A customer came into the coffee shop with his children and ordered a single main course for himself. The children asked for something extra, a child’s meal, and he refused, because it was not included in the price. Bassam was working that day. He is fifty, Syrian, trained as a lawyer in a country he no longer lives in, and he has been making coffee in Canada long enough to know that this is not his business.

“Observing the distress of the children, I then immediately decided to provide for those meals at my own expense.”

He did not describe this as going above and beyond. For him, this was simply what the job required.

Nothing in an employee handbook produces that decision. No performance metric rewards it. On a spreadsheet it appears, if it appears at all, as a small anomaly: an employee spending his own wages on a customer’s children, time lost, resources squandered. One of his co-workers described a similar act by another worker as squandering the restaurant’s resources. And yet something real happened in that shop that afternoon, something a customer remembers for years and no training program has ever successfully manufactured.

I am an Arab immigrant, who lives in Canada. I came here with the same tools that millions of immigrants come with: a language, a system of values, a manner of dealing with people, and a strong conviction that the place I leave is as important as the place I am headed. When I crossed over borders, I did not abandon my culture. I brought it with me. What Bassam brought with him is the subject of this book.

A country that runs on service

The Canadian economy relies heavily on the service sector. The service sector is the dominant pillar of the Canadian economy, accounting for approximately 75% of the national Gross Domestic Product. It is also noted that the service sector in Canada hosts contingent work arrangements, such as part-time, temporary, or seasonal employment, which tend to attract immigrant workers. Arab immigrants are one of Canada’s fastest-growing immigrant populations. As of the 2021 Census, there were 795,665 Arab immigrants in Canada, representing 2.2% of the total Canadian population. Research has shown that service industries account for a higher share of employment among immigrants than among the general population in Canada.

So the encounter at the counter — the hotel desk, the coffee shop, the delivery door, the childcare room — is where a very large part of this country’s economic life actually happens, and it is where a very large number of newcomers actually work.

High power distance, collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance are characteristic of the Arab culture and heritage. The Canadian norms are on the other end, especially that it has low consideration for hierarchies and manifests strong individualism. Two sets of expectations meet, every day, thousands of times, at the point where somebody asks somebody else for a coffee.

The rules nobody writes down

Service provision is in itself a matter of following some rules, many of which are unarticulated. Such implicit conventions can be explained as cultural “scripts,” that is, unwritten rules in service encounters as to perceptions and expectations of what is appropriate behaviour, especially in dealing with customers. Arab immigrants in Canada, especially those in customer-facing jobs within the service industry, were regularly observed to not only stray from the set customer service script, but to actively revise it.

This observation is well known in the industry yet it is not sufficiently supported by research. The relationship between culture and the quality of service has attracted much scholarly attention, and researchers have established that customer expectations, perceptions of service, and outcomes of satisfaction are characterized by cultural values. What is less explored is how the experience and negotiation of those cultural influences play out among first-generation immigrant service workers in real-world work environments. The existing literature has centered on the customer’s side of the encounter. It examines how customers perceive and evaluate culturally dissimilar service providers. Not much research asks how the workers themselves understand, manage, and adapt their culturally shaped service behaviors when they are operating in a host culture with different service norms.

That is the question this book is built on. It looks at the service encounter from behind the counter.

Service encounters between culturally dissimilar customers and workers involve perceived cultural distance, which may lead to friction in cross-cultural service delivery. Arab immigrant workers in Canada experience this dynamic on a daily basis, as the consumer in Canada expects the same level of service no matter what the service worker’s cultural background. How these workers negotiate this cultural distance, and whether their service behaviors shaped by their culture are obstacles to be overcome or assets to be directed, is the central practical concern of this study. The question underneath it is simpler and harder: do culturally shaped behaviours such as relational warmth, hospitality-driven generosity, and deference function as practical assets to service quality, or as deviations from standardized service expectations?

I have had years to study this, and my answer is that it is not a weakness. It is an advantage.

What migration actually moves

We speak about immigration as a change of address. It is not. A language moves. A set of assumptions about what respect looks like moves. A sense of what you owe a stranger in your house moves, and it does not stop at the door of a workplace that has never heard of it.

Immigrant workers, and particularly Arab immigrant workers, have something to offer in service settings. They bring warmth. They carry with them a reverence of relationships. They come with a promise of making people feel welcome that even all the employee handbooks will not teach them. Yet these are not necessarily identified. They are not understood at times. Occasionally they are punished. And more and more they are judged by machines that understand nothing at all about culture.

That last sentence is not a metaphor, and the final part of this book is about it.

Before any of that, there are fourteen people to meet.