Jack Haas

Learning Real Feelings A Study of High Steel Ironworkers' Reactions To Fear and Danger

This paper describes how the author came to learn, through nine months of participant observation, how high steel ironworkers feel and act towards the dangers of their work. Ironworkers define much of their work situation as dangerous, and have developed, out of interactions about this common problem, collectively shared perspectives for enhancing control over the work situation. These processes of control include testing and assessing other workers, communicating these evaluations to others, and establishing worker reputations. Similar processes of control are applied to bosses, contractors, and others whose actions impinge on worker autonomy and self-interest. These processes of control are very analogous to those describing other dangerous occupations. The perception of danger by workers in quite different occupations leads them to develop similar mechanisms of control over their work fellows and environment.

Binging Educational Control Among High Steel Ironworkers

peer or colleague relations develop, in other situations, students control teachers. Above all, we must recognize the developing character of these relations, characterized by llux and situational redefinition (peer, 1 ~)O8 ). In the broadest sensed, all interaction is cducutional, but in schools we deliberately attempt to change people. As mechanisms of social control, schools and training evaluate, punish, and reward. In this paper, I show how such mechanisms of control vary with the relations of participants in different t

Competing commitments: Unanticipated problems of field research

This paper examines the central problems that affected a team research effort in a study of professional socialization. The researchers draw the readers attention to the unanticipated difficulties they encountered in conducting the research—difficulties which, they suspect, are widely shared, but infrequently reported, in the discipline. The authors focus the analysis and discussion around the theme of competing commitments which affected the pace and direction of the research and created strains in team relations, leading eventually to the reconstitution of the team.