Claire Le Breton

Play and Pray: ritualistic cooperation for resilience in a high security prison.

I have been working on this project with David Courpasson and Ignasi Marti for almost four years now. We draw from Goffman’s analysis of secondary adjustments in total institutions to examine how a collective of prisoners goes beyond individual privileges seeking and develops cooperative rituals in the context of a high security prison. We show how these inmates both affirm their humanity in a highly constraining environement, and significantly modify the institutional rules of the prison and the relationships they have with the prison authorities.  Our analysis rests on an ethnographic study of the inmates’ rugby team “Los Espartanos”, in an Argentinian high security prison. We specifically unpack the role of cooperative rituals in transforming Goffman’s secondary adjustments into institutional rules: through solidarity and corporeality rituals, this group of inmates practices institutional work.

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Organizational identity work in post-merger integration: Cycles of mobilizing and expanding discursive resources.

This paper draws from my Master thesis, I develop it with David Kroon, Niels Noorderhaven and Eero Vaara. We examine the process of organizational identity-building during the post-merger integration phase following the merger between Air France and KLM in April 2004. In our findings, we explore how identity issues that come up in a post-merger integration process lead to organizational identity work around specific topics. This identity work in turn gives rise to temporary identity constructions, which change or resolve the identity issues that first of all triggered the identity work. This project focuses on the use of cultural resources in identity-building, to study how this process itself replenishes the resources toolbox, allowing for more self-reflective identity work over time. Hence, we wish to contribute to the literature considering identity work as a part of post-merger integration process, itself being a paramount determinant of a merger’s success or failure.

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Liminal masculinity: betwixt and between class struggles and gender troubles.

This paper examines the intersection of class and gender in the workplace as a dynamic site of productive negotiations. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnography conducted in a French petrochemical factory, it addresses how class struggles between working-class and managerial expectations threaten workers’ gender as a social practice. The paper enriches the literature on multiple masculinities by shedding light on the subtle and productive interlace between apparently competing expressions of masculinity. It shows how in-betweenness develops in liminal occupational spatio-temporalities, where traditional boundaries fade and become blurred. In these fleeting moments, workers perform fluid, porous and constantly changing expressions of masculinity, navigating from one class-based gender expectation to another. The paper frames these results through the concept of liminality to theoretically and methodologically challenge the homogeneity and fixity of current approaches to the intersection of masculinities and other main social categories in the workplace.