Intercultural Service Labour in Multicultural Restaurants: Emotional Mediation and Workplace Communication in Thailand

Abstract

This study examines the emotional, communicative, and relational work through which employees and managers sustain service in multicultural restaurant settings. It uses intercultural service labour as an integrative analytical lens to explain how service actors manage different expectations regarding language, hierarchy, tone, face, food knowledge, and appropriate interaction. The study adopted a qualitative multi-site design based on 27 semi-structured interviews with owners and managers, employees, and customers in Indian restaurants in Bangkok, Pattaya, and Si Racha, Thailand. Data were analysed using a hybrid deductive–inductive thematic approach. Five interconnected dimensions emerged: reading tone, silence, and face; mediating at service boundaries; making unfamiliar cuisine serviceable; learning through mistakes and adjustment; and calibrating service to different expectations. Participants’ accounts showed that sustaining service involved not only technical competence but also the capacity to interpret ambiguous cues, protect face, clarify incomplete understanding, reduce customer uncertainty, and adjust communication through experience. This labour was distributed across restaurant roles and often remained informal and weakly recognised. The study connects emotional labour, intercultural competence, and brokerage within a work-process perspective. It reframes intercultural competence as a situated accomplishment and shows how smooth multicultural service depends on informal coordination that organisations frequently rely on but rarely recognise.