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Gender, race, and class-based meanings inform longstanding divisions and status hierarchies within the culinary profession, such as those between public and private and amateur and professional cooking. Private and personal chefs’ work in homes disrupts these divisions and hierarchies. Given their precarious position, how do these chefs negotiate their standing within the profession?

This chapter draws on interviews with 41 private/personal chefs. Eight were primarily private household employees, while all others were primarily self-employed.

The chefs negotiated their status by making distinctions between themselves and commercial chefs, along with other private/personal chefs. The chefs both challenge and reinforce the dichotomies and criteria shaping status evaluations within the culinary profession. Similarly, they both contest and reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies.

The chefs’ conceptual distinctions can potentially (re)produce or challenge material inequalities. Moreover, while the fields of private/personal cheffing create opportunities for more adults to cook for a living, the traditional status hierarchies remain largely the same. It is likely that as long as those hierarchies persist, the chefs’ conceptual distinctions will continue to challenge and reinforce them.

Research on private/personal chefs has been minimal, so this chapter fills this gap. It also adds to scholarship connecting workers’ status struggles and gender, race, and class inequalities. The case of private and personal chefs sheds new light on how gender, race, and class intersect to inform status evaluations within the culinary profession.

Celiac disease is an auto-immune disorder that requires strict lifelong adherence to a gluten-free diet. I explore how a celiac diagnosis affects gendered feeding work within families.

This chapter is based on a grounded theory analysis of field research with five celiac support groups and 80 in-depth interviews. I interviewed 15 adult men and 56 adult women with celiac, plus nine additional family members.

Gendered care work norms place the onus of responsibility for gluten-free feeding work on women, multiplying time spent planning, shopping, and preparing meals. Women employ distinct gendered strategies to accommodate the gluten-free diet. Following a strategy of integration, women tailor family meals to meet other diagnosed family members’ dietary needs and the entire family’s taste preferences. However, when women themselves have celiac, they follow a pattern of deferential subordination, not allowing their own dietary needs to alter family meals. Thus, women continue to prepare family meals as a form of care for others, even when their medical needs justify putting themselves first.

Social support is a key determinant of compliance with necessary lifestyle and dietary changes in chronic illness. However, little research explores the gendered dynamics within families accounting for the link between social support and dietary compliance. I show how gendered care work norms benefit husbands and children with celiac, while simultaneously disadvantaging women with celiac.

This article outlines the theoretical foundations of the research contributions of this edited collection about “Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations.” First, the sociological understanding of the basic concepts of diversity and discrimination is described and the current state of research is introduced. Second, national and organizational contextual conditions and risk factors that shape discrimination experiences and the management of diversity in research teams and organizations are presented. Third, the questions and research approaches of the individual contributions to this edited collection are presented.