The skills that culinary school graduates gain from the curriculum do not align with the culinary industry requirements for their first position. This problem, if not addressed, will lead to lower enrollment of students and a limited number of employed culinary arts graduates in California. This basic qualitative study aimed to explore California…

Historically, there has been conflict in regards to the perceived value of postsecondary culinary education between those who feel culinary school better prepares students to enter the foodservice industry versus those who claim that claim culinary careers can be entered without formal training and everything that needs be known can be learned on…

In this dissertation, I explored creativity in practice. I ask: 1) How do the participants define creativity?; 2) In what way does creativity reflect the positioning between actor and resource?; 3) What creative practices emerge when individuals choose to use, or not use, resources?; 4) How do resources mediate creativity? To understand creativity…

This quantitative research examines the perceptions of culinary arts/management educators and culinary industry practitioners on the future of online culinary arts education. Specifically pertaining to the recommended procedures by educators and chefs to judge and critique the quality of food products in terms sensory modalities, and what the key…

This dissertation comprises three essays that explore the relationship between knowledge and social structure through an examination of the use of science in the culinary arts and finance. The first two of these essays focus on how science has influenced practices and social structure within the culinary arts; the final essay provides a comparison…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and measure those factors in the restaurant industry and how they impacted student persistence and graduation from a culinary school in the Midwest. A correlational approach was utilized to determine if students' perceptions of stress, low pay, and long and odd hours changed as they progressed through…

The purpose of this study was to explore how students described the curriculum in the Introduction to Food Production class and how they perceived the curriculum prepared them for their future in the hospitality industry. The exploratory questions that guided the study were how do students describe the experiential learning curriculum in the…

This study investigated the construct of the learning organization in the restaurant industry. Descriptive accounts of learning were gleaned from face-to-face interviews, focus groups, observations, document analysis, and data from the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) from 52 participants employed in three US…

Traditionally cooking is considered to be women's work, yet the vast majority of professional chefs, particularly in the upper echelons of restaurant work, are men. These curious gendered patterns stimulated interest in delving more deeply into the gendered nature of restaurant work. Existing research on this topic has concentrated on the front of…

The researcher designed this mixed-methods dissertation to delve further into the definition of professionalism for cooks and chefs within the culinary arts industry. The researcher also explored the process of professionalization (i.e., the process by which members attempt to transform their occupation into a profession) within the field of…