2) (2009). Jo also recently co-edited a special issue of the British Journal of Social Work on Risk and Social Work: Critical Perspectives (2010).

Dawn Talbot has endured long-term mental health problems since the age of 17 and has a degree in Social Science. Dawn has an interest in the concepts and ideas of service delivery and Recovery and implements training as well as lecturing around Positive Risk Taking. Dawn is also interested in user/carer involvement in research and how this is embedded to create a robust knowledge base. Dawn has a specific understanding of issues of empowerment and Recovery and how these apply to the notion of ‘well-being’ in sociological and social work research.

Gerry Bennison is a Trainer and Educator within the academic and practice spheres with relevant academic experience of involvement and participation. Gerry has also developed ideas and thinking in collaboration with organizations within social work and has long-term experience of accessing service provision. Gerry is also interested in ethics and how they are applied in decision-making and choice.

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