Dacin Et Al - FORMAL DINING AT CAMBRIDGE COLLEGES: LINKING RITUAL PERFORMANCE AND INSTITUTIONAL MAINTENANCE

FORMAL DINING AT CAMBRIDGE COLLEGES:LINKING RITUAL PERFORMANCE AND

INSTITUTIONAL MAINTENANCE

M. TINA DACINQueen’s University

KAMAL MUNIRPAUL TRACEY

University of Cambridge

We examine the role of rituals in institutional maintenance. Through an in-depth,qualitative study of formal dining at the University of Cambridge, we explore how theperformance of these rituals contributes to the maintenance of the British class system.We find that rituals are important for institutional maintenance because they have apowerful bearing on participants beyond the confines of the rituals themselves. Ouranalysis also suggests that institutions are refracted through context and individualexperience at a micro level, and indicates a more fragmented and less strategicconception of institutional maintenance than is portrayed in recent work.

Institutional theorists have typically focused onthe diffusion and legitimation of field-level institu-tions (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Strang & Meyer,1993).1 More recently, they have examined hownew institutions are created (Maguire, Hardy, &Lawrence, 2004) and established ones altered(Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006). One area in whichinstitutional theory remains relatively silent is thequestion of how institutions are maintained. In-deed, as Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) and Zilber(2009) have pointed out, institutional theoristshave long taken for granted the process by whichmeaning is perpetuated over time.

For institutions to persist, meaning systems mustbe transmitted and norms communicated in plausibleand authentic ways so as to be readily accepted andpracticed (Tolbert, 1988). This communication andtransmission serve to calibrate behavior and maintain

coherence in an institutional order, thereby avoidinginstitutional erosion and drift. The assumption inmost accounts of this process is that institutions areself-reproducing, requiring minimal “agency” (the ca-pacity of individuals to act independently and tomake their own free choices [Greenwood, Oliver,Sahlin, & Suddaby, 2008]). However, “relatively fewinstitutions have such powerful reproductive mech-anisms that no ongoing maintenance is necessary”(Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006: 229), and most requiresustained institutional work to preserve them. Fromthis perspective, institutional maintenance is notsimply a process of replication, but rather one oftranslation, negotiation, and enactment (Barley & Tol-bert, 1997).

In this article, we seek to explore the processthrough which institutions are maintained. To do so,we believe it is necessary to pay attention to the moremicro interactions that organizational life entails, be-cause as Collins (2004) emphasized, it is only at themicro level that the effects of institutions can be “di-rectly” observed. This concern for microdynamicswas present in earlier institutional work but has sincealmost disappeared, with most discussion now fo-cused at a macro level (Barley, 2008).

In particular, we are interested in a crucial yetoverlooked mechanism that reproduces as well asreinforces a given institutional order: organizationalrituals. Although some institutional theorists haveacknowledged the central role that rituals play in thecreation and transmission of meaning (e.g., Friedland& Alford, 1991; Meyer & Scott, 1983), few have con-sidered their institutional effects or how they connect

We thank Royston Greenwood and the three reviewersof AMJ for their insightful comments on a draft of thispaper. We also thank Klaus Weber and Rick Delbridge fortheir help in the early stages of this project as well asparticipants at seminars held at Bocconi, OTREG,Queen’s, and Scancor.

1 We define a field as “a community of organizationsthat partakes of a common meaning system and whoseparticipants interact more frequently and fatefully withone another than with actors outside the field” (Scott,1995: 56). We define institutions as more-or-less taken-for-granted repetitive social behavior that is underpinnedby normative systems and cognitive understandings thatgive meaning to a variety of social practices and sustaina particular type of social order.

� Academy of Management Journal2010, Vol. 53, No. 6, 1393–1418.

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with broader social and cultural processes. We thinkthis is surprising, given the substantial literature inanthropology and sociology on the role of rituals in avariety of settings (e.g., Alexander, 2004; Douglas,1975; Durkheim, 1912/1995; McLaren, 1999; Schech-ner, 1994; Turner, 1967; van Gennep, 1908/1960).

Our specific focus is on how organizational ritualsat a micro level support the maintenance of institu-tions at a macro level. Our study is motivated by threeresearch questions: First, how are institutions main-tained? Second, how do microlevel dynamics con-tribute to institutional maintenance? Finally, what isthe role of rituals in this process?

Drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1984) conception ofclass, the institution whose maintenance we concernourselves with is the British class system. The ritualthat forms the focus of our analysis is college dining(popularly known as “Formal Hall”) at the Universityof Cambridge. Based on interviews with Fellows,2

students, college staff, and alumni as well as partici-pant observations of the ritual itself, our analysis re-veals that college dining plays an important role incultivating a set of skills and behaviors that contrib-ute to the maintenance of the institution of class inthe United Kingdom.

Specifically, we find that Cambridge dining ritualsare performances that legitimate the concept of socialstratification through the repeated enactment of rolesand boundaries. The performance masks any conflictthat may be present under the surface, giving theimpression of a sophisticated social order that partic-ipants want to be associated with. Next, we find thatcollege dining rituals lead to the transformation ofparticipants’ identities and senses of self, and theirperceptions of their images in the eyes of others. Therepeated performance of the rituals affirms these val-ues and influences participants’ perceived place,present and future, in society. Finally, we find thatcollege dining rituals facilitate an actual shift in par-ticipants’ social standing post-Cambridge. In particu-lar, the norms, values, and practices celebrated in theritual are taken away by participants who help repro-duce them in other settings and at other times to gainentry to, and flourish in, an elite professional-mana-gerial class that dominates many aspects of the Brit-ish establishment.

In developing our arguments, we make three con-tributions. First, we highlight the role of organization-al rituals in the maintenance of institutions. In doingso, we show that the capacity of rituals to socializeparticipants is rooted in their performativity, or their

production of the very social order whose values areembodied in the rituals. Crucially, we also show thatrituals have a powerful bearing on the behavior ofparticipants that goes beyond the confines of the rit-uals themselves. From this perspective, rituals arecarriers of cultural material that influences the way inwhich actors experience the social world at differenttimes and in different places. Thus it is the transtem-poral and transspatial nature of the effects of ritualsthat underpin their capacity to maintain institutions.

Second, we show that although agency is indeedrequired to maintain institutions, it is usually exer-cised in local contexts and in micro situations, wherethe link to institutions at a macro level is not imme-diately obvious to individual actors. The implicationis that institutions are situated, interpreted, and rein-forced locally, suggesting a more fragmented and lessstrategic conception of institutional maintenancethan is often portrayed in the literature.

Finally, we contribute to ritual studies in importantways. We study a type of organizational ritual (havingboth secular and sacred dimensions) that has re-ceived comparatively little research attention. In do-ing so, we shed light on the macro consequences ofritual performance and the mechanisms throughwhich organizational rituals become implicated inwider institutional orders. We also highlight the con-tribution of institutional theory’s highly developedvocabulary and set of conceptual tools for ritual stud-ies scholars who may wish to further explore theintersection of culture and institutions.

THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Institutional Maintenance

Our conception of institutions is rooted in thework of the early symbolic interactionists (e.g.,Blumer, 1969; Goffman, 1959; Mead, 1934) as wellas that of recent institutional theorists (e.g., Green-wood et al., 2008). Thus, for us, institutions arecollective social forms that consistently reflect aswell as pattern action but that vary in scope andintensity (Barley, 2008). And they manifest as“more or less taken-for-granted repetitive social be-havior that is underpinned by normative systemsand cognitive understandings that give meaning tosocial exchange” (Greenwood et al., 2008: 4–5).Institutions are therefore malleable yet firm, some-what illusory yet recognizable, and fleeting as wellas permanent. On an everyday basis, they are main-tained through social interaction.

Institutional maintenance—the “supporting, re-pairing, and recreating” of institutions (Lawrence &Suddaby, 2006: 230)—is essential for the coherenceand stability of meaning systems and social structures

2 In capitalizing “Fellow,” “Master,” and some otherterms and titles here, we follow usage in our researchsetting.

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over time. Yet, as noted above, the processes throughwhich institutions are maintained “remains a rela-tively understudied phenomenon” (Lawrence & Sud-daby, 2006: 234). This is not to say that it has beenignored altogether, as early institutional theorists de-veloped a number of particularly salient insights. Forexample, Douglas posited that actors have innate pat-tern-making tendencies and seek to construct “a sta-ble world in which objects have recognizable shapes,are located in depth, and have permanence” (1966:45). For Douglas, then, actors’ intrinsic propensity tobuild shared schematic representations constitutesthe central mechanism through which institutionsare maintained.

In a similar vein, Berger and Luckmann (1966) con-tended that, by continually communicating and in-teracting with others, actors build “typificatoryschemes” for categorization and “sensemaking” pur-poses. They also highlighted the integral role ofpower dynamics in this process. Specifically, Bergerand Luckmann argued that institutions are main-tained when dominant actors monopolize a particu-lar “symbol system” and are able to impose a set ofschemata in a given society (1966). From this per-spective, institutional reproduction is underpinnedby power inequalities and relies on the capacity ofelite actors to exert authority and eliminate rival sym-bolic orders.

“New” institutional theorists have built on theseinsights, emphasizing that institutional reproductionrequires agency and intended action. For example,Zucker (1988) argued that although social systemsmay appear remarkably stable, they are at the sametime fraught with entropy. Indeed, without “contin-uous action to maintain existing order,” institutionswould simply decay into cultural artifacts (Zucker,1988: 26). Developing these ideas further, Lawrenceand Suddaby (2006) noted that there exist very fewinstitutions not requiring some form of ongoing main-tenance. Synthesizing recent empirical work (e.g.,Angus, 1993; Holm, 1995; Leblebici, Salancik, Copay,& King, 1991; Townley, 1997, 2002; Zilber, 2002),they identified several types of institutional work in-volved in the maintenance of institutions; some focuson compliance and are regulative in nature, and oth-ers tap into the symbolic aspects of institutionalmaintenance. In another important contribution, Zil-ber (2009) adopted a multilevel narrative approach toexamine the symbolic aspects of institutional main-tenance and to explore the forms of institutional workinvolved in the portability of stories.

Beyond institutional theory, a number of promi-nent social scientists have developed argumentsabout the reproduction of social orders with the po-tential to shed light on the process of institutionalmaintenance. For example, Durkheim’s (1897/1951)

comparison of suicide rates within Protestant andCatholic communities showed how group cohesioncan have a profound effect on the maintenance ofsocial dynamics. His arguments parallel Weber’s(1904–05/1978) ideas about the differences be-tween societies characterized by “instrumentalrationality” versus “communicative rationality”and Toennies’s (1887/1957) work on gemein-schaft (community) versus gesellschaft (society).

At a more micro level, socialization processes playa key role in the maintenance of social orders. Goff-man’s (1959) ideas about locally produced interactionorders in which the intrinsic need for actors to reaf-firm the “self” in their relations with others governsbehaviors are an important reference point for thisliterature. Similarly, Trice and Beyer (1993) empha-sized that socialization facilitates cultural continuityby allowing actors to internalize social expectationsand to learn what constitutes appropriate and effec-tive behavior in different circumstances and settings.Interestingly, however, culture researchers have alsopointed to potentially negative effects that may beassociated with socialization. Van Maanen andSchein, for example, suggested that socialization canhinder individual and organizational effectiveness“since certain cultural forms may persist long af-ter they have ceased to be of individual value”(1979: 212–213).

Taken together, this body of work sheds significantlight on the way in which social order in general, andsystems of meaning in particular, are maintained. It isinteresting to note, however, that the literature hastended to prioritize either micro- or macrolevel pro-cesses. Building on the insights outlined above, ouraim in this study was to consider how a particularkind of microlevel event—organizational rituals—can influence the maintenance of society-level insti-tutions. We turn now to the rituals literature.

Ritual and Performance

Institutional theorists have occasionally ac-knowledged the central role that rituals play in theconstruction of meaning. For example, Friedlandand Alford argued that the “routines of each insti-tution are connected to rituals which define theorder of the world and one’s position within it”(1991: 250), Meyer and Scott (1983) pointed to theimportance of ritual in determining the rules, be-liefs, and relational networks that constitute thesocial environment, and Suchman (1995) drew at-tention to the legitimating role of rituals. It is nota-ble, however, that the micro processes inherent inrituals are largely glossed over in institutional re-search. Conceptually, this is problematic because itimplies that rituals merely reflect dominant insti-

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tutional orders, a position that is undermined by asubstantial body of work in sociology and anthro-pology showing the political and contested natureof rituals, as well as their capacity to create, alter,and maintain cultural practices (Bell, 1992).

Outside of institutional theory, however, academicinterest in rituals has increased. Much ritual researchhas focused on religious settings and/or rites of pas-sage in “primitive” or preindustrial societies (Geertz,1957; Turner, 1967; van Gennep, 1908/1960). Morerecently, ritologists (students of ritual) have begun toturn their attention to secular events in industrialsocieties. This initiative has precipitated an in-triguing body of work on contemporary rituals ina range of contexts as diverse as music (Anand &Watson, 2004), schooling (McLaren, 1999), organ-izational succession (Gephart, 1998), and evenfamily meals (Douglas, 1975).

Interestingly, the growth of ritual studies happenedat a time when the relevance of many rituals andtraditions in Western societies was being questionedand new ones were emerging (Giddens, 1999). In-deed, ritologists have forcefully challenged the as-sumption that rituals represent historical anachro-nisms, asserting that they continue to play a pivotalrole in contemporary social life (McLaren, 1999).

This increased focus on ritual has not led to anyconsensus on the precise meaning of the term (Snoek,2006). However, Kunda (2006) noted that despite thefragmented nature of the literature, most ritologistssee ritual as a mechanism that connects actors withbroader social and cultural practices. From this per-spective, rituals are “collectively produced, struc-tured, and dramatic occasions that create a ‘frame,’ ashared definition of the situation within which par-ticipants are expected to express and confirm sanc-tioned ways of experiencing social reality” (Kunda,2006: 93).

To understand the process through which ritualstransmit meaning, ritologists have drawn heavily onthe metaphor of performance (e.g., Schechner, 1985;Turner, 1986). A cultural performance “is a socialprocess by which actors, individually or in concert,display for others the meaning of their social situa-tion” (Alexander, 2004: 529). Although rituals may bemore or less dramatic, all are scripted, involve styl-ized behavior, and draw upon established and, occa-sionally, recently invented cultural material. More-over, by providing specific roles, a performanceallows participants to instill a degree of distance be-tween their selves and their actions (Schechner,1985): through participants’ enactment of particularroles, the meaning embodied in the performance isexpressed and experienced more vividly. Rituals alsohave a temporal order and are often performed in aparticular place, drawing additional meaning from

the location in which they take place (Schechner,1994).

Considered as performances, rituals are “episodesof repeated and simplified cultural communication”in which participants (actors and observers) developshared understandings about the plausibility, valid-ity, and authenticity of the performances (Alexander,2004: 527). When participants consider a perfor-mance to be effective (i.e., plausible, valid, and au-thentic), a ritual binds them by intensifying theiremotional connection to one another. The result maybe that participants enter a “liminoid” (Turner, 1986)or transitory space that operates beyond their “nor-mal” selves. It is when they create such spaces forparticipants—where there is a mutual appreciation ofintention and content—that rituals achieve their ef-fect and affect (Alexander, 2004). In this way, theperformance of rituals allows participants to sharemeaning across multiple iterations of similar events.

It is important to note, however, that the transmis-sion of meaning via ritual performance is not straight-forward. Rituals offer opportunities for powerful ac-tors to legitimate their authority through symbolicmeans, to promote ideological positions, and to ma-nipulate social relations within particular communi-ties (Kertzer, 1988). Van Maanen and Kunda went sofar as to suggest that rituals constitute “mechanismsthrough which certain organizational members influ-ence how other members are to think and feel” (1989:49). As such, rituals are often sites of contestation andresistance. However, as Kunda (2006) pointed out,rituals are not always effective; some rituals haveminimal transformative power and fail to convey anysemblance of meaning to participants (Goody, 1977).

The subjective nature of ritual experience rein-forces the complexity inherent in ritual analysis.Turner (1967) used the term “multivocality” to con-vey the ambiguity of ritual symbolism; each symbolhas a “fan” or “spectrum” of referents, which meansthat it is open to a range of possible interpretations ina given social drama. As a consequence, rituals areliable to have “multiple, complex, ambiguous andchanging layers of meaning that are only partly artic-ulated, understood, or acknowledged by partici-pants” (Kunda, 2006: 94) in a given performance. Theupshot is that rituals involve both action and enact-ment; they are sites of material and symbolic media-tion through which meaning is negotiated and con-structed rather than simply reflected (McLaren,1999).

But how do the systems of meaning constructedthrough ritual performance affect societal institu-tions? We suggest that rituals constitute an importantmechanism through which institutions are main-tained. As noted, institutional theorists have tendedto overlook the concept of institutional maintenance


in general and the microdynamics of ritual interac-tions in particular. Ritologists have examined theways in which rituals influence and are influenced bysocietal processes, yet they have focused mainly onreligious ceremonies and/or rites of passage in prelit-erate cultures; the relationship between rituals andbroader social patterns remains poorly understood inthe context of secular events located in industrialsocieties. In our study, we sought to examine thisrelationship by considering how formal dining at thecolleges of the University of Cambridge supports theBritish class system. In doing so, our aim was toexplore how cultural codes enacted at a micro levelcan contribute to the reproduction of macrolevel in-stitutions. We now turn to a description of our dataand empirical context.

RESEARCH CONTEXT

The British Class System and the Universityof Cambridge

Traditionally, the British as a nation have beenhighly “class-conscious.” This consciousness ofone’s “station” in society is powerfully and widelydepicted in their nonacademic literature, for exam-ple in novels by Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster. Inthe media, too, elitism and class are long-runningthemes that attract much attention. Today, a classsystem not only exists in Britain, but is also “one ofthe most important aspects of modern British his-tory no less than of modern British life” (Canna-dine, 1998: 16). Yet given that Britain, like all de-veloped countries, has undergone huge societaland political upheavals and was the birthplace ofthe Industrial Revolution, why does class appear tomanifest itself more visibly here than elsewhere inEurope and in North America?

Part of the reason this question is so difficult toanswer is that class is more than simply one’s posi-tion in the system of production (Bourdieu, 1984;Chan & Goldthorpe, 2007; Weininger, 2005). Manyconsider other, noneconomic, factors to determineentry into the upper strata of a given class system.These factors, which include ancestry, title, accent,education, mode of dress, patterns of recreation, typeof housing, and style of life, help actors catego-rize others as members of particular classes(Bourdieu, 1984). In turn, this categorization in-fluences how these individuals are themselvesevaluated.

The relative stability of the British class system is atleast partially due to continued deference for thosepossessing particular forms of attributes such as thosementioned above. The concept of a social peckingorder, in which the monarch sits at the very top, is

widely accepted in Britain. Thus, although Britain’ssocial hierarchy may represent an unequal system, itdoes not appear to require the use of force for itscontinued existence. People seem to learn their placein society in a subtle manner and with comparativelylittle conflict.

Many different types of institutions collectivelysupport a class system, including the family, the state,the media, the professions, the monarchy, the mili-tary, the church, and the judiciary (Marshall, Rose,Newby, & Vogler, 1988). One type of institution thathas received considerable attention as a mechanismthrough which class dynamics are transmitted fromone generation to the next are educational institu-tions (Freire, 1973; Lareau, 1987; McLaren, 1999).Much of this work, however, has focused on schoolsrather than universities per se.

Our focus in this study is another type of edu-cational institution—the university—which alsoplays an important role in the class system in the U.K.and elsewhere (Archer, Hutchings, & Ross, 2003). Inthe British context, two universities, Cambridge andOxford, are especially closely associated with socialclass. These universities are the oldest in the English-speaking world and remain two of the most presti-gious. They share many of the same traditions andrituals, with the term “Oxbridge” commonly used torefer to both. Indeed, in the media and in popularconception, the two are often treated as a single entity(e.g., Bolton, 2009; Cadwalladr, 2008; Deslandes,2005).3

Cambridge and Oxford have traditionally beenoverwhelmingly dominated by white, male studentsfrom privileged social backgrounds, and until rela-tively recently, explicitly favored these groups intheir selection processes (Deslandes, 2005; Soares,1999). However, selection practices have changedmarkedly in recent decades. Indeed, more than 50percent of current Cambridge students are women,more than 50 percent are state school educated, and“nonwhite” students made up 15 percent of the 2008intake (Bolton, 2009).

Despite these very significant changes in the back-grounds of students, Cambridge and Oxford remainsynonymous with elitism in Britain. One manifesta-tion of this elitism is the extent to which alumni ofthe two universities continue to dominate prestigiousjobs. For example, the Sutton Trust found that Cam-bridge and Oxford graduates account for 81 percent of

3 Our study is focused on Cambridge. However, we use“Oxbridge” where (1) our informants invoked it and (2)our analysis refers to the widely perceived division be-tween students and graduates of Cambridge and Oxfordand those of other universities.


the British judiciary, 82 percent of barristers, 45 per-cent of “leading” journalists, and 34 percent of seniorpoliticians (Cadwalladr, 2008). And in February2009, the government minister for higher education“bemoaned the fact that Oxbridge graduates are 15times more likely to get jobs with City law firms thanthose from other universities” (Sugden, 2009).

Thus, although the social backgrounds of the stu-dent body have changed quite radically over the past50 years, the basic function of the University of Cam-bridge—to prepare students for a life in the upperechelons of British society—essentially remains thesame. One explanation is that Cambridge (along withOxford) attracts the most able students and faculty,and so it is unremarkable that their graduates shouldbe more successful than those of other British univer-sities. An alternative explanation, one that we findmore convincing, is that they provide an environ-ment in which students learn the norms, values, andbehaviors that are legitimate and appropriate in theupper stratum of British society, which facilitatestheir entry to it. In other words, Cambridge plays acentral role in the production of a professional-man-agerial class that dominates the senior positions incommerce, the professions, the media, and the arts inBritain. Support for our position can be found in thesociological literature, which has suggested that theclass system owes its longevity to a widely enacted,grassroots-level system of localized, microlevel cere-monies and rituals in a range of settings (Cannadine,1998). The processes through which these microlevelrituals support the broader institution of class are,however, far from clear. To explore this issue, westudy a particular ritual at the University of Cam-bridge: college dining. In the following section, weexplain why we chose to study this ritual and de-scribe the nature of the ritual itself.

Dining Rituals at Cambridge

For two hours the silver dishes came, announced bythe swish of the doors in the Screens as the waitersscurried to and fro, bowed down by the weight ofthe food and their sense of occasion. . . . The clatterof knives and forks, the clink of glasses, the rustle ofnapkins and the shuffling feet of the College ser-vants dimmed the present. Outside the Hall thewinter wind swept through the streets of Cambridge.Inside all was warmth and conviviality.

Sharpe (1974: 1)

The research site we chose for this study is theUniversity of Cambridge (henceforth, “Cam-bridge”). Founded in 1209, Cambridge comprises31 colleges and over 150 departments, faculties,schools, and other institutions. A college is where

students live, eat, and socialize. It is also the placewhere students receive small group-teaching ses-sions known as “supervisions.” Each college is anindependent institution with its own property andincome and brings together staff and students frommany different disciplines. The colleges appointtheir own staff and are responsible for selectingstudents, in accordance with university regula-tions. The teaching of students is shared betweenthe colleges and university departments. Degreesare awarded by the university.

Cambridge was an excellent research site for sev-eral reasons. Being one of the world’s oldest and mosttraditional universities, it provides an ideal setting inwhich to study organizational rituals and their rela-tionship to wider social dynamics. Students come toCambridge not only for its excellence but alsobecause of its illustrious legacy. Moreover, Cam-bridge constitutes a very significant breedingground for the British elite. As noted above, Cam-bridge graduates are disproportionately repre-sented in senior positions in the U.K. establish-ment, and their socialization during theiruniversity days therefore takes on a specialsignificance.

Once students are admitted to Cambridge, they par-ticipate in numerous rituals. For example, joiningone’s college tends to be a highly ceremonial affair,involving elaborate costumes, lavish dinners, andceremonies in the Chapel. Graduation is a similarlyelaborate ceremony, conducted almost entirely inLatin and again involving medieval customs, reli-gious symbolism, and meticulous attention to attireand conduct.

A set of rituals that students experience daily atCambridge revolves around dining. Although the var-ious dining rituals vary slightly across the 31 colleges,they all involve members eating together, mostly informal attire and gowns. Students typically sit at longrefectory tables for dinner several nights a week. Atthe far end of the hall, usually on a raised platformabove where the students are seated, is the High Ta-ble, where the Master and Fellows of the college sit.Figure 1 shows a typical Cambridge dining hall.

During dinner, a team of servers supervised byeither the Fellow’s Butler or the Hall Manager waitson those sitting at the High Table. The “low tables”also have a dedicated team of serving staff, oftensupervised by a “Manciple” (a steward). Participantsenjoy a multicourse dinner, which can last up to twohours. Dining rituals consume not only substantialmonetary resources but also time and effort on thepart of all college members. The opulence reflected inthese rituals makes them an obvious target for critics(e.g., Walker, 2003).


We now turn to the major actors who participate inthese rituals. First, there is the Master, who is thehead of the college. The Master generally commandsthe respect of the Fellowship as well as the students.He/she presides over the High Table. Fellows areacademics who may or may not be affiliated withdepartments. Their duties include the supervisionand pastoral care of the students. Students are juniormembers of the college. The college serves as a homefor them, allowing them to live, learn, eat, play, andgenerally fraternize with other students from variousdisciplines. Students usually engage in several extra-curricular activities inside the college, ranging fromassociations for sports (in particular, rowing) todrinking (e.g., wine appreciation). Finally, there is thecollege dining staff. During Formal Hall, the diningstaff’s duty is to serve the Fellows and the students aswell as impose order should any student appear to bedeviating from established custom. In contrast to theFellows and students, who are sitting and consum-ing, the staff is mobile and serving. The staff mainlyeats in the “buttery,” a separate cafeteria.

Cambridge thus presents a context in which partic-ular rituals have persisted over centuries, defyingfunctionalist explanations and influencing universitylife in important ways. Intuitively, one would imag-ine that they somehow mediate participants’ experi-ence of Cambridge and offer particular meaning to thevarious identities that are constructed around them.Given the career trajectory of many Cambridge grad-uates and their role in the upper strata of Britishsociety, it also seems plausible that these rituals havea bearing on the class system as a whole. However,the relationship between dining rituals at the microlevel and the institution of social class at the macrolevel is a complex one. It is this relationship thatforms the focus of our study.

METHODS

Data Sources

To answer our research question about how theenactment of microlevel dining rituals at Cam-bridge helps to perpetuate the macrolevel phenom-enon of social class, we selected a grounded, inter-pretive approach. Such an approach allowed us tobuild our understanding of the properly contextu-alized experiences of those involved in the diningritual, rather than imposing a particular frameworkupon them. Moreover, it permitted the voices ofmarginal as well as central actors to be heard. Thisapproach led us to collect different types of quali-tative data from diverse sources.

Archives, popular press, and fiction. To de-velop an understanding of the origins of the Cam-bridge colleges, we collected historical documentsfrom various Cambridge libraries. Articles in thepopular press and books, both nonfictional andfictional, were important sources of backgroundinformation too. Although these data were not ex-tensively used, they helped us to appreciate thecontext in which dining rituals are enacted.

Interviews and observations. We interviewed57 informants who were participating, or had pre-viously participated, in college dining rituals. Theinterviews lasted 60–90 minutes. Because of excel-lent access to the research site, we were able toconduct interviews with all the categories of par-ticipants in these ceremonies. These included Fel-lows of different colleges, students, staff, alumni,and Masters. Table 1 summarizes interviewees’ cat-egories and colleges.

Sometimes interviewees would suggest other peo-ple that they thought we should talk to, rendering ourtheoretical sampling technique both deliberate andemergent. Our interview protocol contained ques-tions about our informants’ roles in college, their ex-periences of college dining rituals, and their interpre-tations of these experiences. These interviews weresupplemented by 29 instances of participant observa-tion. Specifically, we participated in various diningrituals at a number of colleges, noticing the type offood provided, the setting, the ambiance, the physicallayout of the tables, conversations, any policing byFellows or staff, interactions between staff, Fellows,and students, and students’ attitude to the High Tableand to their surroundings. Field notes were writtendown immediately after each event. Throughout thedata collection, we sought to constantly share anddiscuss the interviews and participant observationsthat formed the basis of our data. This sharing processallowed us to continuously hone our interviewingtechniques and develop new directions for inquiry.

FIGURE 1Formal Hall and the High Table


Data Analysis

Our analysis followed established techniquesand procedures for naturalistic inquiry and ground-ed-theory building (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Locke,2001) and consisted of a series of steps. We em-ployed NVivo 2.0, a relatively user-friendly, quali-tative research software that greatly facilitates theanalysis of qualitative data.

In the first step of the analysis, interview tran-scripts, entered as text files in NVivo, were codedon the basis of “in vivo” words. These comprisedphrases, terms, or descriptions offered by partici-

pants, all revolving around the microdynamics ofdining rituals. Such descriptions included, amongseveral others, comments on lighting or other arti-facts that had seemed meaningful to participants,narrations of politically incorrect behavior or ofidiosyncrasies, stories of faux pas at High Table,and expressions of appreciation or disdain for For-mal Hall. These formed our first-order codes. Wethen swapped our coded files and reread each in-terview, coding for more in vivo words. We con-stantly compared coded documents and discussedpossible conceptual patterns. During this step,

TABLE 1Interview and Participant Observation Data

CollegesType of Interviewee

(Number of Interviews)

Type of ParticipantObservation

(Total Number ofObservations)

Clare College Student (1) Attended dinner (1)

Churchill College Fellow (1) Attended dinner (2)

Darwin College Fellow; student (2) Attended dinner (1)

Downing College Fellow; fellow steward; students (5) Attended dinner (2)

Attended meeting of wineappreciation society (2)

Gonville and CaiusCollege

Fellow; student (2) Attended dinner (1)

Girton College Fellow; student (2) Attended dinner (2)

Hughes Hall Student; fellow (2) Attended dinner (2)

King’s College Fellow; staff; student (3); alumnus (1) Attended dinner (2)

Magdalene College Fellow; student (2) Attended dinner (2)

Pembroke College Fellow; student; student (3) Attended dinner (1)

Queens’ College Fellow; student (1) Attended dinner (1)

St Catherine’s College Fellow; staff (2) Attended dinner (1)

Sidney Sussex College Fellow; senior tutor; Fellow; staff (4);alumnus (1)

Attended dinner (4)

St John’s College Fellows; students; staff (6); alumnus (1) Attended dinner (1)

Trinity College Students (2); alumnus (1) Attended dinner (1)

Corpus Christie College Fellow; student (2)

Jesus College Fellows; students (4); alumnus (1) Attended dinner (2)

Homerton College Fellow (1)

St Edmund’s College Fellow; Fellow; student; student (4) Attended dinner (1)

Newnham College Student (1)

All colleges above Masters (2)


NVivo facilitated the organization of all the codesthat emerged from the data. In total, we had 397coded passages at the end of this process.

The second step of the analysis involved lookingfor codes across interviews that could be collapsedinto higher-level nodes. For example, comments onlighting or artifacts could be grouped into a nodelabeled “stage-setting.” In this second step, we alwaystried to retain the language used by informants. Thehigher-level, or “tree nodes,” were then refinedthrough triangulation of sources (interviews, partici-pant observations, etc.) to produce a set of first-ordercategories. Examples of first-order categories include“script,” “symbols and space,” and “defiance.”

The third step of our analysis involved looking forlinks among first-order categories so that we couldcollapse these into theoretically distinct clusters, orsecond-order themes. This was a recursive ratherthan a linear process; we moved iteratively betweenour first- order categories and the emerging patternsin our data until adequate conceptual themesemerged (Eisenhardt, 1989). For example, categoriescontaining instances in which students talked aboutreassessing their positions in society or acquiringnew traits were collapsed into a theme labeled “iden-tity.” The second-order themes included “socialdrama,” “roles and boundaries,” “conflict and con-trol,” “identity,” “image,” “demystification of theelite,” “cultural knowledge,” and “social networks.”

The fourth step of the analysis involved organizingthe second-order themes into the overarching dimen-sions that eventually underpinned our theorizing.Three dimensions emerged strongly here. The firsttheme was the issue of performance as a mechanismfor assimilating participants into particular valuesand patterns of behavior; the second dimension em-phasized the individual transformation of the partic-ipants; finally, the third theme emphasized an actualshift in participants’ social positions.

In addition to carrying out these steps, we relied ontwo techniques to help ensure the trustworthiness ofour data. First, having multiple authors allowed us toindependently assess each others’ coding and the as-signment of codes to categories. We discussed codesand categorization until agreement was strong. Wher-ever there was disagreement, categories were modi-fied. Distinguishing between first-order categoriesand second-order themes allowed the development ofa clear theoretical argument.

Second, we carried out “member checks” (Nag,Corley, & Gioia, 2007) with informants to help ensurethat our interpretive scheme made sense to those whoexperienced college dining daily. In this respect, wewere very fortunate to be so close to our research site.

Figure 2 illustrates our final data structure, show-ing the categories and themes from which we devel-oped our findings and the relationships betweenthem. Additional supporting evidence for our find-ings is shown in Table 2 and is keyed to Figure 2. Thistable contains representative first-order data, whichunderpin the second-order themes.

FINDINGS

Before we began our field research, our knowl-edge of rituals at Cambridge was largely based onpopular accounts, anecdotal evidence, and casualconversations with college members. Our impres-sion was that the various rituals enacted at Cam-bridge were relics or hangovers from the past, ex-pensive and extravagant undertakings that servedno other purpose than to keep alive an artificialsense of grandeur among the participants.

However, when we combined the analysis of ourinterview and secondary data with our own observa-tions of dining at Cambridge, a new understandingbegan to take shape, one that no single informantappeared to appreciate in its entirety or that any in-dividual observation captured for us. Specifically, wefound that dining rituals serve as powerful devicesfor socializing new generations of actors who, whenthey leave Cambridge, go on to reproduce variousaspects of the British class system. Institutional main-tenance involves the following process:

First and foremost, it rests on the repeated enact-ment of an elaborate performance. This performancecreates a kind of social drama that seduces collegemembers into conforming to the norms and values ofthe ritual. The performance also demarcates roles andboundaries, which legitimates the idea that individ-uals belong to different classes and controls behaviorwhile masking conflict and undermining resistance.Next, the ritual transforms the individual identities ofparticipants and changes their image in the eyes ofothers, which in turn alters their expectations aboutwhat they can achieve and their perceptions of theirplace in the social order. Finally, the ritual supportsparticipants’ entry into an elite professional-manage-rial class by demystifying the upper echelons of theclass system, providing cultural knowledge abouthow to behave and interact with members of theestablishment, and enabling access to one of the mostpowerful social networks in the U.K., one that ap-pears to exhibit strongly preferential treatment of itsmembers and is often treated with suspicion by out-siders. Below, we describe our findings in greaterdetail.


College Dining Rituals as Performance

Ostensibly, the purpose of dining rituals at Cam-bridge colleges is simply to dine, and indeed a fewof our informants did see it that way. However, thenature of the rituals themselves raises questionsabout what is actually being accomplished duringthese elaborate ceremonies. Our analysis suggeststhat the complex ensemble of symbols, structures,language, and actions constitutes a performancewith a number of elements: the creation of a socialdrama, the delineation of roles and boundaries, andthe exercise of control. Collectively, these elementsunderpin the performance and shape the behaviorsof participants during the ritual.

Social drama. Dining at Cambridge is a formalactivity in which the participants arrive in theirformal attire ready to play their part in a ceremonythat has been enacted for centuries. The setting andthe ambiance are carefully controlled, with dimlighting. In some colleges, modern amenities suchas electricity are foregone in favor of candlelight.Candles produce long, flickering shadows on thewalls that reach up to the high, ornate ceilings.Impressive oil portraits of past Masters and other

illustrious members of the college adorn the walls,reminding everyone of those who partook in thisritual before them.

The initial reaction of many of those unaccustomedto dining at Cambridge is astonishment and wonder:the hundreds of candles, elaborate presentation, im-posing architecture, use of Latin and medieval cus-toms, and highly skilled team of hovering waiters allcombine to provide an impressive spectacle. The sto-ries, portraits, and artifacts, such as the silver anddishes, become “sacred objects” (Durkheim, 1912/1995) that are used as props to impress and entertainguests. Our observations suggested that these objectsproduce “a mutual focus of attention” (Collins, 2004:47) that promotes a sense of togetherness and allowsemotional energy to be shared among participants.

Many aspects of the ritual are scripted. For exam-ple, at most colleges dinner begins when the Butlersounds a gong. At this point, the students fall silentand everyone stands for Grace, said invariably inLatin by the Master, or in his/her absence, by who-ever is the senior Fellow. The Butler again sounds agong to signal the end of the dinner, at which pointFellows go to another room for coffee and after-dinner

FIGURE 2Data Structure

A. Stage setting (e.g., lighting, furniture, portraits,artifacts) creates sense of theatre.B. Participants follow a script during the ceremony.

C. Symbols and space used to separate the threegroups of participants.D. Shared pride in the ritual separates ritual insidersfrom ritual outsiders.

E. Extensive monitoring through tradition (e.g., “it iscustomary that”) and custodians (e.g., “a quiet word”)F. Acts of defiance/nonattendance.

G. Students reevaluate their lives and reassess theirexpectations. H. Students acquire new traits (e.g., accent) anddevelop a taste for the finer things in life (e.g., food,wine).

I. Family and friends treat students differently.J. Students self-monitor when interacting with peoplefrom outside of Cambridge.

1. Social drama

Performance 2. Roles and boundaries

3. Control and conflict

K. Students become accustomed to their surroundings.L. Students get to know “old boys” who are part ofthe establishment at reunion dinners.

4. Identity

6. Demystification of the elite

7. Cultural knowledge Shift in SocialPosition

First-Order Categories Second-Order Themes Aggregate Theoretical Dimensions

IndividualTransformation

5. Image

8. Social networks

M. Knowledge of food, wine, and the etiquette arounddining used to create a good impression with theestablishment. N. Social skills facilitate interaction with theestablishment.

O. Oxbridge used as a vetting strategy. P. Perception of privilege creates friction betweenOxbridge and non-Oxbridge graduates.


TABLE 2Dimensions, Themes, Categories, and Data

Second-Order Themes and First-OrderCategories Representative Data

Overarching dimension: Performance1. Social drama

A. Stage setting (e.g. lighting, furniture,portraits, artifacts) creates sense of theatre

A1. “It was absolutely overwhelming.” (undergraduate student describingher first experience of formal dining at her college)

A2. “All those portraits on the wall, and the ambiance. I mean, it’ssomething that, you know, a normal student could never haveexperienced.” (undergraduate student describing her first experience offormal dining at her college)

B. Participants follow a script during theceremony

B1. The Master (or senior-most Fellow present) always says Grace inLatin. (observation journal, entry 22)

B2. “I am not supposed to talk to the Fellows during dinner, even if Iknow them personally.” (interview with college Butler)

2. Roles and boundariesC. Symbols and space used to separate the

three groups of participantsC1. Fellows are not allowed to eat at the students’ table (observation

journal, entry 13)C2. “Our job is to be invisible during the service, to melt into the

background.” (interview with college Butler)

D. Shared pride in the ritual separates ritualinsiders from ritual outsiders

D1. “Yeah, exactly. I mean, it (college dining) just gives you a very strongsense of belonging and that place being home.” (interview with student)

D2. “Because it (college dining) is something so unique—you only have itin Cambridge and Oxford—you get to live in these amazing buildingsand eat in this fantastic environment while people outside, they’regoing to eat this horrible food in their canteen or something. That’s whywe call it the ‘Cambridge bubble.’” (interview with student)

3. Control and conflictE. Extensive monitoring through traditions

(“e.g. it is customary that” and custodians(e.g. “a quiet word”)

E1. “The college can’t require you to do anything other than your 60hours of teaching or 80 hours of teaching a year. You have nocontractual obligations other than your teaching, so it does mean thateverything else comes under the heading of customary.” (college Fellowexplaining there is no obligation to dine)

E2. “It is actually considered bad form to arrange to meet, to speak tosomeone specifically over lunch, you save that for coffee afterwards. Atlunch itself, you sit down at the first available space with whomsoeveris sitting there. My first time, I arranged to meet somebody and satdown and somebody came and had a quiet word with me.” (collegeFellow explaining how custom dictates what is allowed)

F. Acts of defiance/nonattendance F1. “When I suggested that students should not be allowed more than twoglasses of wine at dinner, there were howls of protest from mycolleagues, who did not wish to abridge the liberties they hadthemselves enjoyed as students at Cambridge.” (college dean explainingan episode where students had gotten drunk and misbehaved towardsstaff)

F2. “What I notice here is that when you do something, like, not raiseyour glass to the Queen or whatever, it will be reduced to a charmingeccentricity, and because Dons are expected to be eccentric, the systemactually is resilient, neatly co-opting any such gestures.” (interviewwith college Fellow)

Overarching dimension: Individualtransformation

4. IdentityG. Students reevaluate their lives and reassess

their expectationsG1. “It is a grand thing to feed where so many great men have fed before;

to reflect that their Hall formed part of their daily life, and that theattendant associations possibly had great influence on their after career;and from the latter, because it is equally grand to think that I may havea future archbishop on my right and a lord chancellor on my left.”(Cambridge alumnus, quoted in Deslandes [2005: 21])


TABLE 2Continued


G2. “I don’t blame them for feeling that way. They have never seen anythinglike this before. Many of them have not been to a formal dinner in theirlives! But by the end of the three years most of this feeling of inadequacyis gone. All those who came with doubts, I think those doubts are gone.”(undergraduate student explaining how students from less privilegedbackgrounds found formal dining intimidating to begin with)

H. Students acquire new traits and develop ataste for the finer things in life.

H1. “I guess it all starts feeling normal by the middle of your second year(halfway point). In the first year, we all needed a reason to go, but bythe second year it was like the most normal thing to dress up, wearyour gown and go to this three-course formal dinner in that amazinghall with candlelight.” (interview with undergraduate student)

H2. “You are taught a civil way of eating. I guess I shouldn’t say civil butyou know what I mean.” (interview with undergraduate student)

5. ImageI. Family and friends treat students differently I1. “When you go home it’s quite strange because you get treated

differently. People think you’re some sort of genius or something andthat you’re really privileged because you go to these beautiful collegesand get all this amazing wine and food and everything.” (interview withalumnus)

I2. “I noticed very early on that having gone to Cambridge means that peoplereact differently to you. Often not in a good way. They think you’re a toffor whatever. Is that to do with dining rituals? Not just that, but yes, I thinkthat dining is part of it because when people think of Cambridge theyusually think of Formal Hall.” (interview with alumnus)

J. Students self-monitor when interacting withpeople from outside Cambridge

J1. “My friends who did not go to Oxbridge are really smart, but I mightfind that with certain ones of them, there would be things that Iwouldn’t talk about because either it wouldn’t interest them or I wouldbe afraid that they would think I was being, you know, too academic orwhatever. And they always make fun of me for using the little acronymsin Cambridge like JCR.” (graduating undergraduate student)

J2. “Sometimes I try not to say to people that I went to Cambridge, becausesometimes they get weird with you. They have this Harry Potter image intheir heads. Not just dining, but the whole idea of the place.” (interviewwith alumnus)

Overarching dimension: Shift in social position6. Demystification of the elite

K. Students become relaxed in their collegesurroundings

K1. “Seeing all this privilege up close, being served three-course mealseach night, certainly makes you a lot more confident.” (interview withstudent).

K2. “I remember that I used to get quite nervous when I went to Formal Hall,just because I wasn’t used to all the ceremony. But after a while you getused to it very quickly, and the great thing about it is that it’s actually veryeasy to follow. You just watch what everyone else is doing.” (interviewwith alumnus)

L. Students get to know “old-boys” who arepart of establishment

L1. “Dining societies are a fantastic way to network.” (interview withalumnus)

L2. “We have all these old boys’ nights. You know the recurring joke inthe St Trinian’s films where the old girls come back and are much morewild than the current students? Well it’s kind of like that. They (theformer students) are totally into the whole thing (dining) and are gettingtotally pissed (drunk), even though they’re like, bankers andeverything.” (interview with student)

7. Cultural knowledgeM. Knowledge of food, wine and the etiquette

around dining used to create a goodimpression with the establishment

M1. “I certainly know a lot more about wines than I did when I camehere.” (interview with undergraduate)

M2. In our college, if a student wishes to ask for more wine at the HighTable, he or she must ask in an ancient language.” (interview with Fellow)


liqueurs. Students are usually required to rise whenFellows enter or leave the room.

Even elements of conversation appeared scripted:on one occasion we learned about the college’s “res-ident ghost,” which takes the form of an elderly mandressed in black attire and who “is often seen walkingaround the Fellow’s Garden.” On another occasionwe were told about, and then shown, the “residentskeleton,” which is kept in a wooden case at thebottom of a staircase near the dining hall. At bothtimes, we had the strong impression that these storieswere routinely told to guests who dined at thecollege.

At the most formal dinners, the script can becomequite intricate. For example, at one dinner we at-tended we were told about the “Loving Cup”—agrand silver tankard that is passed around the dininghall. We later learned that this tradition dates back tothe murder of Edward the Martyr in 978: Asked by his

stepmother to drink from a two-handled cup, thisking was unable to defend himself as he was stabbedto death by his stepmother’s guards, which allowedher biological son to assume the throne. Before im-bibing, each guest bows to the person sitting next tohim or her, who covers the cup with his or her righthand (the dagger hand) while the other neighbor facesin the other direction in order to protect the drinkerfrom attack.

Together, the impressive stage setting and the in-tricate script produce a kind of social drama (Turner,1974), a performance rife with medieval ambiance.The result is that participants are seduced by thespectacle and want to participate, conform, and feelpart of it. The sense of drama also makes participantsfeel “special” and marks their experience as differentfrom those of members of other universities. One ofour informants, an undergraduate student, noted that

TABLE 2Continued


N. Social skills facilitate interaction with theestablishment

N1. “The advantage of sitting next to people who are all reading differentsubjects is that it gives you tremendous confidence that you can carryon an intelligent conversation with just about anyone.” (interview withundergraduate student)

N2. “When I went for job interviews I was a lot less scared than I wouldhave been if I hadn’t of gone to Cambridge and had to engage inintellectual conversations with a bunch of Dons.” (interview withalumnus)

8. Social networksO. Oxbridge used as a vetting strategy O1. “I’m involved in graduate recruitment (in an international

management consulting firm) and I would say that 30–40 percent of thepeople that we take on are Oxbridge grads. That’s not because we favorthem, but I do think that I find it easier to interview them because I canrelate to what they have done at college. . . . Yes dining might come upin the interview.” (interview with alumnus)

O2. “The moniker of Oxford or Cambridge man, or woman . . . hasprovided students and former students alike with an identifiable andprivileged cultural stamp that has served a vital role in demarcating andcementing their status in British society.” (Deslandes, 2005: xi)

P. Perception of privilege creates frictionbetween Oxbridge and non-Oxbridgegraduates

P1. One of the authors got a sense of the friction that dining and otherrituals create between Oxbridge and non-Oxbridge graduates firsthandwhile at a social event in London: When the author was asked by afellow guest what he did for a living, and he replied that he taught atCambridge, the guest—who worked for the BBC—made it quite clearthat she was very upset at the dominance of Oxbridge graduates in heremploying organization, and she complained that they “talked in code”about college life, including college dining. (observation journal, entry28)

P2. “I started by playing a word-association game. If I say Oxford orCambridge to you, what’s the first word that comes into your head? Iasked. The answers were: rich, elite, boat race, ancient, crusty, bow-ties,boring, posh, snobby and exclusive.” (Richard Morrison, writing abouthis visit to a Comprehensive School, the Times, December 3, 2008)


Cambridge wouldn’t be the same without formalhalls and that kind of thing. Otherwise, you couldjust be at generic institution and they are all thesame, but that’s what sets as us apart, I think.

Roles and boundaries. As noted above, in addi-tion to the Master, there are three main groups ofparticipants in the ritual: Fellows, students, andcollege staff. It is striking that each group plays aquite different role. The Fellows’ role is to set anexample to the students and to engage in sophisti-cated intellectual exchanges with colleagues fromvaried academic backgrounds; Formal Hall offersan opportunity for them to demonstrate academicand cultural competence, and in doing so, justifytheir place at the High Table. Students are juniorscholars, and the ritual of dining forms part of theirsocial and academic development. Their role is toadhere to the traditions of the ritual and to learn,through observation and the enactment of particu-lar practices, the norms and values exhibited bycivilized intellectuals. In contrast, the role of col-lege staff is to make certain that the ritual functionseffectively and to ensure that the relevant traditionsare respected. This task includes maintaining orderamong the students.

The ritual is designed to highlight the boundariesbetween these roles and to display a hierarchy. Theboundaries are reinforced first and foremost throughspatial divisions. As noted, Fellows dine at the HighTable, a long table that is actually placed on a plinth.Students dine at low tables. College staff are notseated at all. Rather, they scurry to and fro, bringingfood and drink and clearing empty plates as unobtru-sively as possible. It is interesting to note that despitebeing the only mobile people in the dining hall, theyare also the most invisible ones (Zerubavel, 2006).

Other symbols reinforce the boundaries among par-ticipants. For example, in many of the colleges wevisited, the Fellows consume different (and higher-quality) food than the students, drink much moreexpensive wine, and often use higher-quality silver-ware as well. Differences in dress further demarcatethe three groups. Specifically, both Fellows and stu-dents are required to wear gowns, while staff do notwear gowns. However, the gowns of the Fellows aremore elaborate than those of the students. In addition,students are required to stand when Fellows enterand leave the dining hall in a procession; college staffstand in fixed positions in the hall at these points inthe ceremony. Interestingly, during dinner we did notobserve any interaction between the Fellows and thestudents (except for those few students who wereinvited to dine at High Table), nor did we observe anymeaningful interaction between Fellows and collegestaff. Through our interviews we learned that such

interaction is generally considered inappropriate. Inother words, the transgression of boundaries isdiscouraged.

Despite these clearly demarcated boundaries andthe resulting stratification of groups, we found awidely held and shared collective identity anchoredin participants’ association with their colleges. Thiscommon pride in a particular college and its legacybound college members together. Interestingly, thecollege staff shared this bond. Our observations ofdining rituals at the Cambridge colleges we visitedled us to believe that college staff were effectivelythird-class citizens in the college system, performinga role akin to that of servants during England’s Vic-torian era. However, rather than seeing themselves asa kind of underclass, many of the staff expressed adeep sense of pride in their positions and their rolesas custodians (Dacin & Dacin, 2008) of a ritual asmuch as 500 years old.

In Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s Head Butler,Skullion, personifies this attitude, taking it upon him-self to make sure that the proud traditions of Porter-house College are upheld and that all plans to “re-form” the college are frustrated. In our data too wefound this dynamic. Despite the fact that college staffsalaries are very low, they see themselves and areseen by others as constituting a central part of theorganization and proudly proclaim their associationwith the illustrious history of their college. Theirparticipation in these formal, highly focused ritualsenhanced this sense of inclusion, and although theycertainly form the lower stratum within the diningrituals, they are still part of the privileged few byvirtue of being ritual insiders rather than ritualoutsiders.

This is not to say that college staff members believethemselves to be of equal standing to the students orthe Fellows; the staff “keeps a distance” from thestudent body and is deferent toward the Fellowship,particularly during dining. According to the HeadButler at one college:

On an everyday basis, I sometimes chat to the Fel-lows and with some of them I am on a first-namebasis. But obviously I know that if they have guests,I would give them more respect. I would not callthem by their first names for example. I’ll be like, oknow you are a Fellow, I am just, well I’ll just keep inthe background.

By privileging particular activities and roles overothers, dining rituals articulate implicit hierar-chies, and in doing so, make certain inequalitiesdurable (Tilly, 1998). In this way, dining ritualsreify a particular social pattern that participantscome to see as representing the natural order ofthings. The smooth functioning of the ritual makes


the hierarchy seem almost benevolent and, whencoupled with notions of education and tradition,highly legitimate. This legitimization helps to val-idate the concept of a class system comprising ver-tically ordered strata. As we discuss below, stu-dents, who are temporary participants in the ritual,carry these values with them when they leaveuniversity.

Control and conflict. Since a new cohort of stu-dents and a small number of Fellows join the per-formance every year, conformity needs to be en-sured to prevent any disruptions. Although the firstexperience of college dining may seem highly af-fected to participants, our analysis suggests that allthree groups of actors are gradually enveloped by itand come to play their parts naturally and instinc-tively. The enactment of the ritual relies on fewformal mechanisms for instructing newcomers. Theetiquette for dining is learned through observation,deference, and conversations with peers. As one ofour informants put it: “Nobody tells you anything.You very quickly come to learn what . . . [others]value just by the way they talk about things.” Thedesire to remain part of a ritual and to presentthemselves in a favorable light encourages partici-pants to exhibit behaviors that are consistent withtheir role and support the performance of the ritual,and to avoid behaviors that undermine the perfor-mance by deviating from the script or are unlikelyto meet with the approval of others.

Even though learning tends to be implicit ratherthan explicit, all newcomers are aware of monitoring.For example, when Fellows are deemed to break con-vention or make a “mistake” in their enactment of theritual, a polite nudge is often forthcoming and isusually sufficient to inform them of their transgres-sions. This polite nudge often comes from the SeniorSteward, a Fellow who has primary, although by nomeans sole, responsibility for monitoring the behav-ior of his or her colleagues at High Table. Students,too, learn principally from observation:

When I first went to formal hall I didn’t know whento stand up, when to sit down. . . . It was all a bitawkward really but after a few times you get to knowthe routine and you sort of feel at home.

However, the monitoring of students is much moredirect and less subtle than the monitoring of Fel-lows: when protocol needs to be enforced amongstudents it is done through Porters or Mancipleswho, while supervising the waiters, act as custodi-ans of traditions, ensuring participants are con-forming to the dress codes and various norms. Theentire supervisory staff and waiters cannot havedinner in the Hall themselves, but they are ex-

tremely conscientious in making sure tradition ishonored at all times.

For example, one of the students we intervieweddescribed an incident that occurred early on in herfirst year as an undergraduate:

One day we went to dinner and a friend of mine hada baseball hat on. The Manciple stormed up to usand said “Can you take your hat off please!” . . . Heasked “Why should I take my hat off?” “Well be-cause you are dining, and you don’t wear hats inhalls!” and my friend said, “How am I supposed toknow that you can’t wear hats in hall?” And theManciple said “Well you wouldn’t wear a hat inchurch, would you?”

Such overt conflict is rare because the overridinggoal is to maintain the integrity of the performance.There are occasionally some expressions of resis-tance and defiance among college members. Forexample, some students (and occasionally one ortwo Fellows) may choose not to raise their glass totoast the Queen. Moreover, not all of the Fellowsare comfortable at Formal Hall. One of them told usthat he preferred to eat in the buttery with thecollege staff than with his colleagues at High Table:

I constantly get asked why I don’t go to HighTable, and because I live at College it’s very dif-ficult for me to answer. It’s actually easier to an-swer you than it is for me to answer some of mycolleagues because I wouldn’t even know where tobegin with them. We’re really not speaking thesame language. . . . What I feel when I dine is veryuncomfortable. Firstly, the expectation is that youwear a tie, a suit and a gown which I don’t like.Secondly, I find the conversation boring at bestand downright depressing.

Similarly, some students, rather than being en-thralled by their participation in the ritual, con-sider college dining a traumatic experience, andattendance is endured rather than enjoyed. One ofthem told us:

I hated formals. I used to get so nervous beforehandI felt sick. . . . I’ve never been very comfortable insocial situations, and so I always felt a bit of anoutsider. It was as if I was an observer and not really,you know, part of the thing itself.

On the whole, however, such negative sentimentsare generally muted. Any resistance is liable to bepassive rather than active, taking the form of non-attendance rather than disobedience. The effects ofnonattendance for individual actors were difficultto ascertain from our interviews and observations.Students are generally expected to dine at leastonce per week. For Fellows, especially those who“live in,” the expectations are greater. Althoughthere are no formal sanctions against those who do


not engage in formal dining, both students andFellows who did not dine regularly indicated theyfelt marginalized to a degree from the rest of theircollege.

In sum, our first finding is that dining rituals atCambridge take the form of an elaborate performancein which participants are assimilated into particularbehaviors. The performance is a kind of social dramarelying on an elaborate stage setting to seduce partic-ipants into a desire to enact its various aspects. Theperformance also assigns roles and affirms bound-aries that demarcate the students, Fellows, and staff.This demarcation normalizes and legitimates statusdifferences for each new cohort of students who jointhe university. Finally, the performance represents aform of control, ensuring compliance to the norms ofthe ritual while at the same masking conflict andundermining resistance.

Individual Transformation

The ritual performance of college dining outlinedin the previous section creates a stratified, hierar-chical universe in which students spend a lot oftheir time. As noted, titles, designations, roles, seat-ing position, artifacts, language, robes, and many ofthe other objects present are invoked to reinforcehierarchy and create boundaries that separate stu-dents from Fellows and staff. Even if they are un-comfortable to begin with, our analysis suggeststhat over time, students come to internalize, andindeed admire and defend, many of the ritual’speculiarities. This internalization, in turn, appearshave a powerful bearing on their individual iden-tities and the image that they believe they are pro-jecting to others. Below, we elaborate on this pro-cess of individual transformation.

Identity. Our analysis suggests that for students,who constitute the majority of participants, theconstruction of a new identity effectively beginswith the first dinner. Almost all the students whomwe interviewed recalled being deeply affected bythe occasion. As a young classics student recalled:

The first time I went for formal hall, it was abso-lutely overwhelming. Even people who had comefrom Eton College or Harrow were going “bloodyhell!” It was just so amazing. Formal dress withgowns and all that. All these famous scientists, phi-losophers, poets, who had sat here on these tablesand whose portraits now adorned the walls. Wewere part of this illustrious legacy now. We werebeing waited upon, and big things were I guessexpected from us.

Even though Formal Hall also has a powerful effecton students arriving from private schools, it has a

particularly profound effect on those from the stateschool system. These students often start off withfeelings of inadequacy and the belief that, sincethey have come from resource-poor schools, theywill struggle to fit in at Cambridge. One state schoolstudent remembered:

In my initial days, I was thinking, oh God, youknow, I haven’t had the same education as thesepeople. I’m probably, you know, my vocabularyisn’t as good as theirs. I mean, even my Englishvocabulary, I spoke quite straightforward English,you know. Friends of mine who went to privateschool, they all had, like, language labs or theycould, you know, have grammar drills and all thesekinds of things, and we just never had any. We werelucky if we had a TV screen in our classroom. I guessI kind of had a slight inferiority complex when I firstgot here . . . and then there was the Formal Hall.There was bit of something like magical about it andyou were like, wow, I was kind of . . . I felt like I’mkind of part of something special.

Going to their first Formal Hall is like being“thrown in the deep end” for these students: this isthe moment when they begin to reevaluate theirlives and reset expectations for themselves. Thisreassessment of their identities is often given ahelping hand by other participants. For example,one student recalled:

At our first formal hall, a couple of people got up togo out and have a cigarette in between the coursesand the sort of the head waiter came up to them andsaid loudly, “You are not peasants! Getting up andsmoking in between meals is for peasants!” Thatincident has just stuck in my mind.

In other words, students are implicitly encouragedto shed the identities they bring with them and toassume new ones. Through repeated participationin these dining rituals over three years, individualsnot only come to have a strong feeling of belongingto a particular “family” (their college) but also ac-quire a number of new traits. Most students whostarted off with regional accents admitted that theiraccents had changed since their arriving at Cam-bridge. Similarly, their culinary tastes and expec-tations of how dinner was to be presented or con-sumed had also changed. One student reflected:

Now when I go out for a meal, I’m more critical, say,than I would’ve been. I think my personal tasteshave really changed. And things like wine . . . whereI grew up no one really appreciates wine, for exam-ple. Especially when you’re younger, you don’t havea taste for it. You just, when you’re dining withalcohol or whatever, you would just drink anythingand everything. But here, they make a point in say-ing, okay, well, this is the “X” year wine from “X”harvest. I’ve noticed sometimes I catch myself say-


ing things like, oh, actually that wine was reallyhorrible at dinner, or we’ve had much nicer. . . . SoI definitely think that your expectations are cer-tainly raised by that environment.

The result is that, by the end of three years of study,most students have identities that are firmly an-chored in their Cambridge experiences, of whichFormal Hall is usually considered the most forma-tive. College life in general, and college dining inparticular, thus has a powerful bearing on theirsenses of self. Wearing black tie and gowns be-comes second nature to them, and dining in whatwas repeatedly described as a “civilized” or“proper” manner is obligatory. Subtle signals ofclass are recognized and incorporated into behav-ior. For example, one of our informants told us thatif someone broke their bread at dinner rather thansliced it, that person was inadvertently giving awayan important clue about their social background! Inaddition, new affectations were learned throughdining: “Drinking with your left hand is a John’sritual.” Interestingly, we found evidence to suggestthat the identities of students from different back-grounds converged while they were at Cambridge.For example, according to one state-school-edu-cated student:

I think we [students from state and private schools]are a lot more similar now than we were when wewere starting off. I don’t have any friends from reallyposh private schools but a couple of friends thatwent to private school and I think I genuinelydon’t see there’s any difference to us now, youknow. We all talk about the same stuff and wehardly ever to talk about school days and, youknow, I was from this school, and you know, thiskind of thing, it doesn’t matter anymore becausewe’re all at Cambridge.

Over time, students from all backgrounds requireless and less monitoring; by their second year theyseem to automatically enact the traditions associ-ated with the dining ritual and to enjoy their role inthe ceremony. Indeed, one of the Fellows we inter-viewed expressed surprise that the students in hiscollege appeared to observe the formal dress codemore conscientiously than the Fellows, whom henoticed often dressed quite “scrappily.” Perhapsmost tellingly, and as we elaborate upon below,several of them took elements of these ritualsaway with them. As one recently graduated stu-dent suggested:

Formals do change you. At the end of your life inCambridge, you may not become the brightest per-son in the world, but you are definitely taking allthese privileges for granted. Now with my friendsat home, I would just sit with a bottle of wine, and

we toast Lady Margaret (the benefactor of St. JohnsCollege). It’s by no means snobbish! It’s just nor-mal for us.

Image. In addition to the change in identity thatrituals like Formal Hall bring about, ritual partici-pants also experience a transformation in their im-age—that is, their perception of how others seethem (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991). A number of stu-dents said that they first became aware of thischange when they visited their hometowns at theend of their first term at Cambridge. Some felt thatthey were taken more seriously and held almost inreverence by friends and family, whose perceptionsof them appeared to be influenced by the picture ofCambridge that the media and various writers havepopularized. This change of image was reinforcedwhen students invited friends who did not study atCambridge to Formal Hall:

I have invited a few friends from outside to Formals.They always ask how formal is it, and I tell them,but they are still awe-struck every time. Their reac-tion is, we don’t have anything like this! I guess theword would be jealousy? Or envy? Yes, I think theyare envious, and I would be too.

Another student described the times when she in-vited some of her high school friends who had goneto other universities to Formal Hall:

They were always totally blown away by the wholeexperience. They’re like, wow, you have this morethan once in a week like it’s crazy. ’Cause sometimesthey have like a posh dinner like the end when theygraduate or something like that, but I’m like you sortof take it for granted whereas they are totally blownaway by the whole sort of ceremony.

Many students found a need to temper their “nor-mal” personalities when interacting with friendsfrom outside Cambridge. A key reason for this wasa concern that they might be perceived as beingoverly “posh.” Although they could speak theirown language, with its curious acronyms and cul-tural referents, among their Cambridge friends,with outsiders there was a need for self-monitoring:

No, I do sometimes find that when I go back home,I might slightly change the way I talk about things,not because I think my friends are less educated atall, but, you know, I think maybe that they mightthink, she’s turned into a toff or, you know, or what-ever. So, I mean, I do notice that I have changed inthat way.

Some students basked in their new image, but forothers this transformation was an uncomfortableand disconcerting experience. Several students,(particularly those who came from more modestbackgrounds) admitted gradually freeing them-


selves from old high school and family networks offriends and developing new friendship groups thatmainly comprised fellow Cambridge students. Thisis not uncommon in any university setting, yet thebonds appeared particularly strong among the stu-dents in our study because they were based in parton class dynamics. One of our informants de-scribed how she had found it more difficult torelate to her school friends after a year at Cam-bridge, and as a result had become much closer toher college friends:

My school friends got a bit weird with me, cause Iwas at Cambridge, and that meant I became morefriendly with my Cambridge friends. . . . They [myschool friends] thought that I thought I was too goodfor them, which isn’t true at all, but that’s what theyfelt. So we sort of drifted apart really, because wehad less and less in common.

In sum, our interviews with students, who in-cluded those who were just starting out as well asthose who were in the middle and at the end oftheir time in Cambridge, gave us a strong impres-sion that dining represented their most intense so-cialization experience while at Cambridge; almostall students identified dining as the most signifi-cant factor that set their experience apart from thatof their friends at other universities. Dining playeda role not only in shaping their identities but alsotheir image. And in turn, this transformationhelped to bring about a shift in their social posi-tions. It is this shift in social position to which wenow turn.

Dining and a Shift in Social Position

Thus far we have argued that dining rituals atCambridge serve two important purposes at themicro level. First, they constitute elaborate perfor-mances in which participants are assimilated intoparticular values and behaviors. Second, they havethe effect of transforming the identities and imagesof each new generation of participants. However,we also found that the ritual of college dining ap-peared to have a profound bearing on participants’lives after graduation, because it facilitated a dis-tinct shift in their social position. Specifically, ouranalysis suggests that college dining rituals supportCambridge graduates’ entry into, and sense of con-nection with, an elite professional-managerial classthat dominates key positions in the U.K.’s economyand society. We interviewed several Cambridgealumni who had graduated between 5 and 15 yearsago to gain their perspective on how their collegeexperiences, and in particular their experiences ofcollege dining, had influenced their lives. We

found that the ritual of dining appears to have threedistinct effects: it demystifies the upper echelons ofthe class system, provides cultural knowledgeabout how to interact with the establishment, andacts as the “glue” that creates and bonds one of themost influential social networks in the U.K. andbeyond.

Demystification of the elite. First, our analysissuggests that participation in college dining derei-fies and demystifies the elite and helps participantsto feel at ease in the company of people who are inthe establishment. In part, this is simply becausecollege members come to take the sheer grandeurand pageantry of the dining ritual for granted; asnoted above, over time, and through repeated en-actment of the performance, participants begin tofeel more relaxed in their surroundings and becomeaccustomed to living among the trappings of wealthand status.

But in addition to the setting, other factors contrib-ute to this process of demystification. Most notably,Cambridge students regularly come into contact withmembers of the establishment at college functionsand dinners. For example, most colleges regu-larly host dinners to which college alumni areinvited. These so-called “old boys” events notonly allow alumni to reconnect with their col-leges and reaffirm their Cambridge identities butalso enable current students to meet their prede-cessors, most of whom are firmly embedded inthe elite professional-managerial class for whichthey themselves are being prepared. According toone of our informants:

You might go to a dinner where a future controller ofthe BBC turns up, or a future ambassador. And if notat dinner then at drinks you could be rubbing shoul-ders with that sort of person and talking about theirlife at college.

The feeling of ease that students develop abouttheir surroundings through their interactions withmembers of the establishment stays with them longafter graduation. For example, one of our respon-dents told us that he “never feel[s] nervous or in-timidated at work functions” because of his collegedining experience. Accounts of successful Cam-bridge and Oxford graduates in the popular mediasupport this finding. For example, writing in theObserver, Carol Cadwalladr (2008) cited the exam-ple of Toby Young, the author of How to LoseFriends and Alienate People. Young came from astate school in north London and described goingto Oxford as like “going to a foreign country or back100 years in a time machine.” Cadwalladr quoteshim as follows:


The Oxbridge effect . . . works because “seeing thecitadels of the ruling class up close does demystifythem. So you are then less frightened of doing thingslike applying for a job on the Times or starting up amagazine.”

Related to this process of demystification, partici-pation in lavish dining and other rituals creates astrong expectation that Cambridge students canand will do well. As one of our informants put it,“There’s obligation around going to Cambridge. Ifyou wanted to be a housewife or a bin man, thatwould be deemed a betrayal of everything you’vebeen trained to do.” Another informant told us thathe felt he had been pressured into pursuing a careerin management consulting and into feeling hewould be squandering the opportunity Cambridgehad given him had he chosen a less high-statuscareer:

In most people’s eyes I’ve done very well and amstill doing very well. After graduation I went on tothe Kennedy School to do a master’s, and now I’veclimbed the pole [at a well-known management con-sulting firm]. . . . But I don’t really enjoy my job. Istudied classics and would have been quite happybeing a school teacher, but I didn’t feel I could dothat or really make that choice. . . . There was a lot ofpressure [at college] to be successful, but deep downthis wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. . . .I know that’s easy to say now with my lifestyle!

Cultural knowledge. Second, dining rituals pro-vide participants with cultural knowledge abouthow to behave and interact with people from theestablishment. As noted above, this includes gen-eral knowledge about food, wine, and the etiquettearound dinning, but our analysis suggests that italso includes the social skills required for effectiverelations with members of the elite. For example,one of our informants, who worked for a City lawfirm, commented that:

You learn how to talk to people who are very muchmore expert and senior to you. If you were invited toHigh Table you could in theory end up sitting nextto a Nobel laureate or something, and it wasn’t un-common to have to sit with an academic who wasprofessor of whatever that you knew nothing about.That’s actually really hard. You learn to know not tobe silent, but at the same time not be awestruck, butalso not to be obsequious. You’re pretending thatyou’re on the same level, but at the same time subtlysignaling how important they are. That’s somethingthat you need to be successful in my job [law].

Interestingly, one of our informants made thepoint that learning how to behave and interact withmembers of the establishment does not necessarilyequate to politeness or even good manners. She

explained that she was shocked the first time shesaw people “working the room” at drinks beforedinner and was offended when someone she wastalking to walked away from her mid conversationin order to “speak with someone more important.”Yet she acknowledged that this is typical behaviorat most corporate events and conferences and thatshe routinely “works the room” while she is repre-senting her company.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is students who are ed-ucated in the state system whose learning curve ap-pears steepest with respect to these social dynamics,but even those who come from the most prestigiousprivate schools have the opportunity to gain impor-tant social knowledge, as the following anecdote fromone of our informants illustrates:

One time my tutor invited me and another Englishlit student to go to High Table. I felt so nervousbecause the other guy was ex-St Paul’s [an eliteprivate school] and so much more at ease than Iwas. . . . It was hilarious ’cause he totally put his putfoot in it trying to show off. He was talking aboutthis new book by some author or other, and he wasgoing on and on about how awful this book was.And my tutor just let him talk for about 10 minutes,and then he said: “Actually he [the author] is a verygood friend of mine!” That’s been an important les-son for me in my career, that you need to be carefulwhat you say in social situations because this is asmall world.

Social networks. The third way in which diningrituals facilitate a shift in social position is throughthe ties ritual participants are able to draw uponand leverage throughout their careers: upon gradu-ation, students of Cambridge, along with those ofOxford, become members of one of the most pow-erful and influential social networks in the U.K.5

As noted, these graduates dominate key positionsin commerce, the professions, the media, and thearts, and strong evidence suggests that employersin these sectors exhibit a clear preference for Cam-bridge and Oxford graduates as they replenish theirranks each year (Sugden, 2009; Williams, 2006).This preference could simply be the result of grad-

5 It is interesting to note that, despite the rivalry be-tween Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Cam-bridge alumni whom we interviewed generally consid-ered themselves as becoming part of an Oxbridgenetwork, and not just a Cambridge network, after theygraduated. As noted, this is partly because they have hadmany of the same dining and other college experiences asOxford graduates and partly because graduates of otheruniversities treat Cambridge and Oxford as a kind ofcomposite, because of the perceived privileges that resultfrom attending either university.


uates of these universities being of a higher qualitythan those of other universities, but our analysissuggests that underpinning this dynamic, at least inpart, is college dining, with a shared understandingof the peculiarities of Formal Hall providing a kindof social glue that binds the network together. Inother words, although attendance at Cambridge orOxford is clearly required for membership in thenetwork, it is not mere attendance that underpinsits effectiveness; rather, it is the sense of privilegeand common identity that emanates from theshared experience, manifested as appreciation andcomprehension of the idiosyncrasies of college lifein general and dining in particular.

Specifically, having had the same “authentic” ex-perience of college dining, and in some cases havingbeen part of the same dining societies, creates a con-nection and sense of identification that graduates areable to leverage strategically throughout their careers.There are of course other college rituals that couldcreate this identification, but dining is the most im-portant because (1) it is enacted so frequently (oftenseveral times per week) and (2) it is a ritual that allstudents experience. College dining therefore appearsto have particular significance for the functioning ofthe network. For example, discussion of Formal Hallmight be used as an icebreaker at job interviews oramong new colleagues. Crucially, then, not only doesmembership in the network often become a heuristicfor vetting colleagues, but also the mutual experienceof college dining is actually used as a way of buildinginterpersonal relationships within the network. Thisdynamic enables the network to be sustained overtime and helps to perpetuate the place of Cambridgegraduates among the British elite:

People use Oxbridge as a way of screening peoplethey do business with. Other Oxbridge grads willoften ask what I studied and where I studied it.When they find out I went to Cambridge, the nextquestion is, What college did you go to? Then we’llexchange pleasantries about our college days andwhat we got up to, college dinners, rowing, that sortof thing.

Conversely, those who had not studied at Cam-bridge or Oxford were excluded from the conversa-tions about college dining and other rituals, whichsometimes created a schism in the workplace, asthis alumnus who had read classics noted:

There is definitely a divide that is created as a resultof this education. Those who went to Oxbridge andthose who went to say, Bristol. The latter are just leftout of many conversations involving Cambridge id-iosyncrasies. What’s a formal, JCR etc., they don’treally know what we are talking about. I guess youdevelop a very high level of confidence in yourselfbecause of all this.

Partly as a result of this divide, a number of respon-dents argued that an insidious tension exists be-tween Oxbridge and non-Oxbridge graduates inmany professions. For example, an informant whooccupied a senior position in the publishing indus-try described her colleagues who had not studied atCambridge or Oxford as “chippy” and claimed thatthey had tried to block her promotion through theranks of her company because they were “jealous”of her Cambridge college experience and her “poshdinners.” Thus the strength of the social network inwhich Cambridge and Oxford graduates are embed-ded rests not only on a shared experience of collegelife, with its idiosyncratic rituals and traditions,but also on a perception of hostility from graduatesof other universities who, they believe, resent thesense of history and grandeur associated with col-lege dining and other aspects of college life, as wellas the social and career advantages that they appearto hold. The result is a strong sense of solidarityamong the graduates of Cambridge and Oxford uni-versities, which further reinforces the tensions be-tween the “Oxbridge elite” (Cadwalladr, 2008) andthe rest.

Interestingly, although all the alumni whom weinterviewed acknowledged the advantages of theirCambridge experience for their careers, several ar-gued forcefully that studying at Cambridge and par-ticipating in dining rituals does not in any way guar-antee a place amongst the elite, or even a successfulcareer. Some told us stories and anecdotes about theirfriends from college whom they remembered as veryable students, but whose subsequent careers wereeither unremarkable or, in conventional terms, couldbe considered failures. According to one alumnus:

The majority of my friends have done really well,but a few of them haven’t. A lot of my college friendsare like me [pursuing a successful career in law] andwho I’m still in touch with and who I meet profes-sionally. But I’ve got one friend from college, whoalso did English lit, who’s a ghost writer for veryminor celebrities and another who works on a smalllocal newspaper. I don’t know if you you’d call themfailures, but if you went back and interviewed their21-year-old selves, they would have told you “getstuffed. I’m going to do much better than that.”

Thus, entry to the establishment is not automaticfor Cambridge graduates; to become part of it theyneed to be able to demonstrate that they have in-ternalized their college experience and are able toleverage the social skills acquired through dining,as described in the previous section, in a range ofsituations. In other words, graduates need to appearcomfortable and assured in different settings andwith different audiences.


In sum, we did not immediately connect diningrituals with the British class system when we beganour research, yet as our study progressed we came tothe view that Cambridge college dining rituals serveto tacitly support the class system and, more specifi-cally, to maintain an elite professional-managerialclass that dominates the establishment in Britain. Asnoted above, participants’ shift in social position be-gins while they are university members, and later inlife the ramifications of college dining manifest them-selves and alumni are able to cement their place inthis elite.

DISCUSSION

Our objective in this study was to understandhow organizational rituals support the mainte-nance of macrolevel institutions. We studied theseemingly innocuous ritual of formal dining at oneof the leading U.K. universities and showed how itssignificance goes far beyond a group of collegemembers getting together to dine in the evening.Specifically, we found that although dining ritualsinitially started as a reflection of a larger, highlyclass-based society, over time, they had come toserve as powerful yet subtle devices for socializingnew generations of actors who, when they leaveCambridge, go on to reproduce various aspects ofthe British class system. We believe our findingsallow us to make three distinct theoretical contri-butions. Two of these relate specifically to institu-tional theory, and the third relates to the ritualstudies literature. In this section we outline thesecontributions and consider avenues for futureresearch.

Contributions to Institutional Theory

Institutional maintenance. With a few excep-tions (e.g., Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Zilber,2009; Zucker, 1988), the process of institutionalmaintenance has been overlooked in much recentinstitutional research, a central assumption beingthat institutional reproduction is essentially an au-tomatic process. In attempting to address the “mys-tery” of how institutions can be made to be self-replicating, Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) drewtogether empirical insights from the extant institu-tional literature (e.g., Angus, 1993; Holm, 1995;Leblebici et al., 1991; Townley, 1997, 2002; Zilber,2002) to propose a range of purposive strategies, ortypes of institutional work, that actors engage in asthey seek to maintain a given social order. A keytenet of the studies considered by Lawrence andSuddaby is that maintaining institutions involves

the support and/or re-creation of mechanisms thatensure compliance to current norms and practices.

In this study, we have sought to augment and ex-tend this emerging literature by examining the role ofritual enactment as a mechanism for institutionalmaintenance. Although institutional theorists haveacknowledged that rituals play an important role ininstitutional processes (e.g., Friedland & Alford,1991; Meyer & Scott, 1983), the concept of ritual hasbeen marginal to much institutional research, andinstitutional theorists have not engaged meaningfullywith the ritual studies literature.

Our analysis highlights a number of aspects of or-ganizational rituals that collectively underpin theircapacity to support the maintenance of institutions.First, rituals socialize participants into particularnorms and values and teach them the roles they areexpected to play. The ritual of college dining westudied here has historically reflected the Britishclass system in the sense that Fellows and studentswere drawn almost exclusively from its upperreaches and served by waiters and butlers whoseprimary objective was to protect the privilege of theformer. Participants were therefore familiar with theperformance and how to enact its main aspects beforetheir arrival at Cambridge. Moreover, they essentiallytook for granted the notion of a class structure andtheir place in it. More recently, however, as the socialbackgrounds of participants have become increas-ingly diverse, the purpose of the ritual has changed: itnow subtly socializes the participants into adoptingthe sensibilities that make the elite “distinct” (Bour-dieu, 1984). In particular, it legitimates social strati-fication and an explicit categorization of people ac-cording to rank and station. In short, it endorses andreifies the concepts that lie at the core of the classsystem.

Second, rituals induce a powerful desire in partic-ipants to maintain the integrity of the performance.Most notably, the sheer spectacle that is often associ-ated with organizational rituals can mask conflict andundermine resistance. As a consequence, organiza-tional rituals are often highly effective at ensuringconformity to a particular set of practices, whichleads participants to accept their roles even if they areinitially uncomfortable with them. In our study, thecolleges’ ornate dining halls, with their centuries-oldportraits and other artifacts, are invested with richmeaning and symbolism. Moreover, the use of an-cient language, artifacts, labels, and other medievalcustoms creates a compelling link with an illustriouspast. These aspects provide a historical context and“webs of significance” in which students become“suspended” (Geertz, 1973: 5). In this situation resis-tance becomes extremely difficult, and very few par-ticipants choose to deviate from the script.


Third, organizational rituals not only affect theidentity and image of actors while they are activeparticipants, but also influence behavior and socialinteraction beyond the confines of their original con-text. In this respect, rituals are powerful carriers ofcultural material and in particular of symbolic, lin-guistic, and relational material that actors draw uponat other times and in other places. Indeed, it is thetranstemporal and transspatial nature of the effects oforganizational rituals that underpin their capacity toregulate behavior, and ultimately, their capacity tomaintain institutions. In our study, we found thatparticipants used the shared experience of collegedining to gain access to and flourish in the establish-ment. Not only does the ritual cultivate in the partic-ipants the skills and competencies required to inter-act and build relationships with the elite; it alsoenables alumni to subsequently use the shared expe-rience of dining and other college rituals as a kind ofsocial glue to bond with one another and to promotea shared identity that reinforces a sense of entitlementand justifies their dominant class positions.

Our study resonates with some recent institutionalresearch that indicates that the maintenance of insti-tutions is rooted in the repeated enactment of rele-vant norms and practices. Most notably, Zilber’s(2002) study of a rape crisis center shows how therepetition of particular behaviors, such as providingassurance and comfort to new members, created ashared cognitive framework among organizationmembers. Similarly, Townley (1997) showed howmyths of appraisal and accountability were sustainedin U.K. universities by the recurrence of a set of prac-tices, including ceremonies of different sorts, thatcreated a shared view about the benefits of formalmanagerial control mechanisms in that context. AndAngus’s (1993) study of how institutions of competi-tion, machismo, and violence were maintained in anAustralian college through repeated acts of brutalityalso shows how recurring behavior can support aparticular institutional order.

However, our specific focus on rituals allows us toextend this work by explicitly showing how mic-rolevel experiences and events can have conse-quences in times and places far beyond the eventsthemselves, and by showing that performance plays akey role in institutional compliance. Moreover, it isnotable that the empirical studies that Lawrence andSuddaby (2006) drew upon to illustrate their argu-ments about institutional maintenance relate mainlyto institutions that are specific to a given organiza-tion, industry, or field. The result is that institutionalmaintenance is portrayed in these studies as a quasi-strategic process in which particular decisions haveparticular intended outcomes. By contrast, the insti-tution that forms the focus of our analysis—the Brit-

ish class system—is a “true” macrolevel concept af-fecting every aspect of the U.K.’s society andeconomy, and no one group of actors is able to com-pletely understand or exert firm control over its dy-namics and consequences. Our work thus suggests amore complex and less linear picture of institutionalmaintenance than is portrayed in the existingliterature.

The microdynamics of institutions. The relation-ship between localized micro events in which par-ticipants act in situated and patterned ways (Goff-man, 1959) and macrolevel structures such associal class or markets is an important one, and ithas been extensively discussed in sociology (e.g.,Giddens, 1984). However, little work in institu-tional theory explores how microlevel situationscontribute to the reification or erosion of mac-rolevel institutions. Indeed, although early work ininstitutional theory reflected a concern with microsociological issues, over time this focus has dimin-ished (Barley, 2008).

This is unfortunate, since macrolevel institutionsare essentially abstract heuristics that cannot directlybe observed in their entirety (Collins, 2004). In otherwords, to know the nature of an institution existing atthe societal or field level, one needs to study howactors legitimate (and make sense of) it at a microlevel. Indeed, one of the most serious criticisms lev-eled against institutional theory is that it has ne-glected how the struggle for legitimacy manifests it-self in the everyday lives of organization members(Barley, 2008).

In this study, we help to bring a concern for mic-rolevel interaction back into institutional theory. Ourintention is not to regurgitate Giddens’s (1984) orother models of how individual agency is recursivelylinked with structures, but to focus on how mic-rolevel interactions in organizational rituals contrib-ute to the maintenance of larger societal institutions.Our study shows that the way that actors experienceinstitutions is not a direct reflection of how an insti-tution appears at the macro level. Rather, institutionsare refracted through context and individual experi-ence. In other words, they are situated, interpreted,and reinforced at local levels.

In our study, we found that ritual participants werenot necessarily aware of how their actions were con-tributing to broader institutions. Although collegedining rituals were invented within a highly classconscious society, Britain in the 21st century is obvi-ously very different than it was when college diningfirst emerged. Many of the changes in British society,most notably the decline in the power of aristocracy,the ascent in the status of women, and equal rights forethnic minorities, are reflected in contemporary col-lege dining. Thus as the notion of social class (and in


particular, notions as to the kinds of actors who areentitled to belong to its upper ranks) has evolved, theritual of college dining has been forced to accommo-date these shifts to remain legitimate. This suggeststhat the institution of class has a bearing on the en-actment of college dining, just as college dining helpsto support the class system. Indeed, as entry to Cam-bridge has become more meritocratic, the influence ofdining rituals on the class system has arguably in-creased because, as noted above, participants from awide range of social backgrounds now need to be“prepared” for their future roles among the elite.

In sum, we believe that our findings show that thesurvival and perpetuation of macro institutions isrooted in micro events such as organizational rituals.We also show that meaning systems are localized andmay not exactly mirror structures observed at a macrolevel, and that these broader institutions influencemicro events such as organizational rituals. We there-fore believe that we have been able to respond toBarley’s (2008: 510) call for institutional researchersto return to the “coalface” of institutional theory inorder to shed light on “the link between institutionsand the person.”

Contribution to Ritual Studies

Though the main contribution of our study is toinstitutional theory, we also believe that we con-tribute to the ritual studies literature. It is evidentthat ritual studies is focused upon, and givespriority to, microlevel dynamics. However, if wehave criticized the institutional literature for be-ing too macrofocused, a similar criticism couldbe leveled at ritual studies for being too microfo-cused: the main themes in the ritual studies lit-erature concern the performative aspects of ritual(Rappaport, 1968), the liminality or in-betwee-ness of ritual experience (Turner, 1974), the emo-tional power or “communitas” felt by partici-pants (Turner, 1974), the role of time and spacein shaping ritual dynamics (Moore, 1980), andthe individual transformations that ritual partic-ipants undergo (Gray, 2005), all of which relatealmost exclusively to the individual and grouplevels of analysis.

There is a consensus in the literature that ritualssupport social stability and are often used strategi-cally to strengthen the positions of powerful membersof a given social order (Schechner, 2006), yet ritolo-gists are less effective at specifying the mechanismsthrough which rituals buttress or interact with thesebroader social and cultural processes. We thereforebelieve that ritologists may have as much to gain frominstitutional theorists’ understanding of social andinstitutional dynamics as institutional theorists have

to gain from ritologists’ understanding of microlevelbehavior.

A second contribution of our research to theritual studies literature concerns the nature of theritual that forms the focus of our analysis. Asnoted, much of the scholarship on ritual is con-cerned with religious ceremonies and/or rites ofpassage in preindustrial societies (Geertz, 1957;Turner, 1967; van Gennep, 1908/1960). Some im-portant recent work has been done on secularrituals in industrial societies, but the study ofcontemporary rituals remains underdeveloped.Our study helps to address this shortcoming.Moreover, we think that Cambridge college din-ing is a particularly interesting ritual to examinebecause, though it is a secular event that is os-tensibly about eating and sharing knowledge, italso contains some sacred aspects. This combina-tion of the sacred and the secular is in fact quitecommon in contemporary rituals (e.g., birthdayparties, retirement ceremonies, award ceremo-nies) and reinforces Schechner’s (2006: 53) con-tention that the “neat division” between secularand sacred rituals is essentially spurious. Morebroadly, our study highlights the continued im-portance of ritual and tradition in our lives de-spite claims to the contrary (e.g., Giddens, 1999).

Directions for Future Research

Our study of dining at Cambridge raises some in-triguing directions for future research. First, we havefocused on ritual as a mechanism through whichinstitutions are maintained. We recognize, however,that rituals are also important sites of social media-tion and change. Indeed, anthropologists have arguedthat ritual may be a particularly effective mechanismfor social change because it invokes a sense of cul-tural continuity among participants; the modificationof a particular ritual can therefore have profoundeffects on other elements of the cultural system inwhich it is embedded (Bell, 1997). Future researchcould usefully examine the role that ritual plays ininstitutional change and the creation of new systemsof meaning.

Second, we have considered how a particular kindof ritual (college dining) reinforces the class system inthe U.K. We believe that many other kinds of organ-izational rituals may also serve to reinforce systems ofinequality. For example, the ritual of corporate enter-tainment, whereby men take business clients to barsand night clubs in an effort to build and maintainbusiness relationships, reinforces male dominance incorporate hierarchies by explicitly excluding women.Office holiday parties or initiation ceremonies simi-larly put a set of existing and desired values on dis-


play for participants (Rosen, 1985). Likewise, largenetwork organizations such as industry associationsor volunteer groups rely on rituals to promote soli-darity and particular belief systems or ideologies. Itwould be interesting to know how these rituals con-tribute to the maintenance of particular institutions.

Finally, our study considers ritual as a centralmechanism for institutional reproduction and main-tenance, but other mechanisms such as myths (Ack-erman, 1975) and traditions (Dacin & Dacin, 2008)may also play a key role in maintaining a particularsystem of meaning. An especially interesting avenuefor future study would be to consider the extent towhich these mechanisms are reinforcing and/or con-tradictory. It would also be intriguing to considerwhether the relationships among these mechanismsvaries according to the cultural context in which aparticular ritual is embedded. In short, we believegreater attention needs to be paid to rituals as mech-anisms for the maintenance of institutions in general,and to the exercise of agency at different levels in thisprocess in particular. We hope that other researcherswill join us in this endeavor.

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M. Tina Dacin ([email protected]) is the E.Marie Shantz Professor of Strategy & Organizational Be-havior and the director of the Centre for ResponsibleLeadership at the Queen’s School of Business, Queen’sUniversity. She received her Ph.D. from the University ofToronto. Her current research focuses upon organiza-tional heritage, rituals and traditions, and institutionaltheory, as well as social innovation and social entrepre-neurship.

Kamal Munir ([email protected]) is a reader in strat-egy and policy at the University of Cambridge. He obtainedhis Ph.D. from McGill University. His research interests liein the study of social change and stability. He is also inter-ested in issues of socioeconomic development of third-world countries.

Paul Tracey ([email protected]) is a reader in organizationalbehavior at the Judge Business School, University of Cam-bridge. He received his Ph.D. in management and organi-zation from the University of Stirling. His research interestsinclude entrepreneurship, institutions and institutionalchange, regional innovation, and social innovation.


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Dacin Et Al - FORMAL DINING AT CAMBRIDGE COLLEGES: LINKING RITUAL PERFORMANCE AND INSTITUTIONAL MAINTENANCE