'The Technological Sublime': Combining Art and Archaeology in Documenting Change at the Former RAF Coltishall (Norfolk, UK)

Since at least the 1990s, archaeologists and artists have been documenting military installations following the withdrawal of service personnel. They have usually embarked on these recording opportunities separately, experiencing these sites as derelict, lifeless places, with stripped buildings devoid of much of their meaning after their occupants have left. Archaeologists have typically created maps and made photographs. Artists have also taken photographs, but in addition made films and created soundworks. Wherever the medium and the motivation, the assumption is usually made that only those closely familiar with the rhythms and rituals of service life can begin to understand the emptiness of what remains. And being secretive military installations, creating a record during their occupation is never an option. Uniquely, in the months leading to the closure of RAF Coltishall (Norfolk) in 2006, the RAF granted the authors unprecedented access to record the base's drawdown and closure. The project brought artists and archaeologists together to see what could be achieved in unison, while still maintaining some degree of research independence. In undertaking this survey, three related themes emerged: the role of art as heritage practice, new thinking on what constitutes landscape, and the notion of a 'technological sublime'. Following an earlier publication, we now reflect again on those themes. In doing so, we offer this collaboration between art and archaeology (traditionally considered two distinct ways of seeing and recording) as an innovative methodology for documentation, not least after the closure and abandonment of such military and industrial landscapes, where occupational communities had once lived. In this article, the words represent our ideas; the images and films are an example of the result.

NEGOTIATING PROFESSIONAL BELONGINGS: FINNISH ACTORS’ AFFECTIVE ENGAGEMENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

This study addresses how creative workers’ social media presence affects their understandings of professional agency. Focusing on Finnish professional actors, we ask how social media practices inform and shape actors’ occupational self-conceptions and professional belongings. In the theoretical framework, we employ Baym’s notion of relational labour and read it through Berlant’s (1998) conceptualisation of intimacy as mobile attachments. The data is collected from 15 Finnish actors, eight freelancers and seven theatre employees, from June 2020 to March 2021 by using the diary-interview method. The analysis is based on a close reading of the interview material and diary entries in which participants describe their experiences and feelings concerning their presence, work-related connections, and promotion on Facebook and Instagram. The study indicates that for both theatre actors and freelancers their social media activities are entwined in their sense of professionalism and belongings to occupational communities of peers. They negotiate and speculate about their social media presence in relation to peer assessments in a way that involves continuous movements between visibility and invisibility and between independence and interdependence. Our study suggests that to understand the ambivalences involved in creative workers’ presence on social media platforms, it is important to broaden the investigation from strategic self-promotion and audience engagement to questions of professional identities and communities.

Games-as-a-service: Conflicted identities on the new front-line of video game development

As creative industries begin to experiment with service and subscriptions models, prior research suggests that such changes in production and consumption carry important implications for workers. Using the theoretical lens of occupational communities, this empirical study investigates the impact of servitization—that is, the transition from a product to a service-dominant logic—on the identity of video game developers. It theorizes that service workers’ skills and mind-set, relationships with peers and players, internal and external reputation, as well as development principles and values all experience disruptions, leading to the emergence of a distinct identity.

LEARNING SUSTAINABILITY IN THE HARVESTING PRACTICES OF A FOREST-BASED COMPANY

ABSTRACT Purpose: The objective of this study is to understand how the learning process of sustainability occurs within the context of the harvesting practices of a forest-based company. Originality/value: The study contributes to understanding the learning process of sustainability under the approach of practice when demonstrating how the knowledge of sustainability is created and reproduced from the practices established by a group. In practical terms, the narrative of the flow of knowing and learning has the potential of assisting managers and educators to structure more integrative corporate education projects, in which the initiatives are integrated into the practices of the occupational communities. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative research of descriptive nature, through a single-case study in a forest harvesting operation in a Brazilian company that has sustainability at the core of its business strategy. It was adopted as collection instruments the in-depth observation, the semi-structured interview, and the documental research, which were analyzed through the thematic analysis of narratives. Findings: The results suggest that, in the given context, the learning process of sustainability happens in a combination of the processes of creation and dissemination of knowledge conducted by the company and the practices developed within the occupational communities. There are indications that, in a social construction process, new working models are learned, based on an entanglement of planning, safety, and discursive practices, activating the knowledge-in-practice of sustainability.

Socializing Rejection and Failure in Artistic Occupational Communities

Failure is a normal aspect of work in creative industries; even highly successful artists are subject to rejection by critics, fans, and peers. It is known that organizations such as schools and workplaces are the primary space for job-related socialization, but artistic careers are characterized by nonstandard employment relations and do not generally require formal schooling. Without the bureaucratic structures typically used to socialize novice group members, how do artistic occupational communities socialize aspirants to manage rejection and labor market failure? This article draws from 6 months of participant observation from “Song Club,” a periodic professional workshop for aspiring songwriters where aspirants present a song to publishers in the hopes of having it recorded and released to commercial audiences. During the period of study, 403 songs were presented to publishers, and 327 were rejected. During the workshops, Song Club members are socialized toward normalizing rejection, appropriately interacting with gatekeepers, and developing collaborative relationships with peers. Adopting these norms reduces the likelihood of failure and contextualizes the meaning of rejection in this occupational community.

How to Build a Trade Union Oligarchy

Trade unions are ostensibly democratic organizations, but they often fail to operate as democracies in practice. Most studies of Western trade union democracy have acknowledged that oligarchy is the norm among unions but have nonetheless examined exceptional democratic unions to understand how those unions defied the trend. My study inverts this approach and instead examines two known oligarchical unions, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in the United States. I argue that union oligarchy requires certain conditions to thrive. Both unions lacked democratic rules, close-knit occupational communities, local autonomy, rank-and-file decision making, internal opposition, equality between members and officials, and free communication, but these absences were expressed in different ways in each organization. Comparing a prominent US union with a prominent Australian union allows for assessment of the extent to which oligarchy was the result of national context. I argue that the experience of trade union oligarchy in the United States and Australia was more similar than different. National differences between the two countries were important, but they manifested primarily as different methods to achieve similar outcomes.

Latitude or Latent Control? How Occupational Embeddedness and Control Shape Emergent Coordination

We examine how different occupational communities that are embedded in organizations exercise control processes to achieve emergent coordination as they create complex products together. We compare two types of organizations, equipment manufacturing and film production, and find that although occupational control was important for emergent coordination in both settings, this relationship varied according to two aspects of occupational embeddedness: organizational acknowledgment of occupational control and occupational interdependence. In the equipment manufacturing setting, occupational control was latent: the communities visibly conformed to organizational control processes while exercising occupational control behind the scenes to coordinate emergently. In the film setting, the organization granted the occupational community significant latitude over its tasks, which enabled members to coordinate emergently to solve problems the majority of the time. We propose that these two aspects of occupational embeddedness must be analyzed together with occupational control processes to explain how integration unfolds in knowledge-based settings in ways that organizational control processes are ill-equipped to manage.