Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 12:42:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Patricia Novelli Bullish for Take-Out: Food Delivery to Desktop Publisher in the Financial Industry During Weekend Shifts. Prepared by Patricia Novelli, for Barbara Kirsheblatt-Gimblett. FOOD AND PERFORMANCE: Spring 1998 INTRODUCTION Despite the regular hours of the stock exchange in New York City, the financial industry operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Those providing administrative support to the players of the market must work shifts that provide coverage accordingly. The physical conditions prevalent during weekend shifts are radically different from those prevailing during the week. As Eviatar Zerubavel notes weekend shift workers enjoy "higher pay, lighter traffic to and from work, and a far more relaxed working atmosphere (less supervision, a rather informal dress code, and son on)." Taking meals can figure prominently in the construction of this less formal atmosphere particularly when personnel eat at their desk and rarely leave the office. In this paper I examine the complex food system in place during the weekend shifts for desktop operators at Pearl Finch . Alan Beardsworth and Tersa Keil define a food system as one which is articulated through "symbolic properties^Åintricate webs of social relationships and social processes." The food system operating at Pearl Finch during the weekend shifts for desktop publishing operators is predicated on food delivery from local restaurants to the office, the consumption of food at the operator's desk, and the disposition of leftovers after a meal. I embarked on this project stimulated by my own sense of depravation upon initially ordering food and eating at my desk. Working twenty-four hours a week on Saturdays and Sundays for the past six months, I began my assignment as a desktop publisher shortly after moving to New York City to attend graduate school. As my own native informant, dutifully translating the experience of desktop operators into a text to be read through a scholarly lens, I hoped to civilize the process for myself and for the reader. The voice of the native informant is frequently skewed when pressed for answers and many assumptions I made about the food delivery reflected my own experiences and prejudices. I punctuate this paper with these recollections and inconsistencies to acknowledge the subjectivity of my original endeavor and the inevitable permeability of the newly arrived at assertions I now presume to make. THE SETTING "Dependent on my stress level and work load, going to the lobby to pick up a delivery can be a pleasant break or an inconvenience." Pearl Finch is one of the largest Investment Banking firms in the world. The New York office houses the company's largest center for desktop publishing which, on the weekends, is divided between hubs on five floors of the World Financial Center. Each hub accommodates between six and eight operators who sit in unassigned cubicles. Between the five floors, there is one microwave, one very small refrigerator and no open lunch room facility. Food deliveries are made to the lobby of the building and retrieval of the food requires a 24-30 floor elevator ride. A cafeteria on the twenty-fourth floor, which is closed on the weekends, serves as a dark and deserted reminder of how readily available food is for operators working during the week day shifts. THE POPULATION "Temps' cultural backgrounds vary dramatically and they engage in a wide range of activities outside the office such as performing jazz music, acting, writing, or studying in fields as varied as engineering, cultural studies, and law." Each weekend nearly 100 operators provide service to the bankers at Pearl Finch. The constituency of this population changes according to which permanent employees request over-time (they have scheduling priority) and which temps are available on any given weekend. Temporary employees provide the majority of the coverage on weekend shifts with a ratio of 3:1 to regular employees. Over the course of two weekends, I distributed roughly fifty surveys to which I received thirty responses and five subsequent interviews. While this population is not sufficient to establish statistical significance, the responses suggest trends in the operator's behaviors. These trends provide many points of entry into understanding the food system, how it functions, and what we might learn about the information food conveys in the context of its procurement and consumption for this population and, by extension, others like it. Half of the persons who responded to my survey, are between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five and two-thirds are male. Twenty-one of the surveyed employees have been working for Pearl Finch for over six months. Two thirds of the thirty people surveyed work every weekend and nearly one third of them work only weekend shifts. The respondent's average length of employment and frequency of week end shift work indicates a population sufficiently indoctrinated into the food system to answer the survey from an informed perspective. I rely heavily on their input in conjuring conclusions about trends applicable to the larger population of operators in this work place. THE SHIFTS "There is a core of 'indefinite' temps who work each weekend and a group of short term temps who work as needed. Weekend temps earn nearly the highest rate of pay offered on assignment at Pearl Finch, exceeded only by graveyard shift on the weekend." Twenty-seven of the thirty respondents are temporary employees and twenty-three work twelve-hour days. Shifts are frequently extended by two hours to meet the demands of the banker's workflow. As the evening progresses, more work is submitted with ever-shorter deadlines. According to Judy, the weekend supervisor, the busiest hours for the center are from 8:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. During these long shifts, operators take lunch hours as early as five hours into the shift and as late as nine hours after it begins. We must maintain adequate coverage at each hub and, when lunch hours are scheduled, only one of us can leave the building at a time. This need for coverage lessens the opportunity for operators to socialize over a meal outside of the office. However, due to the abundance of work to be done, operators rarely take an hour away from their desk. A great majority of the thirty people surveyed (twenty-seven of them) indicated a preference for working through their lunch hours. Heather once told me, "when they ask you to schedule a lunch hour, take it after 6:00. By that time there will be plenty of jobs and you can just work through it." This tip has paid off on several occasions since I also prefer to work through my lunch hour - and for the same reason as my co-workers: money. As I expected, the five interviewees unanimously agreed that earning the extra money motivated them to eat at their desks without taking a lunch hour. The eagerness with which operators work through their lunch, selling their personal time to Pearl Finch, somewhat conversely relates to Eviatar Zerubavel's view of the employer's need to "buy" time. "Given the modern conception of time as a commodity^Åone of the most common ways of legitimately denying individuals the right to claim control over their social accessibility during their private time would be to buy it from them." My perception of selling my personal time allows me to retain more agency in the process. Eating meals at our desks becomes a visceral marker of this agency, as we function socially in the work place. As one operator boldly stated on his survey, "the more you eat, the less you work." WHY DELIVERY AND HOW DOES IT WORK? "I usually bring a bagel to work in the morning and do not need to order food until much later. Some people order food for delivery twice a day, others not at all. When another operator orders food the aroma may induce me to order earlier and, conversely, malodorous food will cause me to delay ordering." Weekend shift workers at Pearl Finch rely on food delivery for a few reasons. Operators on the weekend have no access to kitchen facilities to prepare food brought from home. Company cafeterias at Pearl Finch remain closed during the weekends and few restaurants in the mall adjoining the offices stay open past 5:00 p.m. One respondent said he'd hoped I conducted my survey in the interest of trying to establish kitchen facility use privileges for weekend operators. Another wanted me to open a better restaurant, with longer hours. These suggestions indicate an awareness of what is lacking in the environment that affects the current food system. As someone who orders food for delivery every weekend, I understand the process as divided into nine steps. First and second are initiating an order and then soliciting other operators to join you. Gathering orders from other operators can entail calling or emailing friends on other floors. Together we usually negotiate the third step: agreeing on a restaurant. Someone, usually the order initiate, calls the restaurant and requests delivery. Before the food arrives, one person collects the money, including enough for tax and tip. When the food arrives, whoever is least busy goes to the lobby and retrieves it. Upon returning to the center, the same person is usually responsible for delivering the meals to those people who have ordered. Then, we eat. After eating it is necessary to dispose of the containers and leftovers. I most enjoy the interaction entailed in collecting the orders, I find other operators' orders interesting and all the discussion stimulates my appetite. To my surprise, the majority of people most prefer the step of eating the food, despite their repeated complaints of limited space, frequent interruptions, and working while they eat. FOOD DELIVERY SCHOLARSHIP "Food for Thought, Joan and John Digby: This text will provide good literary support. It will add texture and depth to the paper if applied properly." There is relatively little scholarly attention paid to food delivery in sociology, anthropology, or cultural studies. Most writers occupy themselves with the differences between eating in (at home) or dining out. An interesting and newly re-published article by Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine unpacks the relationship between New York Jews and Chinese food. In passing, they recognize the subject of food delivery to the home: "After a hard day's work or on a hot night, a wet night, or a cold, snowy evening, families could eat delicious Chinese food without going farther than the front door. Chinese restaurants had few competitors in this enterprise; none served meals as good. Only since the 1980s have other New York restaurants offered high-quality delivered or even take-out food - but most of it remains more expensive than Chinese food." One of the very few explicit reference to food delivery I found, the context here regards its domestic possibilities. I found no reference concerning food delivery to the work place. Articles in food industry journals deal primarily with management strategies for restaurants, trends in fast food or take-away food, and the latest fad of home meal replacements. The report "Factors Affecting Expenditures For Food Away From Home In Commercial Establishments By Type Of Eating Place And Meal Occasion" in the Hospitality Research Journal, presents the findings of an extensive survey of Food Away From Home or, FAFH. It makes no allowance for delivered food, attending only to the following "types of eating places^Åfast food, family type, atmosphere, cafeteria, coffee shops, and take out from restaurants." Furthermore, the study does not even consider delivered food in variables it ignored: the NPD survey does not cover largely noncommercial establishments such as institutional and military foodservices. In addition, some commercial establishments providing food service are also excluded: these include bars, and taverns, mobile caterers, nonstore retailers, and meals at social caterers. The practice of ordering food for delivery in the workplace challenges many assumptions about where and under what conditions food away from home is consumed. Where is the literature that meets these challenges? Why are sources on such a frequently indulged, and corporately reimbursed means of acquiring and consuming food so difficult to locate? THE SYSTEM'S STRUCTURE "I'm quite sure Douglas' Deciphering a Meal will be helpful as a foil for my project." I began this project believing meals eaten at Pearl Finch contrasted with the structure Mary Douglas defined in her seminal article "Deciphering a Meal." At first I thought "A+2B" would be somehow compromised by the meal occurring in a much different cultural context than Douglas'. I heeded the advice of Beardsworth and Keil: "Douglas's (sic) analysis does have its limitations. It refers to the practices of just one upper-middle-class English family and so we must be very cautious about attempting to generalize its arguments." One or two ways of adapting Douglas' structure do present themselves though, and I am willing to twist her structure somewhat to support my ideas. A+2B refers to the components of a meal where "A is the stressed main course" and "B is the unstressed course." The lower case "a" and "b" can represent ingredients in any given dish, of even the most simple meal: the butter and broccoli could be the "2b" to the "a" of a baked potato. One straight forward application of Douglas' theory lies in examining the operator's actual food preferences. Survey respondents overwhelmingly preferred to order delivery from Texas BBQ. The menu for Texas includes several choices of entrée, each accompanied by two side dishes. The preference for this restaurant supports a popular performance of a meal conforming to Douglas' structure. Similarly, delivered Chinese food usually consists of Meat, or vegetables, rice and the always entertaining fortune cookie (A, B, B). Douglas draws this structure down to the size of a "cocktail canapé" and explodes it to meet the cultural challenge of the wedding cake. In doing so, she explores this paradigm in a social and ritual context. Later, writing with Gross, she further explores the eventful-ness of meals and how they can tell us about larger dietary systems: the most distinctive underlying feature appears to be in the increasingly clear geometry of forms which is not discernible in the first phases, but which quickly wins out through the temporal sequences, so that we end with complete units structured in such a way as to show in each the pattern that dominates them all. I believe we can assign Douglas' structure of A+2B to the cultural context of my subject in a very interesting way. There are three anomalous conditions that are necessary to the food system at Pearl Finch during weekend shifts. The hours and days worked should be assigned as the "A" determinant in the structure because it is the most important and defining aspect of the system as a whole. Operators, bankers and supervisors alike constantly refer to things they could be accomplishing at home, how nice it would be to curl up with the Sunday New York Times, or recreational activities they could be doing if they were not at work. Zerubarvel's correctly summarizes the mechanics of this part of the system: (m)ost of us seem to feel that working during the weekend is essentially doing something we are not supposed to be doing^ÅThe price one pays for being out of phase with the conventional weekly work/rest cycle is essentially a social one, namely depriving oneself of the opportunity to interact intensively with those whom one can see mainly during the weekend. Many physical conditions remind us of our displacement into the work world during weekends: the limited access to the offices, the lack of formally dressed business women and men on the plaza, the preponderance of tourists and locals on rollerblades or bicycles. Given these conditions as a normative for weekend operators, I can now identify two attendant features of the food system which resonate with this considerable disruptive state. They function as the "B" elements of Douglas' paradigm. First is the consumption of food in the workspace. If our bodies are misplaced into the office during the weekends, our food is misplaced onto our desks during mealtime. Being at work during weekend hours diminishes the expectation of what one operator called a "normal food situation." Twelve of the survey respondents mentioned spatial considerations when asked to identify the most annoying aspect about eating a meal at Pearl Finch. The responses ranged from "no space on desktop" to an "all around bad ambience for the stomach." An attendant feeling of doing something "wrong" also signifies the location of consumption as anomalous. At least three of the respondents commented on this troubling aspect. One operator said "It actually takes a lot of planning^Åtrying to arrange a meal on [the banker's] time can definitely get you in trouble." And another temp wrote, "I feel like I shouldn't be eating." Support for this assertion can also be read what operators do with their food when someone approaches their desks. Twenty-seven of the survey respondents stop eating, twelve move their food and only one operator claimed to keep working. The third buttress to Butler's structure, the second "B" in my proposal, is the disposal of food waste after the meals are finished. During the weekends, Pearl Finch provides no cleaning service and each operator empties their garbage and cleans their station at the end of their shift. There is nothing more unpleasant than finding someone else's food remnants in your garbage can. Richie said, "One day, well. I thought I forgot to wear deodorant or something. It smelled^Åfinally, I looked in the trash and there was somebody's breakfast. Eggs, it was awful." At the end of each shift, the supervisor will ask if anyone needs trash bags and, on the way out of the building, each operator delivers their garbage to the freight elevator room. Waste removal normally occurs at the end of the day, Monday through Friday, after the majority of people have left the office. Waste removal happens when no one is looking, unless you work during the weekends. This discreet service is scheduled late in the evening and generally is unseen. However, notices posted in the ladies room, near common garbage receptacles, and in the freight elevator room, explicitly direct food disposal. Richie frequently advises new operators to save their delivery bag because it makes garbage take out easier, and more pleasant, than changing the trash bag in the garbage can. Each busy weekend, the take out bags from local restaurants, filled with food remnants, line the corridor outside the elevator room evoking an ever changing and constant memorial to the weekends toiled away at Pearl Finch. I often wonder what becomes of them before Monday morning, when garbage should be out of sight, once again. Applying Douglas' A+2B structure to the food delivery system at Pearl Finch helps to illuminate how it stands in contradistinction to food systems we recognize in the home or dining out. Simultaneously, her paradigm can be adopted in its strictest sense revealing the unquestionable meal-like status of delivered food in the office. SOCIAL INTERACTION "I believe the operators do not think of their meals at work as social events, despite the high level of social activity required for gathering orders, distributing food and ordering with each other." It seems that, despite the dislocated meal taking of operators at their desks, the primary social activity surrounding the meal takes place during the food consumption. While twenty-three of the thirty survey respondents said they have not eaten meals with other operators at their desks, their answers to "What is the most enjoyable aspect of eating meals at Pearl Finch?" predominantly indicate social interaction during the meal. The "good company" of co-workers, opportunity to "share food" with others, and "camaraderie while eating" illustrate the highly social aspect of eating delivered food at work. Due to the boisterous and extensive conversation surrounding the decisions of when, where and what to order, I assumed operators experienced the most positive social engagement while ordering and distributing the food. On the contrary, one operator explicitly denounced the social interaction implicit in this process. One Sunday afternoon, when I asked James if he would cast around for sushi orders from operators on his floor, he staunchly refused and replied "I am certainly not the solicitor general. Besides, I find the camaraderie of order-taking nauseating." One operator said her favorite restaurant is down stairs, Pasqua. She said she "can go directly downstairs" and that way, she doesn't "have to deal with other people." She cited an event where, in a dispute over the tip money, another operator threw a calculator at her. After the ordeal she "couldn't eat" and now she simply avoids ordering food with other people. THE SELECTION PROCESS "My preference for food on Saturday may be in anticipation of a particular restaurant being closed on Sunday, which is the case with my favorite Thai kitchen." Survey participants cited the wide varieties of restaurants as one of the more positive aspects of the food system at Pearl Finch during the weekend shifts. Indeed, a multitude of menus is scattered around the desktop publishing center. Some are organized in binders which are infrequently used, other are harbored at operator's desks, and still more are merely scattered across the various work stations - left over from some meal or another. Index tabs belie the unorganized condition of the collective binders which operators rarely use. I notice a preference among operators to rely on menus held in privately maintained collections. I once asked Bill if I could borrow his tidy lot of menus for the purpose of this paper. He said he'd sooner part with anything else, and reluctantly agreed. When I did borrow the menus one Saturday afternoon, it was only a matter of hours into the shift on Sunday before Bill called me, looking for the phone number of his favorite Italian food restaurant. For the purposes of this project I studied menus from thirty-five different restaurants. A simple tally of different entrees, appetizers and soups yielded an astounding 3,422 different alternative things to eat! This figure does not take into consideration the endless number of possible food combinations. How does an operator choose from such a wide array of gastronomical temptations? Surprisingly, only three survey respondents indicated they cannot identify a restaurant from which they order habitually. One woman said she tried "to rotate each day" and another said she never initiates the ordering process and only "piggy backs" on the orders of others. One interviewee said that when he is hungry he doesn't want any "surprises," so he frequently orders the same dish from the same restaurant. Similarly, consistency is often cited in restaurant recommendations between operators. Ordering familiar food from known restaurants complies with Douglas' notion of purity in process: As time goes on and experiences pile up, we make a greater and greater investment in our system of labels. So a conservative bias is built in. It gives us confidence. At any time we may have to modify our structure of assumptions to accommodate new experience, but the more consistent experience is with the past, the more confidence we can have in our assumptions. In the interest of narrowing the field of choices, I ask myself: "What constitutes a surprise when ordering food for delivery?" What falls outside the consistency most sought by operators? Seemingly anomalous ingredients are sometimes unwelcome surprises. One operator wouldn't order from a Vietnamese restaurant because they include egg in the fried rice. Knowing that egg is a common ingredient in fried rice, I made a point of noticing how the egg appeared in that particular dish. Arranged primarily on top of the rice, it was more visible and discernable from the other ingredients. Perhaps if the eggs were less identifiable he would eat it. If so, he would be in good company with those Jews who, earlier in this century, ate pork concealed in Chinese egg rolls. Foreign objects also qualify as "surprises' and these were noted by a couple survey respondents: an operator reported finding a paper towel in her vegetable curry. I witnessed a false alarm one memorable day when three operators gathered around Betty's work station. She was agitated and they were discussing an insect like object in her breakfast potatoes. Richie, a strict vegetarian said it was only a bit of rosemary and volunteered to eat it, much to the disgust of the other operators. After he tasted it and confirmed its vegetative constitution, the group disbanded and he said he knew it wasn't a bug or he would not have put it in his mouth. Ingredients from other people's food can qualify as surprises too when they taint another person's meal. Ginny, who gave extensive consideration to her survey responses, described an experience where her food was contaminated by someone else's order: Once I ordered from Fresco with some other people. When the food arrived, my burrito was covered with steak sauce which had spilled all over the inside of the bag. Me being a vegetarian for well over a decade, I couldn't eat it. Ever since this incident, I always prefer not to have to order with meat eaters. Ginny effectively narrowed her choice of restaurants by deciding to order only with vegetarians. These examples of foreign objects and food contaminants qualify as "matter out of place" and fall well under the definition of "dirt" as defined by Douglas. Affiliations with people in other contexts also influenced operators' decisions about restaurant choice. One operator intimated to me that he would not align himself gastronomically with a particular person who frequently orders Chinese food because he didn't like her social style. By silently abstaining from delivery orders with her and others who enjoy Chinese food, he successfully refrains from socializing with her during meal times and simultaneously disguises his distrust and animosity for her. Mary Douglas and Jonathan Gross discuss this aspect of social interaction: "With close cultural linkage food can be elaborated into an efficient vehicle of communication and excommunication. But the scope of food to be a communicator of messages about occasions and social roles is limited by the extent of agreement on what the occasions and roles may be." Unless these two individuals agree that his abstaining from Chinese food is a rejection of her personally, the food is not a successful communicator. Institutional environments, where socializing manifests itself more explicitly at mealtime, are likely more conducive to forming clearly marked social groups. School cafeterias provide children an arena in which to define themselves socially through what they eat. "At lunchtime and break times the pupils divide into social groups to eat lunch and share snacks and drinks. In this way the choice and the sharing of food can define insiders' and outsiders' along the line of gender, ethnicity, income, age and body shape." These decisions actually illustrate negative decision making process by ruling out particular restaurants, as opposed to choosing one. What are the affirmative alternatives? Descriptions of "good food" or meals that "just hits the spot" are vague answers to the question "What is the restaurant from which you order most frequently and why?" Because these are food-oriented answers (as opposed to ones contending with delivery time, or expense) I consider them an extension of the difficulty we experience when describing the taste of particular foods. Gary Fine illustrates this phenomena beautifully in his suggested "thought experiment" in which you "[s]elect your favorite food, and then describe why you like it." Other than comments considering the taste value of the food, cost and healthfulness were the predominant choice factors. I interviewed Pat who considered both these factors in choosing Bon Oriental Gourmet: Steamed chicken, broccoli, and tofu in garlic sauce with brown rice. Gotta stay health, I'm not 16 anymore. They don't charge extra to add the tofu, the food is low in fat and fresh. Pat indicated he cooked at home and only ordered delivery when working. Removed from the control of his kitchen, he believes he can choose healthy foods from the vast selection of available alternatives. This belief system is shared by several operators at Pearl Finch and reveals a concern with health and its relationship to diet. Beardworth and Keil carefully consider the history of dietary trends and show how current thought in this area is constructed and supported by "not only medical practitioner and physicians, but also scientists, nutritionists and dieticians" to which I would add politicians and popular cultural figures. Recognizing how larger systems function facilitates an better understanding of smaller food systems, such as the one prevalent during weekend shifts at Pearl Finch. CONCLUSION "The entire system resides in the wasabi that clings to our fingers as we type million dollar figures into hundred page sales pitches. That residue never makes it onto the printed page, but smudges the texts of our work day in the archive of our memories." My first delivered meal at Pearl Finch was three side dishes from Texas BBQ, I knew something was amiss about the experience almost immediately. Ironically, I developed an aversion to their food because I felt so disoriented in the new setting, participating in this strange new ritual of ordering and eating at my desk. The food system existed at Pearl Finch on weekends, long before I began working in October. Organizing the experience into a system contingent on a tripartite structure of anomaly makes it somewhat more digestible. I hope this paper sufficiently defined the elements of dislocation, described some observations of their manifestation and established this model as a vehicle for future consideration of delivered food in professional offices during weekend shifts. My personal reason for writing this project entailed some element of legitimizing the work that financially supports my academic endeavors. Monetary compensation motivates me to endure the physically, spiritually, and psychologically draining task of sitting in front of a computer for twelve or fourteen hours without a break. But it was reconstructing the most intimate aspect of the job - eating - into a scholarly context that breathed a new kind of life into my work at Pearl Finch. Each weekend, I had a renewed enthusiasm for juggling food, supervisors, plastic silverware, bankers, napkins, revised documents, and beverages. The line between the social, professional and academic spheres formally blurred for a few months as I researched this project. I know that my questions stirred others at Pearl Finch to consider their role in the food system. Derrick, Ginny's boyfriend who also works at Pearl Finch, told me since he's answered my survey he has noticed a change in his behavior. When he eats his food with Ginny, it "feels more like a meal." NB: What is the most enjoyable aspect of eating at Pearl Finch for your native informant? Sharing Fortune cookie wisdom after all the food has been cleared from my desk: DON'T TROUBLE TROUBLE TILL TROUBLE TROUBLES YOU. -------------------- Bibliography Beardsworth, Alan and Teresa Keil. Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. London: Routledge, 1997. Bell, David and Gill Valentine. Consuming Geographies: We are Where We Eat. London: Routledge, 1997. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 1966. London: Routledge, 1991. - and Jonathan Gross. "Food and Culture: Measuring the Intricacy of Rule Systems" in Social Science Information 20.1 (1981): 1-35. Hiemstra, Stephen J. and Woo Gon Kim, "Factors Affecting Expenditures For Food Away From Home In Commercial Establishments By Type Of Eating Place And Meal Occasion" in Hospitality Research Journal 17.3 (1994): 15-31. Tuchman, Gaye and Harry Gene Levine. "New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern" in The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods, ed. Barbara and James Shortridge. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. -, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. New York: The Free Press, MacMillan, 1985. ------------------------------------------------------- "keep not standing fixed and rooted briskly venture briskly roam" - Goethe -------------------------------------------------------