Dramaturgy, social stratification, and bureaucracies &

organizations in the Chicago-Midway Airport

Beth Kirvida

Teaching Assistant Mike Gibbons

April 17, 1998

For my first official field research project, I chose the Chicago-Midway airport as my environment. I decided that the best way to do my study would be in the form of nonparticipant observation, considering how an airport, no matter how big or small, is an ideal place for me to observe others but not let them know I’m observing them. An airport is a great place to go to find diversity in subjects and situations. With the wide variety of changes happening there every day, it’s almost impossible for the researcher to become overly-familiar with the environment or to be able to predict which sociological concepts will be illustrated each day, not to mention when, where, and/or how they would be displayed.

These features, as well as the convenience of studying the airport, were what drew me to it. On my way back to Notre Dame after Spring break, I had a lengthy layover at Chicago-Midway, so I wandered around the terminal and surrounding areas, sitting down at intervals to record my notes. This began at about 11:00 on a Sunday morning, and you can imagine the details that separated this day in the airport from, for instance, 4:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in early August. I had a feeling that I would find humanity in all its brilliance (or lack thereof) in an airport. Also, I wanted to see if the sociological theories I had learned about in theory, in class, would indeed prove to be correct in practice, in an airport. Before conducting my study, I had various fascinating sociological concepts dwelling in the front of my brain. Culture shock, deviance, ethnocentrism, folkways, mores, norms, gender roles, subculture, and symbols- I expected to see all of these ideas expressed in various ways at the airport. While it’s true that I saw numerous examples of these concepts, I actually noticed more of some others which are more broad in scope and rich in components. I viewed the airport as a theater of dramaturgy, a model of social stratification, and a world of organizations and bureaucracy. These are the main topics which I will focus on later in my paper, but first I will give you a broad idea of what happened during my stay at the airport.

The physical environment at the airport is full of contrasts. It contains various materials, both man-made and nature-made, including concrete, wood, plaster, tile, and plastic. The dominant colors and patterns of the outer boundaries including the floor, walls, and ceiling are neutral, with the intention of not being too visually daring or offensive, and also of being cost-effective; that is, not looking too outdated right after it is designed and decorated. The features such as flight information counters, rows of seating, restroom fixtures, and lighting overhead are also all neutral in colors and style, focused more on function than form. In contrast, the realm of the media, of advertisements, and of appealing to the consumer, was evident in the bright, booming, and colorful displays by those who were out to make money. This trend would definitely be more evident in a larger airport like Chicago-O’Hare or London, but it is still detectable at the smaller-scale, and perhaps more humble, Chicago-Midway. There were illuminated advertisements, neon signs above restaurants and stores, and employees tidying up their establishments to make them more presentable and to catch the consumer’s eye. This visual amusement park gave me the impression that America is a very commercial culture. The prices of products in the airport are higher than those at a regular town vendor, but the customers are still willing to pay the steep prices; part of the contract the consumer at the airport agrees to is paying for the location, convenience, and marketing procedures enacted to sell products. Other than these items, there are several other important objects in the airport environment that exist either out of necessity or simply for style. Among those with direct purposes are expansive windows allowing people to see arriving and departing planes, taxis, and buses. Also, pay phones, information desks, monitors listing flight information, trashcans, and digital clocks hanging above are things that every traveler needs. Those items intended to ‘warm the place up a bit’ include some multihued wall murals; a number of artistic, handmade, colorful benches; and an assortment of large trees in pots, strategically placed throughout the areas to make the grounds seem more hospitable and less industrial.

The people come off their flights with heterogeneous expressions and demeanors. While one traveler crosses the threshold of the terminal at a snail’s pace, another anxiously breezes right past, glancing at his watch and jaunting down to the baggage claim. There is a flow inside the airport similar to that on the highways outside. The stream is constant, at the ticket counters, cafés, restaurants- almost everywhere possible. Some individuals keep to themselves, while others crave to interact. For example, children ask their parents questions, while their parents in turn keep their children busy with stories, songs, or snacks. Employees tend to keep to themselves unless a customer asks them something. Often, members of the same power, prestige, and income groups interact with each other. I noticed this among pilots, restaurant cooks, and bus drivers. People leave the airport quietly or noisily, quickly or slowly, excitedly or begrudgingly, with others or alone.

So many objects, so many people, and so many sociological concepts to observe in this environment, but only a certain amount of space in which I am allowed to tell about it. Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, I will limit myself to the main themes of dramaturgy, social stratification, and organizations and bureaucracy, explaining within these contexts why some things did or did not exist.

I begin with dramaturgy. In our textbook Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, Newman defines dramaturgy as "the study of social interaction as theater" (166). In 1959, the sociologist Goffman described certain aspects of the performance of everyday life that contribute to a desired goal. These include characters playing roles; costumes, props, scripts, front and back stage, and of course, the audience.

The two main roles in the airport are the employee role and the traveler, or customer, role. Both are roles, so the people in each group are all actors in a way. However, because the employees take an active position in serving the customers, it is easy to see how we can categorize the employees as the characters and the travelers as the audience.

If we quickly think of the travelers as characters too, though, we can imagine the qualities they would want to portray to the outside world; namely, that they are strong, attractive, capable, and important for being in the airport in the first place. While some of them clearly want others to see them as the protagonists, others would rather blend in and function more like ensemble members, or ‘extras.’

On the other hand, employees hope to be seen as polite, calm, and courteous, patient, knowledgeable, helpful, and even-tempered. The general audience is composed of customers, passengers, and travelers, people in more ‘passive’ roles. The characters on stage vary greatly, from flight attendants, pilots, taxi drivers, information guides, and security guards to store clerks, cooks, shoe shiners, and janitors, and many more. These are the people in active, ‘caregiver’ roles.

In order to give a successful, believable performance, everyone must be in costumes. I first recognized the clothing of the travelers; that is, the audience’s attire. Many of the adults were dressed in darker, monochromatic colors; often conservative yet fashionable; many blending in with their peers, I figured, in order to look sophisticated and put-together. In striking contrast, though, were the children in the airport. They were wearing vivid hues and a rainbow of patterns, I believe, in order to be easily spotted by their parents. As for the costumes of the characters (the employees), I saw a great variety of uniforms, from that of the baggage handler and the housekeeper/janitor to the pilot and the restaurant server. The colors of these workers were also rather neutral and soothing to the eye: black, white, grey, navy, maroon, and blue. Certain articles added to the look and meaning of the costumes, including blazers, name pins, aprons, and hats.

Also important are props. Props that the employees carried were usually necessary objects such as suitcases, keys, cooking utensils, trays, walkie-talkie-like devices, and pagers. Employees also used fixed objects such as cash registers, computers, and microphones. And many were in charge of taking care of their props, and stayed with them throughout the day. This included food and magazine stands, carts carrying cleaning supplies, golf cart-like transportation vehicles, and shoe-shine stands. The ‘audience members’ also brought props like cell phones, briefcases, books, and food with them to keep occupied in free times and spare moments. One important thing I would like to note here is that the employees’ props often served the function of preventing deviance and preserving norms. In the case of the metal detector gates that everyone must walk through, it is clear that these props are being used to help eliminate weapons that could cause crimes in the main terminals or, worse, onboard the planes. Moreover, the police with their c.b.s are aiming to retain order within the airport and to report suspicious persons to their comrades stationed throughout the building. When travelers see these intimidating props, or know before getting to the airport that these people and devices are there, they are likely to be dissuaded from attempting to violate our system of norms or break our laws.

Next comes the meaningful subject of the script. The script is the communication that goes on during the performance. I found the script here to be fairly interactive. The employees at the ticket counters have a certain script they must go through with each customer; asking where their destination is, how many pieces of luggage they will be taking, asking for a photo i.d. and asking if they have been away from their luggage so that a stranger could slip something illegal into their bags. Hungry diners order their meals while restaurant servers ask how they’d like something cooked, or if they’d like a side dish or a beverage. These are two forms of the formal script that the employees are accustomed to reciting and the customers are accustomed to hearing.

One can imagine, however, the scripts inside the airplanes. Both pilots and flight attendants have formal, relatively pre-determined scripts that they narrate to the audience, the travelers, by means of a microphone. This is what occurs on the front stage: safety instructions or announcements about the weather or estimated time of arrival. What happens back stage, though- in the cockpit or attendants’ quarters, when the microphone is off, is another story. The pilots may tell dirty jokes to one another or the flight attendants might complain about working conditions or a crabby traveler, assuming that no passengers are in the vicinity to overhear their conversations. Yet if the microphone is accidentally turned on, or if a passenger goes to the front of the plane to ask a question and hears what goes on ‘back stage,’ the performance could be ruined. This result is called ‘impression mismanagement’ and causes great embarrassment in the actors. Everyone in the world participates in impression management, but for many involved in working with the airports, successful impression management is crucial to keeping their jobs and satisfying the customers. Pilots and flight attendants are required to project a certain professional identity, so when the audience sees these professionals ‘falling out of character’ backstage, the result is often a spoiled identity. Thus you can see the importance of impression management and the maintenance of the ‘curtain’ in distinguishing the line between front and back stage.

Returning to the idea of communication, I found language very significant in the social interactions at the airport. There was a diverse tapestry of jargon and lingo that seems to be rather typical of public airports these days. I heard distinct accents and dialects, but not as much as I’m sure I would have heard at a place like the J.F.Kennedy airport in New York. Businesspeople spoke with their own vocabulary and expressions and restaurant workers talked about their products to one another and to their customers in certain ways. I assume that maintenance workers use technical terms to talk about parts on the airplanes; airport security uses abbreviations and code words and phrases to keep certain things secret; and traveling parents talk to their children in simple language to keep their attention. All of these modes of communication seem to reinforce in-group and out-group relationships.

In-group and out-group relationships are also major factors in social stratification. Although we Americans pride ourselves on our class system which we often believe allows for equal opportunities and encourages perseverance and individual gratification, it is clear in most social situations that our class system causes more divisions than unity. Groups and classes, "haves" and "have-nots," and leaders and followers abound in our society. No matter how much we deny it, the fact is that there is a tremendously unequal distribution of resources and power among not only Americans, but the entire world population. And studies show that the gaps continue to widen. People in the upper class often see those in the underclass or lower class as ‘stigmatized,’ and they may try to avoid interacting with them. These ‘mixed contacts,’ they fear, would be uncomfortable. I’ll give you some examples of these concepts and phenomena and explain what I believe lies behind them, and what led me to obtain a clearer picture of social stratification as it really is.

Beginning with the more general theme of groups and classes, while I was eating lunch in a café that Sunday in the airport, I observed something that a lot of people wouldn’t even imagine. I watched a well-dressed, attractive woman pay for her food at the cash register, go to a table in the bar area to put her food down, and then go back to the cooler near the bar to grab a carton of milk and go to sit down. I was appalled at this behavior, but I wasn’t sure if what I thought had happened had actually happened. So I didn’t say anything about it to the employees. I mulled this over in my head, thinking: "While some customers make sure they bring everything to the person at the register, being almost overly honest about their meals, being sure not to cheat the restaurant out of any money; this woman must not see the need to spend ninety-five cents on a mini carton of milk." Yes, everything in this café and in the rest of the airport is very overpriced, but that gives this woman no right to be justified in stealing a carton of milk. And, because this woman looks prestigious, like someone in the upper class, she can get away with things that others ‘below’ her cannot. This situation reminds me a bit of an experiment that my eighth grade geography teacher did with our class. We took a pop quiz one day, and the next day he had us correct our own quizzes. So we did so, and the following day, he told us about the experiment he had done. He had photocopied our quizzes right after we had taken them, and then photocopied them again right after we had corrected them. He noted the differences between the two, and made some overhead projections of a few of the quizzes to show us what he had found. It was very surprising at the time, but many of the students had changed their answers while correcting them in order to get a higher score. This mainly happened among the ones who were ‘good, A students.’ It proved to us that those who are in upper positions will often do whatever they can to stay there. Like the milk carton woman, who didn’t want to go through the trouble of paying another dollar; she felt ‘above’ that. Later I saw a pilot come in for lunch, asking the person at the cash register if he (the pilot) was entitled to a discount for his [high] position. The answer was no. This shows us how those in the upper class or those with prestigious jobs may feel like they are better than others. We often think that they are more important than other people, but we forget that those in the lower classes who perform ‘menial’ tasks are extremely important as well. What would we do if no one served food at the restaurants or emptied the garbage cans or loaded the baggage onto the planes? These people may not get much respect or much pay for their jobs, but they are very important.

I noticed the power discrepancies at the airport as well. The drivers of those golf cart-like transport vehicles have power and they know it. Some use their power wisely and modestly, while others do whatever they can to flaunt it. They use their horn or flashing light, they drive fast, they ask people in their way to move, they wear official-looking blazers, and they act like tour guides to their passengers. They truly enjoy being in control of this resource, and they ‘live it up.’

Some groups of people obtain power from their occupations; others are given more power and are granted different roles as a result of their chromosomal composition and the way society views it. Since the beginning of time, women and men have been treated differently. Though we are entering the 21^st century, we haven’t come too far in our efforts to eliminate gender stratification and discrimination. In our class lecture, Professor Myers stated that our society constructs gender roles according to biological sex. We consider certain attitudes and activities "feminine" and others "masculine," and we organize our early socialization agents to reinforce these attitudes and activities, creating distinct roles for women and guiding girls into them, and distinct roles for men and guiding boys into them. At the airport, I saw the influence that these roles have. For the most part, men were recognized for their achievements, in the form of material success, and women were noticed for their outward beauty. Women eyed the older, distinguished-acting pilots and businessmen, while men focused on young, thin, alluring women. Among married couples, most husbands took the role of leader and money-maker; wives assumed the role of the follower and the child-nurturer. Fathers would grab the luggage and take the keys to the rental car; mothers would wipe the child’s mouth and hands and clean up the table after eating lunch. The power roles were very clear in each case I observed.

In virtually any social environment, there will be the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ While many of both groups are out in the open in the airport, others of them are harder to find. Among those in the higher echelons that are hidden are the corporate C.E.O.s of some airport administration, those employees making the big-time decisions and the big-time dollars. The wealthiest travelers are the ones brought to the airport and picked up in a limousine, and sitting in the first-class section of their flights. They are isolated from us quite often, but we know that they are there.

On the other end of the spectrum are the poorer folk, also hidden from the rest of us, sometimes by choice, but other times without their control. Poorer employees at the airport may be the parking lot attendants working the third shift or the clean-up crews sanitizing the restrooms in the early mornings when the place isn’t as populated. Finally, the poor ‘customer’ may not be a paying customer, but would be a traveler, except one of a different sort. This person could live a nomadic lifestyle, starting at the lower levels, by the bus pick-up points, looking through the trashcans for scraps of food that others may have carelessly thrown away. You may not want to see this person- it may make you feel uncomfortable or ashamed of your own relative affluence. But you know that he and others like him are there.

And then there are the members of the ‘middle class.’ They are the ‘common’ employees and the ‘common’ travelers, just using the airport as a means to earn money or the means to get where they need to go. They are the most visible and are often considered the most ordinary. However, they too, along with the other groups of people, must interact with members of different classes. Mixed contacts are perhaps most uncomfortable when people of opposite socioeconomic classes are forced to mingle. I noticed this in one of the restrooms in the airport. A janitor was washing her hands next to an upper class business woman, and I could feel the tension in the air.

Another thing I noticed was the presence of leaders and followers at the Midway airport. This occurred between family members: young children following their adult parents, old-aged parents following their adult children, wives following their husbands and husbands following their wives. It also occurred among the employees. People in higher positions often moved quickly and always looked like they were in a rush to get somewhere, while those in lower positions often took their time, spending longer on their jobs than necessary. I learned in class that this often happens in the workplace, especially among factory workers. When people are given a certain job to do, they will often take the entire day to complete it, simply to pass the time, when they know that they could do many additional jobs if they would just do the first one more quickly. By going at a quicker pace and getting a lot accomplished, however, employees are subject to discrimination. People often avoid going faster than they need to, because doing more work will only give them the same amount of money. Other employees become upset with those who ‘ruin the curve’ and make it look like everyone should be able to produce that much in that amount of time. They call these ‘curve breakers’ ‘rate busters’ and punish them in very overt or more subtle ways.

Rate busting is usually a term that is applied in the context of organizations or bureaucracies, but just as a factory is an organization, so is an airport, so it can occur there, too. An airport is actually a grand collection of organizations. An organization is a network of statuses created for a specific purpose, with a hierarchical division of labor. Extending this idea further, we have a bureaucracy, which is a large secondary group and a model of how an organization should be run. Efficiency is the main characteristic, the main goal, of a bureaucracy. Tackling complex tasks, a bureaucracy has certain features that may result in dehumanizing both those who it serves and those who work for it. This can be true of an organization as well. I recognized several characteristics of an organization during my observation period. An organization begins with a purpose, then it identifies tasks, delegates authority, constructs a system of hierarchy, decides the name and location of the group, develops membership, and deals with lost members. Not only is the airport model an organization, but everything in it is one as well. Restaurant chains and their employees are organizations, bus companies and their drivers that commute to the airport are employees, and airport law enforcement is an organization. These are just a few examples. Organizations like these are very useful in making the airport system run smoothly and pleasing the customers.

In order to make everything work even more smoothly, bureaucracies have developed. Components of a bureaucracy include a hierarchy; a division of labor; impersonality; rules and regulations; technical competence; and formal, written communication. Society is becoming more irritated with bureaucracies lately, feeling that in order to do anything, one must cut through gobs of red tape, fill out piles of paperwork, and so forth. The paradox of bureaucracies is that, in their effort to be efficient, they actually become less efficient. If someone decides to fly to her destination rather than drive, she soon learns of all the steps she must take in order to do so. The more complicated traveling routes require the most planning. Walking, biking, driving oneself, taking the bus, taking the train, and taking the plane are each more complicated alternatives than the one before them because they require the most planning and involve more people. To fly, a person must arrange a trip with a traveling agent, buy a ticket for a specific day and a specific time, go to the airport at least an hour before the flight is scheduled to leave, wait in line and then check in at the flight counter, unload luggage and put identification labels on bags, go through security, then go to the correct terminal and gate, kiss family members or friends good-bye, and board the plane. The whole day of traveling can be very exhausting. Many of the processes that travelers go through are mere rituals that seem like wastes of time. Wastes of time or not, they are always done to ensure smooth operation and predictable results.

Our modern world is very dependent on the media, and almost every country on the planet can be linked to another country. Organizations are spreading across land and water and companies are being constructed in foreign lands, mainly for economic and imperialistic reasons. This trend is called ‘globalization’ and is very prevalent at the airport. We see ideas, products, and people from far-away continents and think nothing of it. Now is the time when we fly in Boeing planes made in the U.S.; we wear Gap clothes that look American but are made in Taiwan or Hong Kong; we eat Pizza Hut pizza, a capitalized version of an idea created in ancient Italy; we drink out of Starbucks cups that were assembled in Mexico; and we reset our Anne Klein Swiss watches to the local time of our destinations. At one time, the languages we learn, the concepts we admire, and the materials for the products we need, all originated in far-off places. Currently, as a result of time and technology, they reach us when we want them to, and when we can afford to acquire them. Organizations and bureaucracies have the power of improving one group’s standard of life while taking advantage of another group’s inexpensive land, resources, and labor. They allow us to do things we’ve never done before, but when thought of with a humanistic approach, we realize that they are rather frightful monsters that we are allowing to take control of us.

All of these concepts- dramaturgy, social stratification, and bureaucracies & organizations- I saw manifested at the Chicago-Midway airport one Sunday afternoon. Some of them made me realize how proud I am of the intelligence of our society, and of how far we’ve come. Others, however, forced me to accept the fact that we have so many short-comings; we still have so much left to learn.