Heat Beyond the Kitchen: Embodied Strain, Time Poverty, and the Life-Embedded Nature of Employee Experience in Culinary Labour

This study examines how employee experience (EX) in professional kitchens is constituted through the interplay of embodied strain, temporal constraints, care responsibilities, and the meanings attached to work. Drawing on an embedded single-case study conducted in the main kitchen of a five-star city hotel in Istanbul, the study is based on in-depth interviews with workers across hierarchical levels. The findings show that physical strain, long and irregular working hours, and non-work care burdens are not experienced as separate challenges, but as mutually reinforcing pressures that extend into everyday life. Based on these findings, the study reconceptualizes EX as a life-embedded psychosocial process constituted across bodily, temporal, and extra-organizational domains. Within this framework, the study introduces two conceptual mechanisms: embodied time poverty, which captures how time pressure becomes intertwined with bodily exhaustion and limited recovery, and the hidden social burden of culinary labour, which explains how care responsibilities and everyday life demands become constitutive of EX. The findings further show that the discourse of passion operates as a meaning-making and normalizing mechanism that legitimizes demanding working conditions while obscuring their cumulative psychosocial costs. Overall, the study contributes to the EX literature by offering a more integrated understanding of work, well-being, and everyday life in labour-intensive settings.