ABSTRACT
The maintenance of the surface of agreement, the veneer of harmony or working consensus depends on each party feeling obliged to pay lip service to a crude overall definition of the situation. Whatever the waiter does, then, to ensure that he has control of the situation, it must always lie within the accepted limits of the service relationship. Thus in higher status hotels - whose staff can be categorised as being ‘craft-oriented’ - a waiter will take particular pride in the skills he uses to manipulate customers from the outside; and it is that the service specialist is supreme. With a tip, the emphasis is on the relationship between the customer and the waiter and the quality of this is manifest in the service offered and received. Given that there is uncertainty as to what kind of intimacies is permissible; it is safer to first build familiarity into the relationship with those who are not full participants.
