new yorker piece on the michelin ratings
Sticking with the food theme, let me call attention to John Colapinto’s great article on the Michelin Guide in the recent New Yorker food issue. There’s a lot in this article that should be of interest to org theorists and institutionalists, especially given former guest blogger Michael Sauder’s important work (with Wendy Espeland) on the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools. In the piece, Colapinto gains access to a covert Michelin inspector, a task that fell to him after the famously secretive Michelin dragged its heels on letting another reporter talk with an inspector. In it, he describes a lunch at Jean Georges shared with “Maxime” (the inspector) and Michelin managing director Jean-Luc Naret, which he uses as an entry point for describing the way that Michelin recruits and trains its inspectors, its very French orientation to judging the quality of the cuisine and ambiance of the establishment, and the way that chefs and restaurant owners respond to the rankings.
The piece inherently raises a number of organizational questions, such as:
- How well do the cultural understandings inherent in an institutionalized rating system translate into new environments? The more populist Zagat guides (or crowd-sourced websites like Yelp.com) seem to be much better suited to the U.S., although they too suffer from worries that interested parties will try to game or cheat the ratings. On the other hand, the role of the disinterested, anonymous expert Michelin critic seems to encourage a sort of standardization. A dish is either “right” or “wrong,” in true French form. Indeed, as Rao has pointed out, French cuisine went through considerable changes associated with the rise of the insurgent nouvelle cuisine form, and in which those chefs who borrowed from a rival form of cuisine in their dishes became significantly more likely to lose a Michelin star as a result. Consider the following case in which Maxime describes why famed Upper East Side restaurant Daniel scored only two out of three Michelin stars until very recently:
[It lacked] consistency — and accuracy… It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a science, and either it’s right or its wrong. And that’s something that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately — or it’s not. A fish is cooked accurately — or it’s not. There’s the talent, the creativity that has to be applied to get a three-star — he has to be a very talented chef — but there was just a lot of inconsistency.
- Further, consider NYT food critic emeritus Frank Bruni’s thoughts on what gets lost in applying a universal standard:
… I wonder if a certain sort of chromosomal stodginess can ever really be completely leached out of the Michelin guide and the system. [...] The other thing that has always made me wonder about Michelin rankings is that they claim a lot of science to them, but is there a lot of soul to them? When Michelin describes its own system, I think, where is the allowance for just a visceral, emotional response to a restaurant?
- As Surowiecki notes about the worries many have about the impact of health reform, anxieties about losses tend to overpower the pleasures associated with potential gains. Losing a Michelin star can be catastrophic for a restaurant in a concentrated market, even though being rated at all remains a considerable status marker. Colapinto recounts the story of former La Côte d’Or chef Bernard Loiseau, who threatened that he would kill himself if he ever lost one of his Michelin stars. Shortly after losing the star, Loiseau made good on that promise.
- Do the judgments of one rating system tend to spill over to others? There’s indication in the story that the Michelin Guide has been struggling to build its legitimacy in the U.S. market since its arrival here in 2005, and that its editors feel considerable pressure when its ratings are inconsistent with those of Zagat or the Times. They may, therefore, be more inclined to give an additional star to a restaurant others have rated quite highly, or to take one away for a negative reputation.
Excellent post Ed! I’ve been fascinated recently with ratings and so the questions you pose are really interesting to me.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about is how ratings and rankings differ. Internally, they are different monsters. Ranking is inherently about comparison. You can have dozens of organizations or products that are above a certain quality threshold but a ranking system can create or magnify differences between them that weren’t apparent before. Ratings, on the other hand, seem to stamp an organization and/or a product with legitimacy by saying that the quality has passed that threshold. What criteria are used to determine those ratings (i.e., the content of ratings) are negotiated by the actors who create the ratings. There must be a field influence as well (e.g., how much influence do chefs have on determining the content of the different rating systems?). Seems like pretty open terrain from a theoretical perspective.
brayden
November 30, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I don’t believe that Loiseau lost a Michelin star at his Cote d’Or restaurant in Burgoyne. There was speculation that he might lose one, but one of the features of the Michelin process is that there is no “advance warning”. Loiseau had a history of depression and a complex personality and one goes too far in assigning any single cause to his suicide. But it makes for good journalism… for what it’s worth.
REW
November 30, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Thanks, Brayden!
About ratings vs. rankings, I’m with you most of the way. On the other hand, isn’t ranking sometimes just the grouping or categorizing of ratings? It would seem that the two systems converge especially in a fine-grained rating system. If you take a look at the film rating aggregation site metacritic, you get an instance of this- score above 60 and you’re in the green (acclaimed), between 40-60 and it’s a yellow (mixed) rating, and below 40 it’s red (panned). Of course, this is crowd-sourced rather than one sole judge’s evaluation, which of a much different nature and therefore has a different type of legitimacy. I suppose that for these sites, you’re only as good as your algorithm (about which the public may know very little, thus placing a limit on how much trust can be involved).
The other issue is that many ranking systems allow for ties, as the U.S. News does for social science graduate programs. Long story short: it seems to me that there’s comparison involved in ratings and not just rankings, and quality thresholds inherent in rankings and not just ratings (how often have you heard an undergrad say they’d rather not attend a graduate program outside the top 20?).
Relatedly, did you see the blurb on the NRC rankings in IHE today? Thinking about the methodology here gets into not only the interests involved, but also the rating/ranking distinction. Perhaps that helps to explain the huge delay! I remember, incidentally, that Fabio had a post about this on here a few months ago.
etwalker
December 9, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I think you are right to see ratings/rankings as a continuum of sorts based on the specificity with which they distinguish among the entities they are evaluating. While their pure types are different monsters (to use Brayden’s frightening term), the more nuanced your ratings, the more they will take on the characteristics of a ranking system.
I also like the final issue you raise in your original post. When USN first ranked law schools, Harvard came out 4th. That put the legitimacy of the ranking in question to many, and–at least according to some–USN then tweaked its formula so that Harvard would rise to its “rightful” place in the hierarchy.
When you have multiple rankers, like business schools do, there is clearly some isomorphic pressure (to ensure that your evaluations look reasonable and that you are seen as legitimate), but there is also pressure to differentiate yourself within the rankings market.
M. Sauder
December 10, 2009 at 5:58 pm
I agree with one of the posts above. To my knowledge Loiseau did not lose a star. What is worse than actually losing the star is that the mere spectre of losing a star caused him to end his life.
How can we be sure, however, that this was the sole reason. The media speculates. In the end, there is not great certainty.
Johan Liebenberg
August 5, 2010 at 5:07 pm