DOCTOR DOORMAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Doormen, book)

When Peter Bearman, a professor of sociology, moved from North Carolina to New York, seven years ago, to take a post at Columbia, he found his new colleagues unusually arrogant and difficult, even for the Ivy League. After considering other factors, he laid the blame on the doormen in their apartment buildings. He reasoned that the doormen had an interest in elevating the status of their tenants in order to enhance their own status, and so they treated the professors like big shots--for example, by addressing them as "professor"--until the professors came to believe that they really were big shots. Bearman felt that he had discovered a previously unobserved variant of the Matthew effect, Robert K. Merton's theory concerning the compounding of iniquity among prominent and marginal individuals--the rich getting richer, and so forth.

Over time, Bearman rejected his initial hypothesis, as well as his first impressions of his colleagues, but his interest in doormen had taken hold. He noted that while sociologists had produced ethnographies of waiters, milkmen, bill collectors, and nail-salon cosmetologists, they'd left doormen alone, and so, a few years ago, he had his students interview doormen all over Manhattan, and then he wrote a book on the class's findings, which has just been published by the University of Chicago. It is called "Doormen," and it addresses such familiar phenomena as the Christmas bonus, the sports conversation, the shady visitor, the problem of boredom, and the elasticity of the rule that, as the sign in the lobby says, "All Visitors Must Be Announced." The book is an academic work, but to anyone who has ever wished that doormen would stop calling him "Sir," or worried that a babysitter might be mistaken for a mistress, or wondered whether he should refrain from looking at his nose hairs in the elevator mirror while the doorman presumably watches via security cam, it is a marvel. It provides the theoretical underpinnings for a lifetime of awkward awning encounters.

"Doormen and tenant interactions in the lobby, and the distinct ecology of the residential building, are shaped within the narrow shoals of too much closeness in a context of too much distance," Bearman writes. Closeness: doormen know an awful lot about their tenants. Distance: tenants know little about their doormen, and the socioeconomic gulf tends to be wide. To tenants doormen are "socially dead." Doormen are well paid, and they wear livery, but since, as Bearman writes, "occupational prestige is ...