Dreaming of space, imagining membership
Zara Mirmalek, University of California San Diego
Images of organizations can excite desires of membership in people, fuelling them to spend a significant portion of their lives seeking the material experience of the imagined organizational membership. Imbuing their imaginations are media sources such as film, television, and literature, all of which provide organizational accounts and depictions of esoteric rewards, material, and emotional gains conferred upon members of particular organizations. These accounts, while appearing primarily to inform people of the rewards and satisfactions of membership, at the same time, I argue, may also serve to inform people’s expectations of normative work practices, such as temporal rhythms of production and ideal membership identities.
Once a person joins the organization to which they have long sought membership, how do their imagined versions of work and identity come to bear on their work practices? That is, how do members respond in situ to discrepancies between imagined and actual experiences of work? And through their responses, are issues rendered as structural (responsibilities of the organizational infrastructure) or individual (personal responsibilities) issues? In seeking to understand the phenomena of maintenance work, wherein organization members engage in workarounds and invisible work to make-up for the absence of support technologies and social support, I examine ethnographic data from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers mission (MER), collected during one year of participant-observation research on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers mission (MER) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California.
Drawing on Goffman’s theory of stigma management (1963), I posit that members of NASA’s MER mission responded to discrepancies between preconceptions and actual experiences of work practices by trying to prevent the display of character stigmas, which threaten member status and life chances. And, that the underpinning schemas of normal were informed by preconceptions of idealized membership and work practices found in sensational accounts of organizational identities. In this paper, I examine how this configuration helps to make visible the work practices that emerged in response to work system breakdowns like time management, which had been inadequately provided for in the organizational infrastructure, and, why members constituted these breakdowns as individual rather than structural responsibilities. Towards this examination, I focus on the work of time management and investigate the possibility that the sense of temporal rhythms that members receive from external accounts of work in the organization serve as a source of resistance to allowing imagined processes to give way to actual processes and to the experience of temporal rhythms.