Abstract
This paper provides an empirical investigation of Israeli flight attendants in order to characterize the structural underpinnings of the liquid self, and their resultant phenomenological consequences on personal morality, conceptions of self and interpersonal relations. The study touched upon the motivations and behaviours of flight attendants, how they juggle family and personal commitments, and the internal persona they adopt vis-à-vis their own selves. By contextualizing their narratives through the structural elements of their jobs, the study exposes the attendants’ ambivalent and incoherent lives and the complex ways in which they manage their social networks across place and time. While flight attendants evince chameleon-like selves and fluid morality in their interpersonal relations – taking advantage of their ability to stage different selves in different ports of life – they maintain their multiple selves in functioning ways.
Introduction
During the past two decades, writings on post-modernism have burgeoned. The concept is widely used today in explaining contemporary historical shifts, artistic productions as well as personal identities (Baudrillard, 1994; Bauman, 2000; Clifford, 1997; Heller, 1999; Jameson, 1991; Kumar, 1995). Indeed, these historical shifts affect the very nature of selfhood and identity (Craig, 1997). Some psychologists, for example, point out that the post-modern self is ‘shattered’ or suffers from a sense of ‘multiple personalities’ or self complexity (Glass, 1993; Holstein and Gubrium, 2000). Similarly, sociologists have used the idea to explain homelessness and to discuss the liquid and uncommitted nature of interpersonal and love relationships (Bauman, 2003, Beck-Gernsheim and Beck, 1995, Illouz, 2007, Pescosolido and Rubin, 2000). Implicitly, at least, many authors render post-modernity as traumatic, anomic, and pathological, intimating that ‘post-modern occupations’ may structure pathological identities.
In contrast to such intimations at pathology, we show that occupations with extreme levels of mobility produce historically-unique but simultaneously normally-functioning employees. We characterize some structural underpinnings of the extremely mobile occupation of flight attendants – quick shifts across roles, rapid moves across space and time, and lack of fixed social networks – and study their resultant phenomenological consequences on personal morality, conceptions of self and interpersonal relations. Through an empirical investigation of Israeli flight attendants – a unique occupation that received attention of researchers in the past (e.g., Hochschild, 1983; Nielsen, 1982; Whitelegg, 2007) – we show that they are given the opportunity to evince chameleon-like selves and behaviours – having different selves that they keep compartmentalized in different ports or life universes. However, flight attendants maintain their multiple selves in perfectly-functioning ways (Coser, 1991). The structural elements of their role unsettle their identity, integrity, loyalty and morality as modernists lived and understood them. While not all of our flight attendants developed such ‘multiple’ or ‘fluid’ identities, many wrestled with the struggle of identity on a day-to-day basis. We show that despite their hectic occupation, the flight attendants live their liquid identities normally as others.
We extend recent efforts to understand the circumstances, personalities and relationships of the modern self in the specific context of highly-mobile people (Illouz, 2008). Previous studies of extremely mobile occupations – seafarers (Thomas and Bailey, 2009), long-distance truck drivers (de Croon et al., 2004), soldiers on extended missions abroad (Moelker et al., 2008) – have shown that mobility affects all facets of life, and require agents and their social networks to realign their relationships across time and space. However, flight attendants experience an accentuated form of those occupations because the technology of flight created immediate mobility back and forth across time and space, the time travel between home and abroad is often shorter than half a day, and there is no ‘transition period’ between different locations and compartments of life. In this sense, flight attendants provide an extreme case of a highly mobile occupation. By studying flight attendants, we may learn about the personal and moral challenges that similar occupations hold inherent in their structures – thereby shedding light on recent conceptions of liquidity in social life.
Bauman and the Liquid Occupation of the Flight Attendant
Post-modernism is not a coherent body of ideas. It refers to multiple points of view and narratives, the obliteration of eternal and unquestionable truths, and the positioning of perceptions or intellectual positions within specific contexts (Bauman, 1992, 2000; Giddens, 1991). The gradual annihilation of definite truths reflected new ideas concerning the arbitrary nature of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ (Foucault, 1980) and later expanded through the critique of ‘ideology’ and the end of utopia. The blurring of genres and the hybrid combinations of previously coherent and authentic cultural products are created by ever-growing mobility of populations and groups across the globe (Clifford, 1997).
Prominent amongst the interpreters of these blurring and hybrid identities is Zygmunt Bauman who defined the era of post-modernity as an era of absence – the absence of stable relations, the disappearance of grand narratives (Bauman, 1991, 1992, 2000; Bauman and Tester, 2001). In discussing the changing nature of emancipation, individualism, time-space coordinates, work and communal relations, Bauman suggests that post-modernity lacks stable norms and patterns. Consequently, life in post-modernity lacks stable anchors of meaning (e.g. ultimate values and standards of appreciation), and instead of previous anchors, individuals experience ambivalence and existential insecurity (Bauman, 1991). This liquidity is characterized by the collapse of modern illusions of a better future, and the disintegration of attempts at centralized administration of a better society; and social relations, including love, become temporary and fluid (Bauman, 2003).
In a deep sense, then, post-modernity marked the death of the Enlightenment’s belief in reason and the good society (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972); and it blurred prior coherent cultures and diffused the meaning of authenticity (Clifford, 1997; Ritzer, 2004). Post-modernity amounts to a sense of disorder – all categories seem to be arbitrary, all orders are based on brute power. Under these new historical circumstances, confusion and ambivalence become rampant (Bauman, 1991). While modernity aspired to order, control and predictability, its latest historical phases have harboured disorder, confusion and even randomness. Bauman suggests that in late modernity ambivalence-as-incoherence became a Zeitgeist – ‘the spirit of the time’; a general cultural orientation that is loosely identified with post-modernity (Yair, 2007). As Bauman said:
What is…new about the postmodern rendition of uncertainty…is that it is no longer seen as a temporary nuisance, which with due effort may be either mollified or altogether overcome. The post-modern world is bracing itself for life under a condition of uncertainty which is permanent and irreducible. (Bauman, 1992: 21)
Work in structural sociology attempted to translate the general conceptions of post-modern theory into concrete social formations and occupations that impinge on individuals and identities. In doing so, Pescosolido and Rubin (2000) suggested that, in contrast with traditional and modern formations, post-modern individuals ‘are not enmeshed within interconnected circles but rather stand outside them, and their connections to institutions are multiple and often temporary, not single and lifelong. Individuals, over time, have connections to many workplaces, to many families, perhaps even to more than one religion’ (Pescosolido and Rubin, 2000: 62-3). They continue to point out that ‘social life is based on serial, ephermal, short-term, contingent relationships with comparably limited contracts’ (Pescosolido and Rubin, 2000: 63). These structural elements may blur identities and change modern conceptions of morality in social relations.
The Structural Elements of Flight Attendants
Flight attendance constitutes a structurally extreme occupation to test the abovementioned ideas. Frequent travels and hectic timetables create unpredictable working conditions (Whitelegg, 2007). The un-structuring occupational structure of the flight attendant has three main features: The first is being ‘on call.’ Flight attendants can neither enjoy a pre-planned schedule nor plan one for their immediate future. Being constantly on call, they traverse life with a sense of transience – now I’m here, now I’m there – without advanced knowledge of the timing of each station. The second feature is liquid ‘time-space’ loops. Flight attendants often find themselves landing when the clock shows that they are yet to take off. Aeroplanes carry all passengers across time and space, yet flight attendants encounter this off-setting of clocks and spaces on a daily basis.
The third structural feature is the frequent development and dissolution of social relations. Frequent visits to new destinations lead to transient chance encounters, but at the same time to new possible selves. Lost destinations often tear apart the meagre social relations that flight attendants have succeeded to form, and dissolve the new self that was about to develop. Furthermore, their flying schedules weaken home-based networks too. Consequently, flight attendants re-form, re-group and develop new social networks as they go from destination to destination, with a modest commitment to partners in different stations. Their unique occupational structure allows incumbents to continually de-construct and re-construct their selves.
In the following analysis we show how these occupational features influence the lifestyle of flight attendants and their strategic choice and presentation of multiple selves across contexts. In contrast with prior depictions of the self as fluid, shattered or homeless, we show that flight attendants live their lives in a non-structured structure which produces unique, experientially-normal and consistent life patterns of inconsistency and fluidity.
Our study extends Hochschild’s classic investigation of flight attendants (1983) in significant ways. Her book has shown that ‘emotional work’ during flights, such as the duty to smile while not feeling in the mood, leads to emotional dissonance. In the long term, this can eventually lead to fatigue, drug use, alcoholism and sexual dysfunction. In contrast, the tenured flight attendants we studied show that unlike Hochschild’s suffering agents, those who committed to this occupational lifestyle managed to structure a way of life where they balance dualities, ambiguities and dissonances; however, extending her work, we show that they also use their occupation to disconnect from their home relationships and families in ways they find most satisfying.
Method
Sampling
All tenured flight attendants (n=250) in an Israeli carrier were asked to reply to a short questionnaire that requested basic information about their social background and lifestyle. Tenured flight attendants – with at least five years of experience and expecting to retire at the mandatory age of 68 – were selected because they have proved to be committed to this unique lifestyle – having spent at least five years on the job. Secondly, 13 flight attendants who responded agreed to meet for an intensive open-ended interview – two via telephone interview. 20 more flight attendants agreed to participate in more casual conversations about their lifestyle. Those 33 interviews were supplanted by ‘galley-talks’ – casual conversations in the kitchens of aeroplanes, in hotel lobbies and recreational hangouts. These casual conversations were held over the two years of the study.
The Interview
The major strategy of data collection followed life-story interviews (Denzin, 1989; McAdams, 1996; Lieblich et al., 1998). The assumption underlying this method is that respondents construct themselves through the phenomenological stories they tell themselves and others. The interviews were open-ended and were led by the basic question: What was your life story before coming to the company, and how did that story evolve after you became a flight attendant? The interviews were carried out one-on-one, always in a secluded and private setting without other flight attendants present. The respondents were very easygoing and candid throughout the interviews and did not hesitate to discuss highly-private issues.
Method of Analysis
Each interview was read in its entirety. Each section was assigned a code or theme, and the themes were collated across all the interviews. By marking and re-marking each of the interviews with those themes, we were able to generalize across interviews. The results described here use those emergent themes as leading heuristics to understand conceptions of self, lifestyle and social relationships of flight attendants and their strategic manoeuvring with their multiple selves.
Results
The results are organized around four themes that refer to the ambivalent phenomenology of the flight attendants. Each in its own unique modality shows how the compartmentalized nature of the occupation is accompanied by disregard for coherence; how the structural ambivalence produced by the de-structuring structure of the job is existentially handled through day-to-day activities.
The Broken Cage: Borders and Transgression
In using the idea of the ‘broken cage’ the interviewees referred to an ambivalent desire to navigate life between two contradictory existential conditions. On the one hand, the flight attendants express a wish to traverse normative borders and enjoy personal freedom; on the other hand, they express a romanticized quest to live within normative boundaries. This ambivalence suggests that the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘vacation’ – in Hebrew sharing the same root – blur and blend. The short breaks between flights are often perceived as vacations. Though limited and brief, the structure of swings between being on and off duty provides the opportunity to evade commitments, to be relieved of daily or normative obligations – until a call for another flight comes. As one respondent said, ‘I flew to Rishikesh, it took me twelve hours to get there…Flight, taxi, and another taxi…Overall I had five days of stay in India…It was amazing; when I got back to Israel I felt like I was still there…I began practicing yoga in Tel Aviv…But I really threw off the Indian yoga pants – I’m really not for this shanty banty’. This experience – part of her job – disconnected the respondent from her daily life in Israel. Unlike backpackers, who tend to create a total and coherent experience of their travel to India, our respondent stayed for a limited duration, and her experience of that visit to India was limited. She constantly felt like she was ‘on call,’ colouring her ‘vacation’ in different shades.
Respondents often mentioned the juggling between normative living and traversing boundaries. The structure that unsettles the flight attendants produced several cravings and practices around the sense of freedom, choice and agency. Alon, a 34 year old single male flight attendant gave a clear testimony to this, speaking of ‘balancing’ freedom with duties, a life on the job and the freedom of being.
Through the seven years I have been in the company the question arose: ‘What is the right way to have balance? To be us?’…During the last years on the job, in the midst of a very chaotic reality, I found a satisfying balance. The company allows me free days even while I’m on duty abroad and even here; this allows me to ‘relax the days and space it’. On any given day, either here or abroad, I will go out to see the sunshine, I will always cook something and will always practice yoga, I’ll usually read, and meet some friends. This very non-balanced job allows me to find that balance.
Several flight attendants referred to the constant physical movement across countries and continents in terms of a popular children’s game called ‘sea and land’. This analogy conveyed their sense of leaping across continents – like in the game, they are ‘on call’ to be either in one continent or another. Wherever they land, though, they quickly find their place. As Nirit, a married female respondent with nine years of experience said, ‘The life of the flight attendants reminds me of the game of ‘sea and land’ – you jump and shout ‘sea’ or ‘land’, but it doesn’t matter where you land, as in each place you learn to swim’. Those transitions call for frequent ‘switches’ of state of mind. Notwithstanding the difficulty of those frequent transitions, the respondents report that they cherish the freedoms they generate and are eager to retain them.
They cherish the freedoms because they resent the ‘closed’ nature of normative life. As Alon said, ‘The job allows me to express myself as a human being; I’m not a victim of circumstances. I take responsibility for life. I have a lot of control over my choices and the paths I choose in life. I’m not a victim of a job, of circumstances, of the capitalistic world…There is something boundless in that energy; there is no ‘time’ – I decide how much to invest and in what…I do not make sacrifices, I live as I wish to live, and my world is constructed by the parameters I sought to have in life’. This sense of agency – generated by the constant swings from one place to another – allows flight attendants to generate a sense of personal consistency and self-fulfillment in the seemingly disordered and chaotic structure of their task. Alon continued by saying, ‘Every absence of structure becomes a structure. I have a monthly schedule and this is my structure. I plan for each month. This way I don’t lose myself and construct a world without commitments – I go to the movies, to dinner, do this or that project, and if I have a flight somewhere I plan a tour’.
Family life is one of the major anchors to normative being. Family life is a constant weight that pulls against the quest for freedom. For many, family life is a burden. Flight attendants enjoy their job because it allows them to release those anchors, weights and burdens. While maintaining a connection to their family, they use their swinging movements across countries to emancipate themselves during those gaps in time. As Mickey, a single female respondent of 38 said, ‘The advantages [of being a flight attendant] are amazing. The disconnection, the flights and the free annual vacation…I have a sick mother, and for me the job is blessing. I can be beside her, yet go away. As if to give her my full attention when I’m here, but when I’m gone I am an orphan. On the one hand it gives me a sense of doing, but on the other I never give up on myself. Never’.
Keeping close to the family should be especially appreciated given the Israeli emphasis on commitment to family life. Children are expected to care for their elders; couples are expected to live together and be loyal. They are expected to bear children and maintain relations with the extended family. Under these circumstances, transgressions gain deeper meaning. Such meaning is given by Karin, a 30 year old attendant who said, ‘I was in the shower this morning, thinking what to pack as it’s winter… I thought of dresses to go out in, and then I realized, ‘Who will take care of my son? So his father will care for him. It’s not my problem. This is the advantage of having this job – for me as a mother. You run away from it; it’s kind of an illusion’. This clear statement of transgression – of breaking away from the family – was tempered by other respondents who spoke of the value added to family life by being disconnected and away travelling. As Gali, a 45 year old married woman with 20 years of experience said that she quit her managerial role in a local company.
I found that I have a lot of time to spend with the kids and the family. It was a new and refreshing experience. My life changed. The flights are refreshing…This break from the family, from my friends, from life in this country, [I feel] relaxed as I’ve never been as an executive…I have no reservations about my choice. Sometimes I go on a flight distressed – I argue with the kids but have to go. It’s frustrating and distressing to solve issues over the phone…Yet that distance can drown those distressing moments just as it can create them…I came back after missing the kids and then I forget everything and stay at home for a few days.
These examples show the various facets of the theme of ‘the broken cage’. They have shown how flight attendants navigate between living freely without commitments and having a sense of stability and a home. The unique structure of the job bears witness in the inner lives of flight attendants, in their geography of being, and in the way they juggle family life. The balancing acts between material and spiritual cravings, between economic freedom (which necessitates fixed employment) and peace of mind all testify to the same tension. The trips across distances and their fast lifestyles clarify the dynamic nature of transitions, challenging flight attendants to find a status quo wherein they can both find self-expression and individuality yet maintain ties to family and friends.
Stranger Me’s: Juggling of Identities
The interviewees repeatedly referred to the juggling of different identities across space and time. Expressing Pescosolido and Rubin’s depiction of the post-modern condition (2000), flight attendants often mention the fact that they have multiple selves or identities; that they live as different persons in the different places that the aeroplane takes them; that what was once a ‘strange self’ becomes – for a short while – close and taken for granted.
Those liquid, changing or multiple selves that the interviewees allude to refer to core elements of identity as sexual preference, religious, and national identity. For short periods of time and in different destinations, they feel that they now live their ‘authentic self,’ yet this ‘authentic self’ changes as they move. Underlying it all, their deepest sense is of having a multiple, compartmentalized and fluid set of selves – contradictory at times – each of which they express in different places. Paradoxically, they depict their lives as ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘insane,’ as if suffering from a ‘split personality’ but regard those abnormalities as workable solutions for their personal aspirations. As Gali said, ‘A flight attendant is a bit schizophrenic. When I am away on a flight I have no control on my life back home; I do other things without my family, and I experience things which they have no part in’. This recurrent disjuncture between life-worlds – between the ‘normal life’ back home and the temporary authentic self in foreign destinations – provides the context for fluidity, complexity, and multiplicity (see also Thomas and Bailey, 2009).
Such multiplicity and seeming contradictions were often exemplified in relation to sexual identities and preferences. Some flight attendants lead heterosexual lives in one place, switching to homosexual preferences in another; others are able to engage in extreme forms of sexuality abroad that they refrain from experimenting with back home. In that sense, flight attendants betray common conceptions, which conceive uni-modal sexual identities as expressing ‘a true self’ and define those who live in the ‘closet’ as bearing a ‘false identity’. From their perspective, one need not be ‘either/or’; one can be both, expressing each identity in a different setting.
The interviewees often expressed these oscillating identities. Yaara, who is in a lesbian relationship, said ‘The idea of ‘here and there’ always did me good…I fulfilled a dream, I love it and every time I feel happy to have managed to accomplish my dream. My sense of difference subsided as I became a flight attendant. To be a lesbian in my world is different. But being in the air changes everything…maybe my lesbianism fits this world’. Tzachi, a married heterosexual man with children at home but homosexual when abroad, buttressed this: ‘I have a wife who I adore and two charming boys. I can tell you that I’m as masculine for them as can be…Here only two or three employees know that I’m gay abroad’. He continued by reporting, ‘It all began in Germany. From a young age, I knew that I am attracted to men, but in the place where I come from, and in what I believe – I am straight as can be. I love to be screwed at times…well, it’s not totally gay, its gay tourism’. These interviewees do not conceive of themselves as bisexual; rather, they split their identity in time and space – here one ‘me’ lives, there another ‘true self’ lives. Another pattern – less extreme, perhaps – was expressed by other interviewees who turn from calm commitment in one place to wild experimentation with multiple partners in another. As Gadi – in his thirties – said, the flight attendants’ occupational structure allows such juggling:
I am in the gay community, but how many more experiences can you have outside, how irresponsible can you be, how many more opportunities to mess around…it’s the anonymity…I get to Frankfurt where no one knows me and I can do whatever I like…It satisfies my core needs – shopping, screwing around, and being alone. This is how I want to live my life; forever…If I did not have the job I would not have lived here. Fortunately, I have the job; it allows me to connect my reality here with the free life I have while being abroad without commitment. As I told you, being a stranger, like a prince, one who comes from an exotic country to conquer the male European.
The oscillation between relationships – between a committed partner at home and transient partners while away, for example – is another form of juggling identities. The structure of time/space warp that characterizes the flight attendant lifestyle turns fantasy into reality and blurs the normative concepts of loyalty and commitment. Several interviewees recounted how they manage the line separating their life and moral sense across time/space boundaries. As Chen, a 35 year old man, said, ‘I awoke today in the ‘crew rest’ (a resting cabin) and didn’t know where I am. It happens at times. What frightened me was that I forgot who I was; I had to stop for a second, to wake up with a pounding heart. Until I realized that I’m on the ‘crew rest’ I thought I was at my girlfriend’s place, and I sensed that she discovered something that she need not know. I was really, really scared’. This exceptional experience of losing control of the boundaries of time/space – and of one’s identity – testifies to the immensity of the task of patrolling those borders and keeping those identities separated. This oscillating pattern proves to be gender-neutral, as both male and female flight attendants engage in these sophisticated juggling strategies. The following excerpt from Danielle, a female interviewee 36 years old and married, provides a good example:
I left my child sick at home. Don’t think I have no guilt feelings; that’s obvious. But here I think about myself and I say something simple: My love for my kids and husband should not overrule me and my trips; I want to feel as though I’m still single, to flirt in coffee shops. This is another side of me which I do not destroy in moving from who I was to my role as a ‘wife and a mother.’ I am still the single, cool person I was…Yesterday I dated someone who I know here, drinking coffee, nothing sexual. It’s as if I’m experimenting with the opportunity. I exploit it up to a point so that it doesn’t turn into cheating – but I am filled with excitement.
Another challenge to what is often conceived as a core component of identity refers to national commitments. The interviewees often expressed an ambivalent stance, oscillating between avid nationalism on the one hand, and uninterest in Israel’s political and security predicaments on the other. However, the interviewees reported that they did not experience those oscillating feelings as contradictory: Each context called for a distinct attitude; and they sensed that they need no consistency across them. As Nati said, ‘I may love this country, but it suffocates me – so the ability to run away every time something bad happens, not participate in them and fly away – then I don’t have to call everyone’. Rani, a 40 year old male in a relationship supplemented this testimony by adding that, ‘This job can give you whatever you dream of, and that’s important because all of us seek freedom. The freedom on the job is economic, personal; we do not need to be accountable to everybody, and the nation – when we are not obliged to be here…We do not have to express a political statement all the time’. Zilli, a mature female flight attendant and the daughter of an ex-army pilot expressed this bi-modality vis-à-vis Israeli nationality:
I used to walk with my father in his uniform, all proud of him. I knew my life is here. Even when I flew to New York, I knew it was fiction. No matter how much I fantasize about living in another country, I live and will die here. It’s this type of conflict. Those flights emancipate me. I can be here, yet not be here. I call these ‘small touches of happiness’ and ‘small bites of pleasure.’ Strangely, I find myself most patriotic when am away, as if in the extreme right; when here, I can volunteer in an Arab feminist organization.
As Pescosolido suggested (2000), the post-modern self has structural precedents. The routine structure of flight attendants provides the clearest example for these structural precedents, but as our data suggests, they also exemplify the personal life-worlds that emanate from those structures. Specifically, our respondents repeatedly exemplified how different identities are constantly reshuffled and negotiated with a little sense of sociological ambivalence (Merton, 1976). While some talk of ‘schizophrenia,’ most respondents view this split identity as normal and manageable. This normality of what is normatively conceived as immoral and non-normal provides another glance into our subjects’ ability to internally neutralize the potential of deviant identity and self-stigmatization (Goffman, 1974; Scott and Lyman, 1968). The flight attendants live this unique identity without an ideological drive; their self-stranger identities are simply lived as possible normative lives.
The Wandering Flying Jews
The interviewees often express the aforementioned structural characteristics of the job of flight attendants in terms of the age-old metaphor of the ‘wandering Jew’ (though without anti-Semitic connotations; simply referring to the experience of exile). Being in one place in the morning and in another place in the afternoon echoes the existential being of people in exile – being strangers in one place, yet still feeling strangers in another (Simmel, 1950). As Alon said, ‘We as Jews have always wandered and were connected to this existential spirit; to our inner self, but always with a wide social awareness and lots of will not to give up our identity: The eternal exile and the fear to lose ourselves’. Other interviewees even expressed an existential need to remain connected to the Jewish predicament – and thus to remain in exilic domains. The evidence suggests that the flight attendants experience themselves as Jews and Israelis, yet at the same time as cosmopolitans – citizens of the world with connections throughout the globe (Beck, 2001). They traverse borders – personally, professionally, and culturally. They have romantic relations in other countries, import foreign goods, and even study abroad – all the while hopping across oceans and identities. Rami expressed this combination of localism and cosmopolitanism:
I play football on Saturdays in the very same field I used to play while in high school. If I’m in Israel, there is no chance I’ll miss football there. It is part of me. After the game, I go to my Mom’s for the Friday night meal. It is the connection to my culture, to who I am…When I’m not in Israel on a Friday night I miss that, but I make do with something else. Usually I attend a local bar and drink a beer with a friend or another flight attendant – and at times even alone, which is the most fun, because it is like you are part of their culture. I know the places that the locals attend and drink with them.
Notwithstanding the motives of exile and wandering – the above quote and others suggest that the flight attendants blend into local customs and feel part of seemingly foreign places. Expressing a cosmopolitan identity, they do not prefer one place over another: They feel at home in all places, and actively plunge into local places and customs to ensure they feel at home wherever they are – playing with locals, attending bars, and frequenting meeting places. Israel, the ‘natural home,’ is indeed not a privileged place – it is just the place where family and friends live. The flight attendants often point to other countries as the true anchor for their existential place in the world – if there is a true anchor. As Liran, a female aged 34 with nine years on the job said, ‘Israel turns into their problem, and their problems are now part of mine. It’s all mixed up – and I confusingly ask myself: Wait, are you an Israeli? An American? What are you? This is a wonderful feeling’. This fluid positioning of places and identities was expressed by Elinor (32 years old, divorced), a Russian immigrant to Israel, whose parents left Israel and now live in Germany:
In Europe I am mostly Russian. With my parents I am the most Israeli, as I always cared for their basic needs and managed their bills. With my friends I am stylish, as if already an American.
From a Jewish perspective, Jews have always wandered in hope to get to the Promised Land. Now that they are in the Promised Land, however, the flight attendants seek to run away. They seek exile, they seek freedom. The way some interviewees talked about this could be interpreted in terms of Jewish cultural narratives which talk about a predisposition to pack and move yet again. Instead of a melting pot for the exiles, for the flight attendants Israel became a springboard for fleeing to alternative cosmopolitan centres. It seems that their Israeli and cosmopolitan identities do not contradict each other. The flight attendants attain this co-existence because they work in a structural context that allows them to juggle both identities by the hour and by the day.
The Time Tunnel: Transitions and Parallel Universes
The respondents refer to multiple identities, but they also speak about multiple universes that they traverse. These universes seem to have an internal logic that is independent of their existence in other universes. For example, in one universe they act like adults – with a regular job, a family, mortgage – but in another they behave in a childlike way – without commitments or boundaries. The movement between these orthogonal universes is carried through a time tunnel produced by flights, switching between one universe and the other in rapid moves. As the respondents suggest, the flight is not just an eight- or twelve-hour break; it constitutes a move to another plane of existence, to another mode of phenomenological and behavioural being-in-the-world. The flight attendants are clearly aware of these independent universes, and they even feel committed to embrace or engulf themselves in each universe as they step down from flights. This suggests that they are not passive in this crossing between universes; rather, they enjoy those transitions and seek to reap their identity-benefits. As the following quotes suggest, indeed, the flight constitutes a transition across life stages and modes of being-in-the-world.
I arrive at the flight as a child: I’m being picked up, I do my job, we enter our queue and that’s it. To be involved is to be responsible; to invest yourself. It is as if on the one hand I’m a child that has to be brought and be taken, and behave as he likes, but on the other hand it’s a lot of things which aren’t really good…It is a job but at the same time a place for my own self. Therefore, I take responsibility for the passengers, I go onto the aeroplane, and go out travelling on my own (Eli, male homosexual in his thirties). To be self-fulfilled I have to taste everything – and that means, indeed, from everything. In our world you take responsibility, so it’s not surprising that many choose occupations which allow them some balance…We are afraid to get to 50 years of age and to look at our lives and say we missed something…Luckily, we live in a world that pushes us to experience, to postpone our adulthood by studying and travelling, so we remain a bit childish but with a lot of responsibility to balance the child and the adult in me – to have money and enjoy life in a responsible way (Alon).
The interviewees are tenured flight attendants; they have been on the job for at least five years. In speaking about their tenure decision, they often mentioned a sense of depression and confusion, generated by their fear of losing their being in one universe, notably their childish being. They suspected that getting tenure would mean that they have to be responsible from that point on; that they have to be serious and committed. As Nati said, ‘It’s not easy to understand that as of now this is what you’re going to do…it was very difficult for many people, it was very difficult for me, I can’t say exactly why, because it’s suddenly this awareness that this is what you’re going to do’.
However, soon after the tenure crisis, the interviewees understood that their ability to cross over multiple universes is not dependent upon tenure; they understood that their complex existence would not change as they moved from temporary employee status to a tenured one. Rather, they learnt to appreciate that the job always allows them to move across universes of being. The time tunnel that the aeroplane generates constitutes a structure that allows them to move across identity universes on a daily basis. In that sense, their ability to live a child-like existence is inherent to the structure of their occupation. And this allows them a moratorium for indefinite periods (Kahane, 1997).
Discussion
Bauman – one of the leading scholars on the post-modern experience – describes our era through the concept of liquidity. He suggests that while previous eras had constancy and clarity, today’s world is experienced as a flux – nothing has constancy, values lose their metaphysical underpinnings, or, as Marx said, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Berman, 1988). In his book Liquid Modernity (Bauman, 2000), Bauman focuses on five facets that constitute meaning: emancipation, individualism, crosses between time and space, work and communal life. Each of those areas had changed in the transition to liquid modernity. Today’s world, suggests Bauman, blurred those concepts. Nothing in experience – even time and space – is fixed anymore. The illusions of modernity about progress, and the false hopes to have central control and planning for the betterment of humanity, have finally crumbled. Indeed, all that was solid dissipated into thin air.
The present article set out to show that structural elements of rapid movements across space and time and lack of fixed social networks indeed produce liquid modes of being and identity. The study of flight attendants thus breathes life into Bauman’s concept of the liquid self. Furthermore, while doing so we also provide a new tack on Hochschild’s classical study (1983) of the characteristics of emotional work amongst flight attendants. In contrast to her portrayal of the role as engendering ambiguity, paradox, ambivalence and depression, we have shown here that those who have chosen to have a lifelong career as flight attendants actually thrive on the characteristics of the occupation. They take advantage of the structural elements of mobility and skillfully manage their multiple identities while living with contradictions and inconsistencies. Despite their hectic occupation, the flight attendants regard themselves as normal and unexceptional. Indeed, though they give expression to complex and at times seemingly contradictory identities, the flight attendants see their juggling of multiple personae as fitting their unique context. In Baudrillard’s terminology, the compartmentalization between time, space and roles allows them to juggle reversals between reality and fantasy (Baudrillard, 1994).
The four themes we identified – the ‘broken cage’, ‘stranger me’, ‘the wandering flying Jew’ and ‘the time tunnel’ – all describe the phenomenology of living through an ideal type of a liquid occupation where identity and social borders are constantly being transgressed. They support Jameson’s argument that post modernity is characterized by a lack of depth and the erosion of affect (1991). While these features have positive effects, they also have negative ones. Our respondents embrace their occupations, but their longing for security and stability at home lurks beneath their contentment. In Agnes Heller’s terminology, ‘homesickness’ is still paramount in flight attendants’ liquid modality of life (Heller, 1999). This modality is neither good nor bad. It is a product of occupational structures, and the latter allow adopting new types of identities and relations. From a sociological point of view, the flight attendants are simply an ideal case for getting a glimpse into the consequences that highly mobile roles embody.
Flight attendants indeed share occupational features with other highly mobile occupations. As we mentioned above, seafarers, long distance truck drivers, soldiers on long missions and even traditional sales people – who spent long time away from home – share some affinities with flight attendants. The latter, however, experience mobility across distances and life worlds in much higher speeds. They are required or given the opportunity to alternate selves or compartmentalize their identities in a hectic and unpredictable manner on a daily basis. Other occupations may share the unique modality described above. For example, hi-tech employees, academics and business people who experience rapid mobility across working locations – i.e., working in two or three locales at the same time, or moving between centres of life and being constantly ‘on call.’ Historical developments suggest that more people and occupations will become latched to similar structural elements of liquidity and diffuseness (Bauman, 2003).
We have shown that the structural elements of liquidity and mobility unsettle linear and coherent identities; for some of the flight attendants they also unsettle integrity, loyalty and morality as modernists lived and understood them. While not all of our flight attendants used those structural elements to adopt such fluid, chameleon-like lifestyles, most do wrestle with issues of identity on a day-to-day basis. Nevertheless, our respondents suggest that – though challenging at times – these occupational structures do not produce pathology and dysfunction. Rather, they live a life they are happy with and insist on continuing as much as they can. Still, while celebrating their freedom and individuality, many flight attendants express romantic desires to re-embrace modernity: Craving stable connections and emotional attachment to personal social relations. Future studies should focus on those dilemmas as they are subjectively experienced in different settings and occupations.