Tipping Regimes: Organizational Dynamics and Labor Control Mechanisms on Nashville’s Honky-Tonk Row

ABSTRACT Why would highly skilled and independent tipped service workers obey the dictates of small organizations? Tip work disrupts and informalizes the standard wage relation between workers and management, calling into question organizational commitment and control. Using the case of tipped labor (musicians and bartenders) in three bars along Nashville’s “Honky-Tonk Row,” I present a perspective on their labor processes that is sensitive to the interactive and relational nature of control in small organizations. Rather than forward a self-organizing or simple labor process by which owners and management secure surplus value, I argue that small organizations construct “tipping regimes” that mediate workers’ access to monetary and symbolic rewards and justify the distribution with embedded cultural frames. Tipping regimes may foster competitive or communal relations among workers, resulting in distinctive employment experiences and well-being outcomes. Larger organizations, meanwhile, tend to enshrine technical and bureaucratic methods of control that serve to reduce uncertainty in the tipped service interaction. This paper, therefore, theorizes the organizational domain of control in tipped labor and presents a non-exhaustive typology of organizational control in downtown Nashville.