Construction and Negotiation of Entrepreneurial Subjectivities in the Polish Video Game Industry

Using the framework of critical creative labour studies, I discuss Polish video game workers’ construction and negotiations of ‘entrepreneurial subjectivities’. Drawing on secondary sources and 44 interviews, I position Polish video game workers’ perspectives within the economic and socio-cultural context of a post-socialist country. I argue that entrepreneurial discourses were developed in relation to the industry’s socio-historical development, the government’s promotional initiatives, and on-going precarization of employment in the Polish labour market. This contribution discusses the tensions between claimed meritocratic nature of the industry and pervasiveness of informality; between the requirements of sociality and the exclusionary mechanisms of local occupational community; between the interviewees’ acknowledgement of inequalities and the emphasis on individual responsibility and resilience.

Workers’ Identities in Transition: Deindustrialisation and Scottish Steelworkers

Deindustrialisation is often characterised as an ending, with sentiments of intangible loss andidentity disintegration defining displaced workers’ narratives of job loss. These experiencesare important, yet workers do not cease to exist with the closure of their workplace. Despitethis, little attention has been paid to the post-redundancy employment experiences of formerheavy industry workers or the survivability of their specific occupational identities and workcultures. This article examines the post-redundancy employment of former Scottishsteelworkers. Given their previous immersion in a distinctive occupational culture, a study ofthe post-redundancy employment experiences of these workers offers a window into theafterlives of deindustrialisation. Oral history is indispensable in prioritising working-classperspectives, therefore this article draws on seventeen newly conducted oral history interviewswith former Scottish steelworkers who were made redundant in the early 1990s. In order tobetter understand the long-term impact of deindustrialisation, as well as gage the survivabilityof occupational identities and work cultures, this article examines the ways in whichsteelworkers’ post-redundancy employment contrasted with steelmaking, focusing on thefollowing thematic areas: the significance of work; trade unionism and collective values;masculinity and emasculation; occupational community and workplace culture.

The Role of the Steelworker Occupational Community in the Internalization of Industrial Restructuring: The ‘Layering Up’ of Collective Proximal and Distal Experiences

This article explores the relationship between occupational community and restructuring at a UK steelworks. Through historic and contemporary experiences, restructuring has become an internalized feature of the steelworker identity. Zittoun and Gillespie’s framework of proximal and distal experiences is adapted to analyse the internalization process. The article argues that experiential resources associated with restructuring are transmitted via the occupational community, forming a part of a collective memory of workplace change. These experiences relate to the historical precedence of restructuring, the role of trade unions in accepting the inevitability of downsizing and prior personal and vicarious experiences of redundancy. The findings build on debates around the determinants of an occupational community, highlighting the role of ‘marginality’ and how experiences of restructuring bind steelworkers to a broader community of fate.

Older Workers and Occupational Identity in the Telecommunications Industry: Navigating Employment Transitions through the Life Course

The article examines the relationship between restructuring and work-based identity among older workers, exploring occupational identity, occupational community and their roles in navigating transitions in the life course. Based on working-life biographical interviews with late career and retired telecoms engineers, the article explores the role of occupational identity in dealing with change prior to and following the end of careers at BT, the UK’s national telecommunications provider. Restructuring and perpetual organizational change undermined key aspects of the engineering occupational identity, inspiring many to seek alternative employment outside BT. For older workers, some seeking bridge employment in the transition to retirement, the occupational community not only served as a mechanism for finding work but also provided a sustained collective identity resource. Distinctively, the research points to a dialectical relationship between occupational identity and the navigation of change as opposed to the former simply facilitating the latter.

Embedded in the Crowd: Creative Freelancers, Crowdsourced Work, and Occupational Community

Although scholars are beginning to examine the experience of crowdsourced work, the extant literature and popular accounts paint an undersocialized picture of the labor process. This study explores how crowdsourced work remains socially embedded in the structure of an occupational community that exists exclusively online and in relation to a focal firm. The findings draw on interviews and observation of creative freelancers who designed, developed, and distributed digital goods in a crowdsourced work arrangement with an entertainment publisher. The online meeting places of an occupational community supported workers in their responses to three challenges of contingency: limited communication with the firm, sporadic and unpredictable compensation for their work, and unclear career trajectory. Within the community, freelancers found direction and meaning for their work, built collective strategies to smooth compensation, and illuminated a pathway from amateur to expert. As an occupational institution, the community also structured collaborations that transferred knowledge of industry standard practice and coordinated work in the absence of bureaucratic organization.

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.