Long Careers: The Lives of Professionals in a Postsocialist Work World
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | This paper draws theoretical conclusions about the role that careers play in the history of production culture, focusing on the work world of postsocialist Prague. It draws these conclusions from empirical research into internal and external variables shaping career decisions and paths, including the ethnographic study of professional self-conception, socializing at work, learning-by-doing, networking, and impression management; and analysis of conditions such as labor-market structures, the coordination of production teams, employment contracts, unions, film schools, etc. While its conclusions are supported by a broad set of interviews with workers on various levels of the labor hierarchy, the paper focuses on three sample careers that have spanned the radical changes to East Central European cinema over the past twenty years (the collapse of state-owned industry, privatization, the externalization of employment relations, the shift to temporary organizations, freelance work and the boom of US runaway production): a production designer, a sound recordist and a production manager. The paper looks at long-term, intermittent careers, career transformations and survival strategies as cultural-historical phenomena characterizing a specific work world in cinema history: the ways in which old skills, habits and contacts are re-purposed to serve new functions, and how this constitutes the work world’s styles of work and also film style itself. |
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