Close quarters. Sailing the murky waters of an ethnography ‘at-home’

Taken aback

My ‘homecoming’ as an ethnographer was first the result of an ambivalent feeling I gradually developed during my early years as a post high-school student, away from my home town. I had to move to a far city to join a literary ‘classe préparatoire’ for 3 years (2008–2011), a culturally elitist world where I didn’t feel at ease, and to which I didn’t feel like I belonged. If I had already felt a certain sensation of decalage among other students during high school, the feeling of being ‘out of place’ really struck me at that time, when I sailed away from my home world and found myself among people who were part of social universes that, culturally, were totally opposed to mine.

All of a sudden, I have been surrounded in my everyday life by people very far from—and rather insensitive to—the working-class world(s), surprisingly not affected by its concerns, unmoved by its grievances. I deeply felt like I didn’t ‘fit in’: everything suggested that my mere presence here was, somehow, inappropriate, even unwelcome. Until then, I had never been aware of being, for instance, either graceful or clumsy: such thoughts had never occurred to me. But for the first time, I was overwhelmed with the fierce sense of the awkward, abnormal figure I was cutting there, among my bourgeois classmates. I’ll always remember vividly the silent, judgmental look of my schoolmates—some of whom, later, have become friends—when I turned up at school with a down jacket, chain, and sneakers, displaying a social belonging that was very different to theirs. I also remember the revealing time when I joined a group of students who were innocently introducing themselves by talking about what their parents did. I heard them mention professors, doctors, managers, etc. None of them had parents who were industrial workers, and I felt somewhat humiliated by the symbolic violence of such an apparently inoffensive situation. I couldn’t really talk about my relatives: I sensed their singularity without being able to name it. I was painfully aware of my incongruousness, but without being able to interpret it yet. Like Jack London’s protagonist Martin Eden, a young proletarian struggling to rise above his working-class condition through a passionate pursuit of self-education, hoping to achieve a place among the literary elite, “I didn’t even have, [at that time], the words with which to think.” I felt like “a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging.”

During these years, I took refuge in my work and books as an escape route. Literature and poetry were the first intellectual gateways that awoke my dormant social observations, and thanks to them I started to put into words the bizarre feeling of the growing distance and disconnection I was experiencing both from my classmates and my social origins. I especially found comfort in various authors’ writings describing the experience of being transfuge de classe (Reed-Danahay, 1997). I was also slowly discovering some sociologists whose work has since had a profound impact on me, especially that of Pierre Bourdieu.

Three years passed and in 2011, I have been admitted to two ‘grandes écoles’: one of the most selective French university, in sociology, and one of the top-five French business schools, both known to be cornerstones of elites’ reproduction in France. My gradual discovery of sociological reading fed a strong compulsion to pursue this field of study. Yet, my lack of knowledge of the academic world and its opportunities and the views of my relatives (who were afraid that I would be wasting my so-called ‘potential’ in a domain that would lead me to unemployment), made me follow a parallel business school curriculum. My father, in particular, still a radical left-wing factory unionist, pushed me to take this program as a safety net, even if it went against everything he said about management, because, at least, I would not end up a blue-collar worker like him, he said proudly.

Like a growing headache, my initial sensation of decalage got worse. This feeling of disconnection with the intellectual and bourgeois world never ceased to strike me. Therefore, the ‘return to my roots’ as an ethnographer was firstly a need to escape an environment that I felt uncomfortable with, without being able to fully explain why. At the end of 2011, I took the opportunity of a social science fieldwork project to carry out an investigation in the factory near the port where relatives and friends work, and where I also worked in the summer during my youth. From a very young age, I have been immersed in stories about and imagery of this factory, which have frequently popped up during discussions with family or friends. While telling myself that access to the field would be easy, this choice of subject was at first a pretext to go back home more regularly (officially for the purpose of the study), seeking to run away from the unpleasant sensation I was experiencing as a result of navigating different social universes.

All at sea

However, without being really aware of it initially, another reason for this return home was that, as I was studying social sciences and was evolving in a universe of elitist people, I was continually re-discovering my home environment from different perspectives. Somewhat strangely and without being able to clearly identify what had changed, I somehow started to gradually feel out of place with my own people.

This was not just because we were growing apart. My expanding education created some distance with my home world: as a ‘class defector’ I was increasingly incorporating some of the bourgeois ways of seeing and reacting to the world. The universe for me was thus slowly turning upside down. Everything I used to love gradually seemed like vulgar and (c)rude. I was drifting, helpless, aware of a strange, powerful stream that was pushing me away from my native world. This growing disconnection was fueled by an emerging social class distance, of course, but a special one, as my transformation was at once intellectual and affective. Martin Eden’s quote below, taken from the moment when the protagonist returns to his old working-class friends after a life-changing social and intellectual journey among the upper class, depicts well some of my ambiguous, growing feelings at that time:

“It was the old crowd in which he found himself [..] Martin drank with them, and began to feel really human once more. He was a fool to have ever left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of happiness would have been greater had he remained with them and let alone the books and the people who sat in the high places. Yet the beer seemed not so good as of yore [...] [similarly], he wondered if, after all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends of his youth.”

Over the years, I realized that I was looking at my relatives with newly (re)socialized eyes. It took me a while to admit it, but I felt a growing bittersweet feeling of shame towards my loved ones and the place I used to live. I still remember one of the first embarrassments I felt, when, in middle school as part of a school exchange, I had to host an English pen pal for a week. I had gone to his house the year before, a huge mansion with large, well-furnished rooms. When I returned, I insisted that my parents change the sofa, which had holes in it in our little living room (I somehow became obsessed with it), without realizing at the time that my parents could not afford it. My parents still tell this story today as a running joke, yet with a sour laugh.

When I grew older, I no longer brought many friends home. Because I gradually became aware of what my parents’ house was like, and it wasn’t as good as those of my new friends, who lived in more privileged neighborhoods. The sofa was cheap, but so was everything else in this house.

In the doldrums

Later, as I pursued my studies, I also started to judge the way my relatives ate, the way they talked and the clothes they wore. Rather than money, the issue was eventually their manners, their way of being: their ethos. Gradually, everything seemed vulgar to me, especially their inability to speak without grumbling. I started to be ‘unfair’ towards them, thinking that they were ‘pulling me down’ somehow, as expressed by Martin Eden: “How could I, herding with such cattle, ever become worthy? [..] I was appalled at the problem confronting me, weighted down by the incubus of my working-class station. Everything reached out to hold me down [..] everybody I knew, every tie of life.”

I was ashamed of my home and relatives, yet at the same time, in a terrible feeling of guilt, I was ashamed to be ashamed. I ended up feeling like Pip, Dickens’ protagonist who, after being offered a gentleman’s education, rediscovers his humble home with shame and sorrow, while being horrified by the irreversible experience of this feeling:

“It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify […] all was changed. […]. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Excusably or inexcusably, it was done” (Dickens, Great Expectations).

That is when I started to feel like a stranger in my own home.

Friends and relatives started to increasingly address me with some kind of deference, because I was part of another world they knew nothing about, except that it was an ‘elite world’, although a bit fantasied:

Going out for beers with Doudouch and Lucas at the port. An unknown friend of Lucas joins us […]. As I begin to speak to introduce myself, Doudouch cuts me off to introduce me to him. With a bit of pride, it seems, he quickly retraces my trajectory: “like [them],” I am from the working-class parts of the city, “but” I “managed to leave.” More than that, I “went to college,” in a business school, and worked at “La Défense” [Parisian prestigious business area], in “suits and all,” he insists. He ends the presentation saying that I have now “thousands of diploma” and that I am “going to make so much cash” (fieldnotes).

This deference is, in itself, a mark of distance. Besides, I often suspect their constant way of demeaning themselves (especially in front of me), and the way some of them strive to adjust their language in my presence, are due to a certain sense of self-embarrassment they feel, because of me. I think that, to some extent, despite kindness and attachment, I contribute to making them feel uncomfortable when I am around. Many friends could sense the growing gulf between me and us—‘the gulf the books have made’. In the field, I am often introduced as “[someone’s friend/relative], who went to college.” The pause in their sentence, marked here by the comma, speaks volumes about the effect of my uncommon educational capital in this social universe. When we talk, they always say ‘your school’, often throwing their hand up in defiance, rejecting a familiarity with the school system that they don’t feel entitled to claim. The school, my school, seems for them a mysterious (“do your teachers still write on the board?”, “do you write on the board?”, the question of formal writing on the board always has been something like a fascination), but also terrible universe floating above me to direct my manners, all my gestures. Hence their concerns: “don’t forget us, Dada,” but also, perhaps more importantly: “don’t forget where you come from,” as Rnouna, my oldest childhood friend, repeats with alarm and insistence, each time our casual conversation leads to my scholar life.

Despite social proximity and time spent together, in the end, I am not a blue-collar worker myself. How I live, “it’s not the same.” I am always ‘behind a book’, so what do I really know, now, about life? I am no longer “in the reality,” that is, ‘their’—working-class—reality. As I pursued my education, I evolved outside the factory, its world, and escaped the working-class condition for which most of them are destined. As a result, even if I am not a total stranger, I no longer ‘really’ belong. This singular frame of (un)familiarity, this bizarre distance, places me in an ambiguous position, paradoxically characterized by a relationship of familiarity with the interviewees (here in every sense of the word), while no longer sharing their daily lives (Bajard, 2013).

I was in the doldrums for a long time, because I felt that I had no way back home like it was before. And at the same time, I did not find a ‘new home’ neither. I was symbolically home-less, as well expressed by Jack London describing Martin Eden’s despair:

“He had travelled too far to go back [..]. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him. […]. He had exiled himself, travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer return home. On the other hand [..]. he had found no new home. As his own family could not understand him, the bourgeoisie could not understand him.”

Tossed by the flows

The challenges generated by my prior proximity to the field did not appear immediately but, rather, during the course of the investigation. At first, this familiarity was somewhat of a real ethnographical ‘red carpet’ regarding the ease of access to empirical data (Bajard, 2013: 12).

Indeed, although my situation did not erase the unavoidable asymmetry in interactions with informants—partly due to the menacing weight of my educational capital—it had many advantages in terms of data collection, simplifying contact with interviewees and enabling me to acquire abundant and heterogeneous empirical materials. Access to the data was greatly facilitated precisely because I already knew many respondents before the study began (Zaman, 2008). These allies were valuable intermediaries in my efforts to obtain empirical materials, providing me with documentation, looking for archival materials (interview reports, documentation on the intranet, personal statistics, etc.) and contacting people for me to arrange interviews with them. As such, they allowed me to be easily integrated into the field: it took little effort to access a significant number of respondents with various profiles, including those, such as temporary workers or subcontractors, whose social characteristics usually make them difficult to ‘catch’.

Past experiences and memories with informants, shared before the investigation started, facilitated my integration as an ‘educated’ observer:

At the switchboard, everyone was settled: I notice beers ostensibly laid out. Jimmy offers me one: seeing me hesitating, he laughs and says, raising his voice, that I “didn't hesitate so much when [I] was on the boat” with him, that I was “not so prissy at that time,” referring to the loaded whiskies that we drank together during fishing trips years ago, with two other colleagues present here. Everyone laughs, while one of the boys exclaims that I was “pre-destined [he insists] to end up on the team anyway” (fieldnotes).

I have seized prior relationships as an ‘easy’ track to navigate fieldwork. Pre-existing ties gave me access to private and informal practices which are usually difficult and time consuming for researchers to uncover (Qamar, 2021). This is the reason why I was able to enter the factory in the first place: being classified ‘SEVESO 2’—one of the highest security protocol in France—entrance within the plant is strictly controlled and the management does not allow any ‘visitor’ outside business reasons and business hours (8 h–18 h). Hence, to access the factory (which operates 24/7), I had to take advantage of my connections with friends and relatives who work at the site to enter the field through unofficial means and at unusual times, that is, after dark and during weekends, once the management had left the premises. As a result, I gained nighttime access to a high-security plant to pursue ethnographic observations and develop relationships with other workers, under management’s radar. Over time, however, my presence became known to management, who agreed to be interviewed after workers and unionists informally introduced me. Progressively, I thus managed to obtain more official access to the factory and perform daytime interviews while continuing to observe outside business hours in more covert ways. Eventually, I benefited from full access to the factory, which is atypical in high-security industrial plants in France.

For a while, such easy access within the field made me feel guilty. I had the feeling that it gave me a privilege that a ‘real’ ethnographer would not have benefited from. Being an ethnographer at-home, I did not experience the ‘mythical rites of passage’ of an unfamiliar, exotic field. Like Rabinow in his Moroccan fieldwork, I ended up experiencing the following feeling: “When I thought about it, it was a too perfect place for investigation. To the point that, at the time, this ease and accessibility [...] seemed to me to depreciate the potential value of the results. Fieldwork had to require, necessarily, more effort and hard work” (Rabinow, quoted by Bajard, 2013: 13).

But many investigative effects surfaced. Especially, my affinities within the field produced traditional setbacks which were here particularly accentuated because of my pre-existing roots (Zaman, 2008). Although strangers to their fields are also subject to implicit expectations and requests from respondents, there are many more of these and they are explicit for endo-ethnographers, for whom “[challenging] certain norms may mean risking ostracism” (Ouattara, 2004: 643). Familiarity with the field particularly involves the endo-ethnographers in local strategies (Qamar, 2021). Personal bonds took precedence over investigative relationships, and I found myself tossed around between clan rivalries, suffering from the shifting friendships and hostilities related to my affiliations, which acted as a solid social anchor. This was even more the case for me as my father is an elected working-class unionist, meaning that my filiation automatically positioned me, in the eyes of others, as a direct sympathizer of protesters. One of my first visits to a production team was quite revealing: the middle manager I met at that time said in front of the workers: “it will serve his father, all of this. He sends his son to scout and all, so he will have all the information he needs afterwards.” From the very beginning of the investigation I was stained with the ‘hot blood’ of my father, and my affinities with local activists (I have known most of them since childhood) exacerbated this political scar which could not go unnoticed:

Interview with Michel, advisory manager for the Intervention unit […]. He was introduced to me as a “total asshole” by workers, who portrayed him to me as a horrible character. […]. I found Michel surprisingly (maybe suspiciously) pleasant and attentive to me. He treats me with a certain complicit consideration as a management-“knowledgeable” person (his words) […].When the issue of the team management came up, I jump on his comments to get some clarification regarding the “troubles with the boys” he mentions. His face, previously so pleasant, suddenly closes and he blushes slightly. He then sits back in his chair, crossing his arms, and roughly says to me, with a sudden stern look and after a slight silence: “Ah yes, it’s true... I know whose son you are…” (fieldnotes).

This filial stigma acted as a strong social signal and therefore required great caution in my presentation and approach, and especially during some sensitive interviews with the management, as I had sometimes to walk on thin ice to not put my relatives at risk.

In deep water

Also, and although, by nature, all ethnographies involve an emotional commitment, I have discovered over time that being an ethnographer at-home, most especially, is emotionally demanding and morally damaging. Specifically, tense situations related to conflicts, hard working conditions or plant reorganizations were difficult moments to experience since the field was characterized by social and affective intimacy, and most of the events had personal repercussions that interfered with my private life (Van Ginkel, 1994). For me, investigating at-home constituted a tough experience with long-lasting effects.

I experienced particularly strong emotional waves when interviewees shared information about their suffering. I gradually noticed that some, especially those who had left school early, saw me as a caring doctor willing to listen, and they ‘confused’ the sociological interviews with therapeutic ones. If such deep introspections resulted in sociologically fascinating data, allowing for detailed sociological portrait of the informants, there were, however, some situations that were very hard to record. I regretted doing certain interviews, especially with people I have known since I was a child. As Tillmann-Healy observed, social and affective proximity within the field “do[es] not pave a smooth, comfortable road. When we engage ‘[loved ones]’ humanity, struggles and oppression, we cannot simply shut off the recorder, turn our backs and exit the field” (2003: 743). I wish I could erase some of the intimate testimonies so they don’t get stuck in my head and they stop resonating when I see the familiar faces of those who gave them, for example, when a long-time friend of my family fell apart during his interview, confessing a near suicide attempt off Etretat cliff.

I was often the only bearer of such painful information, which troubled me deeply. I felt emotionally overwhelmed and didn’t even know what to do. I felt powerless and unprepared to handle these situations. As they trusted me because of the confidentiality I promised, I didn’t want to betray their confidence by openly talking on their behalf. I took these silenced, haunting testimonies away with me, and I put them into words in my fieldnotes—but nothing will really be done to change the situation. That’s why I felt sometimes like a useless voyeur.

Also, the experience of being a researcher at-home led to a utilitarian relationship with people, who here, had the disturbing particularity of being childhood friends or relatives. As many respondents were part of my life, I never managed to define when and where my investigation ended. The intertwining of intimacy and investigation made the boundaries of my research particularly unclear, and the lines between private life and academia peculiarly blurry. Being simultaneously an observer and ‘one of their own’ caused me to experience moral turmoil. As both a friend and a researcher, I often gathered information during outings with friends or family dinners. It was notable that they ignored the fact that my investigation also took account of all the informal and private situations. As they thought they were only being ‘studied’ during the formal interviews in the factory (when the dictaphone gave a quite official and serious aspect to the conversation), they were not aware that my analysis continued during supposedly meaningless interactions and outside the factory, ‘at-home’, in private places and moments, among friends. This made me feel that my affinities and affection were no more than a lure, a cynical manipulation of affections that allowed me to obtain information. I ended up feeling that I was committing something like a disgusting betrayal of my loved ones, and even of myself. I felt like I was breaking their trust, that I was an impostor in my own home, with a mask stuck to my skin, tracking the thoughts and actions of my kin.

Along with this strong sensation of being a deceiver, I ended up feeling that with this research project, I was producing something potentially harmful. Indeed, the very act of academic writing entails symbolic violence by objectifying informants, and it was damaging to thoroughly apply the brutality of this distant gaze to those closest to me. My change of perspective thus led to an inexorable sense of violence for continually breaking the narratives of my relatives. Although my academic work is fiercely driven by the wish to voice their ordinary, silenced experience of domination, and to honor their ways of fighting for their dignity, they wouldn’t understand the modalities of scientific deconstruction and would probably be hurt by what I might say about them. Scientific objectivation violently crushes the testimony and practices of people through the cold triangulation of data: this goes against the narratives people like to tell themselves and each other. I was thus increasingly worried about harming them with academic writings likely to reproduce symbolic violence, especially if they came to read certain extracts. This is why I wanted to write this introspection in English: if it makes the writing process more painful (although writing in a foreign language helps to create some emotional distance), my relatives won’t read it because of the linguistic entry cost, and thus won’t be wounded by hurtful feelings.

In the remaining of the paper, I aim to show how these haunting hurdles eventually came to be highly heuristic for my research, influencing the unfolding of my fieldwork, some of my methodological choices and the nature of my results.

Riding the tide

As previously mentioned, ethnographers investigating in familiar settings are embedded in pre-existing social contexts from which they can hardly disaffiliate themselves (Zaman, 2008). I therefore had to employ circumvented means to ‘test the water’ and unlock potential self-censorships processes resulting from the constant ‘calls to order’ that my affiliations and affinities triggered within the field (Qamar, 2021). During this investigation, drawing on my contrasted social experiences allowed me to make the most of the field. Indeed, I have been able to use very different social skills acquired through a mixed social background to mature a sort of ‘fieldplay’ and constantly adjust the image I portrayed depending on the audience. While I come from the very working-class bastion that I study, I am also a former student of business school, during which studies I also had several professional experiences in different companies. I therefore benefit from a variety of professional and social (dis)positions, a pool of ‘hats’ that make continuous adjustments possible depending on the social characteristics of the interviewees and the nature of the relationship. During this fieldwork, I composed with these different social class norms, making the best out of my habitus clivé: if I emphasize my working-class features with workers, on the contrary, I play along the managerial script I learnt in business school to build trust with managers.

This was particularly useful in interviews with the management: having been identified as the relative of hostile unionists, the only way to reduce mistrust was to emphasize my business school studies (and my experience in finance and strategy in particular, which made me ‘look like I was on their side’). Introducing such selected biographical snippets led the managers to position more favorably towards me, because I appeared as a potential ally who had followed a similar curriculum. A certain number of executives showed themselves to be particularly sensitive to my cursus in ‘grandes écoles’, creating a sort of elitist complicity that was sometimes useful in defusing the suspicion towards me. Because of my education, we would “live in the same world”, and, unlike workers—especially the protesters—I would be “able to put things into perspectives” (their words). Thus, by acting as if, somehow, ‘the apple had fallen far from the tree’, I attracted the sympathy of several executives, who even came to help me by looking for information or giving me their contact details. This performed ‘class complicity’ allowed me to obtain straightforward verbatims about some managerial methods implemented, especially those intended to “overcome [workers’ collective] resistance” dynamics, as illustrated below:

“A shift, it’s a family… [..]. they spend nights and weekends together [...] How do you break that? Well, you break it by mixing them, by bringing in people from all over the place. [...] When I came here, the message was clear. I was told: ‘Thierry, you have to mix the teams, it's going to be good’.” (Thierry, manager)

The situation was different with the workers, with whom I kept rethinking my verbal and body language to display signs of my original social affiliation. I used the local ‘lingo’ and relied on body language and the way I talked (tone, accent, words), elements which are so easy to intuitively decipher but are difficult to describe. I had no intention of ‘overplaying’ these attributes, as the weight of my educational capital prevented a real counter-balancing of the researcher-researched relationships. But it was important for me to play on my social origins to, at least, mitigate the inevitable inequality in our interactions, and attenuate, partially, its symbolic violence. This is why I frequently revealed some aspects of my past, which could echo their path, their interests, and resonate with their experiences. One of the strongest triggers of intimacy with workers was the mention of ‘places’, the neighborhoods and the shared experiences in certain common lived spaces. As the city studied is strongly spatially segregated—like many cities—recalling the spaces where I lived, the events I participated in while I lived there, was the best way for them to situate me socially. It is also from these physical and symbolic landmarks, where memories mix, jumbled together, beings and things, that I could most easily address elements that go beyond the factory: family, children, school, friends, girls, ¹ cars, sports, and hobbies. From this spatial and social ‘lived geography’, I could gradually draw dense narratives going back to childhood, and paint detailed sociological portraits needed for my investigation, while creating some forms of reciprocity.

Also, although endo-ethnographers struggle to establish autonomy strategies to keep a safe and scientific distance from their informants (Qamar, 2021; Zaman, 2008), I was here able to ‘stem the tide’ and build a certain distance because of my immersion in geographically and symbolically aloof intellectual networks. Indeed, since my studies, I have taken advantage of living in another city, geographically far from Le Havre, to preserve a critical and emotional distance, thereby developing a staggered approach of taking time-outs and making focused revisits to the field. This ‘wave’ method, developed along the way, has helped me to keep a certain emotional detachment, and enabled a more detached analysis of my fieldnotes. It also gave me a higher level of autonomy in the field. The privilege of being ‘the one who succeeded’ allowed me to benefit from a useful deference from many informants: they didn’t understand exactly what I was doing, but didn’t feel like they were in a legitimate position to ask me about it. I ended up in a sociologically ideal position of being ‘in the loop’, while being ‘authorized’, to a certain extent, to keep a geographical—and critical—distance from them.

Trimming the sails

Eventually, the type of results I was producing were deeply reliant on my pre-existing intimacy with informants.

My ethnographer’s position indeed led me to build on long-term familiarity with the field which permitted attention to hidden aspects of respondents’ lives, as close relationships with the participants resulted in the continuity of the investigation in various, intimate times and spaces. I was thus able to broaden the scope of the study to capture aspects of their private lives, decompartmentalizing distinct social spheres to better understand how changes at work threaten workers in their daily existence far beyond the professional sphere alone, and how deep they influence their representation of the world. These intimate incursions were indispensable to account for the impact of management restructurings on workers’ domestic lives, and better understand the insidious influence—and violence—of current managerial logics, which circulate between the different dimensions of existence. In that perspective, emotions felt in the course of the study were also particular driving forces, vital sources of inspiration and interpretative tools to grasp the strength of the new singular forms of managerial oppression that weigh on workers. My observations were related to a strong interiorization of what my respondents experience, as I could here more easily “step into [their] shoes” and sense over the years “how [they] really feels” (Bracke, 2017: 390), that is, observe the transformation of their everyday life linked to the imposition of new individualizing ideologies within the factory, and the accompanying feelings of anger, anxiety and distress among my informants.

This closer observation of workers’ lives and wider social contexts also unveiled how transformations in the factory contributed to the alteration of workers’ relationships towards (each) others in a context of sharp individualization of management practices. Over time, the restructurings clearly unveiled the cultural clash between the new managerial expectations, which were increasingly being promoted through the systematization of individual skills assessments, and the resulting devaluation of working-class ethos as these categories of social judgment progressively intruded into the workers’ minds. In that regard, focusing on the singular role of the new skills assessments system helped to better understand workers’ increasing disengagement from collective structures. More specifically, in-depth sociological portraits enabled here to shed a detailed and subtle light on the ‘differentiated’ ways workers perceive and ‘receive’ these managerial devices according to their social profile, trajectories and dispositional resources, while highlighting how, by valorizing specific social(-class) skills (eg the ability to argue by expressing ideas in a structural and clear way), these assessments end up (re)producing social inequalities among workers. I thereby could unveil how, by individualizing professional trajectories according to employees’ estimated social skills, such appraisal systems slowly and insidiously reshape workers’ ways of being and thinking, and subtly erode their feeling of sharing a same social destiny.

At last, although the current neoliberal evisceration of communal relationships in contemporary organizations seems to have dissolved collective bonds and solidary relationships in favor of competition and rivalry between individuals, this ethnography at-home allowed to probe beyond this common conclusion by uncovering the social processes through which (infra-)politicized forms of resistance are simultaneity being recomposed around small, closed groups of workers binding together and sharing a sharp awareness of social antagonism. Thanks to pre-existing intimacy with some informants, I managed to highlight workers’ complex socio-spatial interconnections between home-work settings, shedding light on how workers reshape selective forms of solidarities and articulate complex forms of resistance to managerial individualistic evaluation at the intersection of their private and working lives. Here, the intertwining of intimacy and investigation gradually refined my focus on the social, spatial, and temporal entanglements leading to the production of ‘autonomous geographies of resistance’ in the neoliberal workplace. Night times and specific private places, in particular—where strangers are deliberately pushed away—appeared to be key spatial and temporal conditions allowing the preservation of strong solidaristic ties and mutual support between workers. Through these everyday familiar and closed spaces, fortified through symbolic barriers that are deliberately difficult for an outsider to cross, enduring sentiments of belonging are (re)created, nudging managerial discourses of individualization by perpetuating alternative social relations within disparate yet tight and bounded groups of close friends.

This investigation at-home thus provided an opportunity to collect original valuable data, as many elements were related to personal trajectories and extra-professional experiences which could be fully grasped by long-term pre-existing affiliations and a familiar observation of the respondents’ work and private lives.