How Breakfast Happens in the Café

Abstract

In this article I present an ethnographic study of `breakfast in the café', to begin to document the orderly properties of an emergent timespace. In so doing, the aim is to provide a description of the local production of timespace and a consideration of a change to the daily rhythm of city life. Harold Garfinkel and David Sudnow's study of a chemistry lecture is drawn upon as an exemplary study of the collective creation of an event. Attention is drawn to the centrality of sequentiality as part of the orderly properties of occasioned places. As part of examining the sequences I chart the ongoing emergence of features of breakfast time in the café such as `the first customer', `crowded' and `quiet'. In closing the article, I consider how changes in the rhythm of the city are made apprehensible to its residents.