This study explores the informal workplace learning of newcomer baristas in New York City’s third wave coffee industry as a political and psychological site where narratives of power, ideology, and agency are continuously negotiated. Drawing on narrative inquiry and correspondence analysis, it examines how psychological constructs such as adaptability, motivation, and belonging function as ideological instruments that both enable and constrain workers’ agency. Narratives from twelve newcomer baristas and twelve café owners across single shops, local chains, and global brands reveal overlapping work values, including customer orientation and hard work, but also newcomer-specific values such as proactive attitude and cultural adaptation.

While café owners frame their enterprises through cosmopolitan and sustainable discourses of “global connection,” they frequently depoliticize the transnational labor sustaining this image. Newcomers’ narratives, by contrast, foreground the emotional and cultural labor of integration, revealing informal learning as a process of navigating systemic inequalities rather than merely acquiring skills. These findings situate informal learning within broader socio-political and postcolonial dynamics, showing how global service industries reproduce neoliberal ideals of self-reliance and cultural “fit,” while also offering spaces of micro-resistance and re-signification.

By theorizing informal workplace learning as a narrative practice shaped by ideology and power, this study contributes to critical theoretical psychology, emphasizing that the making of the “competent worker” is inseparable from the making of the compliant (or resistant) subject in globalized labor economies.