Naslov
Understanding Local, National, and Global Entanglements of the Shipbuilding Organization ‘3. Maj’

Autori
Puljar D'Alessio, Sanja

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
The liquid city. Adriatic life-worlds in transformation

Mjesto i datum
Rijeka, Hrvatska, 16.09.2018. - 22.09.2018

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Plenarno

Vrsta recenzije
Podatak o recenziji nije dostupan

Ključne riječi
ethnography in organization, shipbuilding, relating technical and cultural components of the complex system

Sažetak
The lecture presents one of the possible approaches to the understanding of the contemporary worlds of labor focusing on the big industrial systems. Four years ago, in 2013 and 2014, I conducted research in the local shipyard “3. maj”. In this research, I focused on the analysis of the shipyard's internal organizational dynamics, as well as its interrelations with external socio-political developments and developments in the shipbuilding industry. The goal of this approach was to question the ideas of clear-cut borders between “in” and “out” of the organization “3. maj”, or to demonstrate complex entanglements of organizations in the contemporary world. In order to do so, firstly I had to comprehend organizations as complex systems relaying on the systems theory: when working on the social analysis, we can take these concepts used for the description of a complex system (relationships between parts and the wholes, and of emergency) and translate them into anthropological ideas of contexts and holism. Secondly, the research method had to correspond to the complexity of the research subject/object: methodology, ethnography, and theory (relations)in organizational research. Finally, In this spirit, we can describe interwoven physical and social reality in the shipyard “3. maj”, and follow the idea of connectedness between the shipyard and its environment, and their indivisibility. In the organic conception of anthropological holism, Tim Ingold’s concept of meshwork (cfr. 1991: 117) builds on a vision of indivisibility of the thing and its environment in the form of the net made of lines of flow and becoming, instead of the network made of connecting lines (as in ANT). We can imagine lines of flow as traces that human and non-human activities leave in a lived space. They are trajectories, and as such, they mark changes in the things they encounter. Because of this, they show processes. In this manner, we can describe the composition of the lines of flow in the shipyard. This composition consists of traces left by shop floor workers, programmers, machines, work ethics, political climate, ships…., and they certainly don’t end at the wired fence of the shipyard. These lines go further into the environment, and many of them as inputs come in from the environment. To analyze the shipyard as an industrial system, I was using an organizational perspective as an umbrella to connect technical factors such as profitability of the system, machinery, and their use, with the symbolic, social and cultural factors. Connecting technical and cultural factors and overcoming the division between materialistic and cultural explanations was necessary to comprehend such a complex industrial system. Relations detected in this line of work are crossing scales and realities which form together a complex system of the organization 3. maj. Therefore, when we describe 3. maj analyzing relations between specific offices and their initiatives, or management's decisions and their implementation, we are describing the lower scales of the system. When we describe the national industrial policy and international standards, we are describing higher scales of the system. Organization 3. maj is in this approach taken as an entity of middle size whose analysis brings insight about the shipyard itself, as well as about business, expert and social realities on the national and international level in the frame of which it exists.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Etnologija i antropologija

POVEZANOST RADA