Wiebe Bijker's study of the bicycle raises many similar theoretical issues to those addressed by Spang's book. Technological histories tell teleological tales of the inevitability of the bicycle's being a familiar, two-wheeled object with clearly defined uses. From the beginning of her work, Spang problematises our retrospective vision and understanding of the restaurant as space or cultural object by pointing to its fluidity, its controversial identity over the period between the 1760s and the 1800s. Like sociologists of knowledge, she shows how a variable, contested, cultural entity with a succession of different political and cultural meanings could eventually develop into a familiar institution. These repertoires of self-conduct, the alternating management of the visibility and orderliness of restaurant behaviour, were all quite central to the forging of the restaurant's cultural meaning.
Service is good, rather expensive, but at the time one wants.
One eats alone. It is at this point that Spang's study extends the boundaries of the studies of cultural objects produced by sociologists of knowledge. For, as she stresses, the restaurant was not merely a cultural institution, but also, indeed primarily, a public space, in which certain new sorts of behaviours were constructed. In this respect Spang's book contributes to a particular historiographical problem of late eighteenth-century France. In examining the restaurant as public space, her account raises the issue of how 'public' and 'private' are to be defined for this period.