Doormen is a book about the work of doormen in the lobbies of residential buildings in New York City. It is organized around a cluster of seemingly contradictory phenomena: Doormen claim that they simply stumbled into their jobs, and most people who say they formally applied for a doorman’s job never got one. Doormen sustain a delicate balance between delivering personalized service and maintaining formal commitment to the norm of universal service, which is considered to be the basis of their professional status. In relation to this, doormen appear both too busy and too idle, and, by extension, they manage to project to tenants an eagerness to serve even if they are unable to provide service exactly when tenants believe they need it. During labor contract negotiations, tenants align themselves with doormen against management. Correspondingly, during strikes, doormen help tenants ensure that their building can function smoothly, thereby undermining the impact of their own strike. The central issue in these contradictions, Peter Bearman argues, is how doormen and tenants negotiate interpersonal closeness given the vast social distance between them.

Doormen are far beneath their tenants in life opportunities and social class. Yet their relationship with tenants is not one that involves simple servility or subordination. Bearman portrays the nature of the relationship as mutually supportive. That is, tenants need the doormen’s service to achieve a sense of distinction, whereas the doormen want to be perceived as professionals; together, they validate each other’s status claim. To accomplish this, “tenants want to know that their doormen know who to greet and who not to greet. Doormen want to know whom their tenants wish to see and not to see” (p. 11). The intimate knowledge a doorman has about his tenants is essential to this common goal.

Yet knowledge is a double-edged sword. Whereas tenants long for the distinction derived from the personalized service provided by their doormen, they are also concerned about the personal information doormen learn about them. The negotiation and (re)assertion of boundaries is a continuous process in the lobby through the daily interaction between tenants and doormen and is expressed in the language of respect on both sides. Tenants also worry, however, that they will not get full benefits from their doormen if they do not demonstrate the right amount of appreciation, primarily in the form of a Christmas bonus. The annual bonus carries multiple meanings: It is “a gift, a way of saying thanks, an obligation … a sign of expected reciprocal attention and an expression of social power” (p. 172). Calculating the bonus is also a nerveracking experience for the tenants. This is particularly true in a building where the occupants of each individual apartment have to hand out a bonus separately. People do not want to give too much or too little. They try to find out how much their neighbors intend to give to doormen, so that they can exceed them by just the smallest amount. Doormen also welcome this subtle competition. They, of course, prefer a large bonus, especially when the annual bonus constitutes a considerable portion of their wage packet.

Bearman states that his goal in Doormen is to focus on “the grammar of social life”—“the unspoken rules that organize social interactions, shape decisions, and motivate behavior” (p. 4)—and to link this microprocess to the macrostructure one observes (p. 63). I found his description of the tenantdoorman interaction in the lobby compelling; it gives the reader a vivid sense of the complex and ambiguous nature of their relationship. In this respect, Doormen could be seen as a modern heir of the early urban ethnographic tradition in sociology. I question, however, the choice of the subject matter. Doormen originated as a class field project in Bearman’s sociological method course for which his primary concern was finding a safe site for students to study; the lobby of a residential doorman building seemed to be a reasonable choice. To write a book about doormen, I feel, requires a stronger justification. Given that the majority of New York City residents do not live in a doorman building—and many of them may hardly ever visit such a building—do doormen offer the best choice of data to address the author’s research question? Accordingly, how does the tenant–doorman interaction in a lobby inform readers about social life in New York City or in U.S. society at large?