Cafe & Bar Society

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Bar Society – TCR

I have not always or only worked in cafes. As Aksel Tjora and I construct a proposal for a companion volume to our Café Society, to be entitled Bar Society, it is only appropriate that I come clean and acknowledge that at a certain time of day I can be seen escorting my laptop … well, to what? To a bar certainly, this being a fairly transhistorical and transcultural term for a ‘public drinking space’, but can I be more specific?…    Read more

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Talking about coffee shops on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed

Read full the programme information and listen to the podcast…

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grand cafe

grand cafe

Oslo’s Cafe Scene

Oslo’s cafe scene is well covered in Café Society, which I co-edited recently with Aksel Tjora, so I will not trespass on ground covered elsewhere. Instead, this is a personal piece, garnered from a working trip to see Dag Album and colleagues in November of 2013…

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Vienna’s Cafe Central

There are cafes outside the normal run. They make a mark and become cultural signifiers. I have lucky enough to sample a few. Café Dorian in Venice I might return to; Oslo’s Grand Café, visited in November 2013, is another. But this blog is committed to another historic space, Vienna’s Café Central

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C Wright Mills, the Power Elite and Cafe Society

The phrase ‘café society’, the title of a book in press, has for me always pointed to a form of bounded sociability. It is a classic  example of what Oldenburg calls a ‘third place’. Revisiting C Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, however, I discovered an alternative and quite different meaning…

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Café Society and Sociability: A Shared Project – 3

Some papers have long periods of gestation as other projects sidle by. This belated new post yields more background material. It outlines two typologies: of (a) the material and (b) the social spaces of contemporary cafes in London and elsewhere. These set parameters for the ongoing discussion of virtual as well as actual relations. They will see the light of day shortly in my contribution to Café Society, co-edited with fellow café addict Aksel Tjora and due to be published by the New York office of Palgrave Macmillan…

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Café Society and Sociability: A Shared Project – 2

Already I have had feedback – including the tweeting of a link to a paper I had not been aware of – for which many thanks. There’s an issue of authorship here. It was never my intention to profit quietly from the suggestions, guidance or insights of colleagues. Multi-authorship maybe, or a novel form of collective action: more feedback please – let’s innovate.)…

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Café Society and Sociability: A Shared Project – 1

As the manuscript for our edited book on Café Society was dispatched to the publisher, the American branch of Palgrave Macmillan, I took the decision to write a paper arising out of four decades of personal café usage. The purpose would be twofold: (a) to reflect on the parameters of this varied and varying usage, as a kind of exercise in auto-ethnography; and (b) to draw on sociology’s traditions of symbolic interactionist and ethnomethodological research to throw further light on those rules and rituals of sociability that café behaviour accomplishes and reproduces (with Goffman and Garfinkel serving as my primary mentors)…

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Screen Shot 2013-04-10 at 20.46.57Kaldi’s and New Orleans

If I were to be pushed into declaring a stand-out café, a one-off port-of-call, it would not be difficult to respond. Kaldi’s at 941 Decatur Street in New Orleans would be my choice. Sadly it is no more…

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Graham ScamblerA few preliminary paragraphs

I have for over 40 years written in cafes. In the early 1970s I scribbled in longhand, always having a notebook and biro about me somewhere. More recently, of course, I have carried a lightweight laptop around, several books chapters or papers on the go simultaneously….

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