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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Abigail Marks
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.This article explores the relationship between technology and occupational identity based on working-life biographical interviews with older telecommunications engineers. In the construction of their own working-life biographical narratives, participants attached great importance to the technology with which they worked. The article contends that workers’ relationship with technology can be more nuanced than either the sociology of technology literature or the sociology of work literature accommodates. Adopting the concept of affordances, it is argued that the physical nature of earlier electromechanical technology afforded engineers the opportunity to ‘fix’ things through the skilled application of tools and act as autonomous custodians of ‘living’ machines: factors that were inherent to their occupational identity. However, the change to digital technology denied the affordances to apply hands-on skill and undermined key elements of the engineering occupational identity. Rather than simply reflecting the nostalgic romanticizing of the past, the biographies captured deterioration in the material realities of work.
Author(s): MacKenzie R, Marks A, Morgan K
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Sociology
Year: 2017
Volume: 51
Issue: 4
Pages: 732-748
Print publication date: 01/08/2017
Online publication date: 15/12/2015
Acceptance date: 01/09/2015
Date deposited: 02/09/2022
ISSN (print): 0038-0385
ISSN (electronic): 1469-8684
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038515616352
DOI: 10.1177/0038038515616352
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