“In this sparkling book, Michel Anteby challenges managerial images of polished efficient organizations that relegate employees’ personal relations and private goals to a controlled periphery. As he focuses a skilled ethnographer’s attention on the production of unauthorized personal objects within a French aeronautical factory, Anteby gradually reveals a profound truth about paid labor for others: workers make labor contracts bearable for themselves by creating space for their own creativity and relations to fellow workers.”–Viviana Zelizer, author of The Purchase of Intimacy

“Moral Gray Zones is superb. Rich, judicious, and well written, this trenchant portrayal of how control really gets done, moves the sociology of meaning forward.”–Harrison White, author of Identity and Control

“Moral Gray Zones brings classical mid-twentieth-century social theory into the twenty-first century. This lively look at a dying trade–craft workers in the modern factory–has relevance to almost any work world today. In fine detail, Anteby makes it clear that beneath surface performance contracts and economic exchanges at work lies a rich if hidden interaction in which laborers seek dignity and respect for what they do from coworkers and managers. That they succeed more often than not makes for a terrific tale of considerable interest–dramatically and theoretically. A marvelous book.”–John Van Maanen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“The book channels the spirit of industrial sociology of the 1950s, when students of work and organization encountered the shop floor up close and came away understanding how everyday behaviors formed the woof and warp of industrialization’s social fabric. Anteby’s use of the production of homers for understanding relations between workers and managers is ingenious.”–Stephen R. Barley, Stanford University

“An accessible good read, Moral Gray Zones makes a distinct contribution toward the understanding of informal structures, situated moralities, occupational cultures, and systems of control.”–Peter V. Marsden, Harvard University

“Moral Gray Zones is first-rate qualitative organizational analysis. Effectively organized and cogently argued, I was impressed by Anteby’s marshalling of diverse streams of evidence. The extension of his ideas through the vast literature on multiple occupations is particularly stimulating.”–Calvin Morrill, University of California, Irvine

Michel Anteby is assistant professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School.

Moral Gray Zones

Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautic PlantBy Michel Anteby

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13524-3

Introduction

The Persistence of Organizational Gray Zones

IN 1997, in a steel mill in northern France, an ashtray rested heavily on a desk, its luster dimmed by time. It seemed to blend quite easily into the plant’s surroundings, and yet something about it caused it to stand out. Upon noticing my gaze, the person with whom I spoke took the ashtray in his hand and began to recount his life. An hour later, when he finished, he returned the ashtray to the desk. This ashtray, which he made with his own hands, was my first encounter with “homers,” or as they are called in French, perruques. Two close observers of factory life, Michel de Certeau, who as a Jesuit priest spent time in the industrial town of Villeurbanne (France), and Miklos Haraszti, a former milling machine operator in a tractor plant in Hungary, offer the following interpretations of these terms. La perruque, according to de Certeau, “is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room.” “A homer,” Haraszti explains, “is an object made for his own purpose or pleasure by a worker using his factory’s machines and materials. It is not an object made for sale as an additional income source. The word does not appear in most dictionaries, such as the Oxford or Webster’s, but appears to be most widely used in England and America of a number of variants.”

The focus of this book, which centers on interactions around artifacts produced for personal use by plant employees, on company time, and with company materials or tools, might at first seem anecdotal. Artifacts such as these are found on coffee tables and in garages and attics, are easily mistaken for trinkets, and do not hold up very well to inter-generational transmissions. They seem merely part of an industrial folklore that will become slowly extinguished with the arrival of new generations. In context, however, artifacts are an inherent part of social systems and can offer fruitful insight into social meanings and processes, especially when, as will be shown, these artifacts are fairly prevalent in those systems. In that regard, delicate glass flowers and sturdy steel ashtrays (two fairly typical homers) are perhaps not merely anecdotal. Both Haraszti and de Certeau caution us against dismissing these artifacts too quickly: “Connoisseurs of folklore may look on homers as a native, decorative art,” remarks Haraszti. “As yet, they are not able to see further than that.” De Certeau makes a similar point when he observes that institutional custodians of knowledge oftentimes extract the products [homers] in order to “set off a display of technical gadgets and thus arrange them, inert, on the margins of a system that remains itself intact.”

This book goes beyond a study of homers as folklore. It explores, in the context of a particular plant, the gray zone in organizations that surrounds the manufacture and exchange of homers. Primo Levi, in the context of the Nazi concentration camps, referred to a gray zone as a “zone poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge”-a zone, he added, that “possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.” In the less contentious context of work settings, gray zones are areas in which workers and their supervisors together engage in practices that are officially forbidden, yet tolerated by the organization. Examples of gray zones outside factory environments might include a manager in a financial firm authorizing an employee to trade at work on the side; a supervisor allowing a mail carrier to “hide” (meaning to return home or engage in non-work-related activities) once the mail has been delivered but before the end of the official workday; or a supervisor letting industrial bakery truck drivers take unaccounted loaves of bread to sell to their customers for added income. In this last example, the collusion between supervisors and workers is clear; management makes sure that there is enough extra bread available every day on the stock racks where drivers supposedly only take “their” bread. In all these cases, though, official rules are broken, and management, aware of these breaches, tolerates them.

Organizational gray zones are found in many work settings, and as such, warrant our attention. Most people can easily identify gray zones in organizations for which they work: small, repeated leniencies tolerated by their bosses; informal, collective arrangements that violate company rules; or multiple infractions of official rules overtly endorsed by management. How these gray zones emerge and are sustained constitute key questions that this book addresses. The persistence of gray zones in organizations is puzzling. Outsiders would be quick to point to them as occurrences of theft; the truck drivers and their supervisor in the industrial bakery just mentioned above would easily be labeled thieves. Yet management with knowledge of these practices seems oddly unconcerned. The reasons for such apparent leniency confuse “our need to judge.” Consider, for instance, the practice mail carriers have developed to “hide.” When a carrier with more than fifteen years of seniority (who was most likely hiding the entire time with the consent of his supervisors) was convicted of a minor offense (stealing lunchmeat) while hiding, he was immediately discharged for “improper conduct” because he hid. The surprise lies as much in the harshness of the sentence as in the length of time such hiding was most likely tolerated. Setting aside for a second the offense itself, what did the mail carrier have in mind when he was hiding? Or, to draw another parallel, what do factory members believe they are engaging in when they make homers? Moreover, why does management tolerate these behaviors? How can the collusion be explained?

Answers to these questions mainly revolve around a close examination of the identity dynamics that occur in gray zones. Gray zones constitute ideal settings in which to explore the ways participants see themselves, since participants, rather than organizations, are mainly the ones defining the rules of gray zones. At the onset, few guidelines are given once participants decide to navigate gray zones; if anything, the participants in gray zone activities seem left to their own devices. Although the material and monetary rewards are obviously tempting, the choices made around such engagements also influence the self-images participants build for themselves. For instance, the industrial bakery truck driver who decides, with his supervisor’s approval, to sell the “unaccounted for” loaves of bread, appears to do so after reflecting not only on the potential material gains, but also on the implications the decision might have on how he views himself and is viewed by others. The call one makes regarding whether or not to participate- and how to participate-in some ways is a window into one’s enacted identity. Numerous identities might surface in gray zones. Some of these identities are individual (the driver Jim’s identities), others occupational (the bakery drivers’ identity across organizations), and perhaps some even organizational (the Wellbreads bakery’s identity, the pseudonym for this bakery) or national (a British identity, since Well-breads is located in the United Kingdom). Each of these identities is of interest; however, the focus of this book is the occupational identities of gray zone participants since they specify and help explain many of the gray zone practices presented and analyzed here. More generally, other identities might explain other gray zones; but many gray zones are likely to contain similar identity pursuits.

A study of these identity dynamics in gray zones also uncovers other dynamics, namely the delicate balance between freedom and constraint in organizations. This balance fluctuates between individuals’ aspirations to express themselves and find respect at work with the managerial imperative to achieve certain goals. As such, the study of gray zones also raises questions of control within a given work group, and more broadly in organizations. While the physicality of delivering bread to customers each day or adjusting a bolt to an engine in a factory might seem sufficiently constraining to direct behaviors, repeated gray zone practices guide behaviors in perhaps more subtle but equally efficient ways than any moving conveyer belt, task description, or official rule can achieve. Similar to research on street corner societies or games at work, this book provides evidence of the significance and the regulating qualities of complex, perhaps even seemingly objectionable, informal practices for given communities. Unlike past research, it shows the identity mechanisms by which such practices-here, gray zone activities-gain relevance in the eyes of participants and why, as a result, the practices are here to stay.

Homer-Making at Pierreville

This book answers the question of the persistence of gray zones through a study of the making and exchange of homers in a French aeronautic plant, labeled Pierreville (a pseudonym). It explores how the occupational identity of a subgroup of plant members (craftsmen) in the plant plays into the processes supporting the gray zone of homer-making, and how management relies on this interplay to exert its control over these craftsmen. The book is divided into three parts: part 1 describes the motivations and the setting for the field research supporting the book; part 2 presents the main findings from the analyses of the field data; and part 3 discusses the implications of these findings.

The relevance of social systems, specifically those involving gray zone practices, to the understanding of human behaviors provides the theoretical impetus for this book (chapter 1: “Revisiting Social Systems in Organizations”). This leads to the examination of the fairly common, albeit rarely documented, gray zone of homer-making, or the manufacture of artifacts for personal use on company time and with company materials or tools (chapter 2: “The Side Production of Homers in Factories”). Once familiar with homers, readers can enter the Pierreville aeronautic plant, the empirical setting for the study, where aside from homers, airplane engines generate most of the production (chapter 3: “The Pierreville Plant: Setting and Status Divides”). The plant provides the stage for an in-depth study of homer-making and, more broadly, the social regulations at work unearthed in the process. Given that data collection and analyses are closely intertwined, and before continuing the roadmap to the book’s content, an explanation of the methodology employed helps to appreciate the book’s findings and implications.

An Overview of the Methodology

The strategy adopted in this book, to begin by observing the small (in this case, these homers) in order to illuminate the large (the social regulations in the plant), is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s technique of enlargement that “brings the rigid in motion … drawn as it is to everything that has slipped through the conventional conceptual net or to things which have been esteemed too trivial by the prevailing spirit for it to have left any traces other than those of hasty judgment.” This book seeks to uncover the social dynamics that govern activity in gray zones and beyond through an examination of apparently insignificant organizational artifacts at the Pierreville plant. A combination of interview, observation, survey, and archival data are mobilized in this examination. The interviews were conducted with retirees of the plant; the observations occurred mostly at the plant Labor Council, situated just outside the plant gates; the surveys were administered to a sample of retirees; and the analyzed archives include corporate and union documents relating to the plant. An overview of these four data sources follows. (For more details, see appendix A, “Data and Methods.”)

After discovering via my informant zero that homers were manufactured at Pierreville, I initially sought official company endorsement of the study. Unsurprisingly, the company refused to endorse it, the official reason being that “the priorities of the plant could not accommodate the request.” Though a bit disappointing, their refusal provided me with the freedom to pursue this study by other means. Having disclosed my intentions in good faith to management, I now felt I could approach any plant member without the fear of being reported. Specifically, I approached the retiree group of the plant’s Labor Council since retirees are not as prone to corporate sanctions. I shared my interest in homers with them, and asked if I could interview them and if they knew other retirees I could meet. This snowball sampling technique yielded a first set of thirty interviews and allowed for entry into the Pierreville community. Many retirees expressed interest in documenting the social history of the plant and saw select homers as unique craft pieces highlighting the plant’s past, so they decided to endorse the project. Their endorsement provided me with access to the contact database of all plant retirees registered at the Labor Council. Direct mail solicitation of a random sample of plant retirees yielded another forty interviews. A total of seventy interviews with retirees, spanning all hierarchical levels, who worked in the plant, mainly from the 1970s to the late 1990s, therefore constitute the first source of data.

Given the methodological biases of the study-positing that interactions sustain social identities-it is only fair to describe my own relationship to these retirees. (Appendix B, “Position in the Field,” further clarifies the relationship.) I never worked in the plant before or during this research project, and I had only driven by it a few times before I embarked on the study. Thus, this study began as an outsider’s perspective on a given social system. Many small actions made my initial disconnection salient: minor decisions, such as selecting the “wrong” drink from a menu when visiting retirees at their home or referring to workshops by name rather than number (the former favored by management and headquarters, the latter by lower-level plant members). At the same time, that a relative of mine worked at Pierreville and that the plant had a significant population of technicians and engineers (closer in training to mine) allowed me to find ways to connect with the retirees. Though I never became an insider, by the end of the project, when I walked by groups of retirees to whom I had grown attached, they often shouted out in my direction, smiles on their faces, “Here is the homer-maker!” suggesting that despite my social oddness at Pierreville, the Pierreville members made a place for me.

One could often find groups of retirees in the Labor Council building at Pierreville, dropping off insurance claims or attending a retiree’s bridge or photography club meeting, and sometimes at the factory museum attached to the plant, where they reconditioned old engines later displayed in aeronautic museums. The observations I conducted there constitute a second important set of data. Once a week for nearly a year, either between formal interviews or simply to “catch up” with retirees, I spent time in these places.

I obtained a third data source from a survey I conducted on retirement homers, which I administered to a random sample of retirees. Restricting the focus of the survey to retirement homers was a condition of the Labor Council’s endorsement of the survey. The survey tested potential variations along occupational lines in patterns of receiving retirement homers and solicited interviews. A total of 184 surveys were analyzed. Whereas receiving a retirement homer is different than participating in the manufacture of a homer or in interactions dealing with more generic homers, the survey provided an additional entry point into the community of homer-makers, since homer recipients are often homer-makers as well.

(Continues…)

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