Using walking-with approach to explore embodied dining practices for workplace impression management

Consumer studies mainly take a cross-sectional approach to understand leisure and home consumption. This paper takes the mundane workplace as a unit of consumption and adopts a processual view to understand what and how cultural capital for impression management is acquired and changes over career trajectories. Integrating the theories of Goffman and Bourdieu, the study explores how embodied habitual practices (habitus) enables and shapes impression management to build desirable work identity. The walking-with approach is used to seek conversations with senior executives in Hong Kong along their work routes.

The accumulated knowing about a repertoire of meanings in dining is found to evolve at different career stages, which extends our conceptual understanding beyond ‘we are what we eat’. Overtime, to enact desirable work identities, professionals mobilize their constituted habitus to make distinct dining choices so as to achieve situational socializing purposes.