Extensions of bodies through digital artefacts

During the year of 2008 until the early spring of 2009 I had the opportunity to observe mundane activities at an industrial site, Tuollavaara Transportation (a pseudonym has been used for the name of the organization), located in the northernmost part of Sweden. Tuollavaara Transportation is occupied with assembling sheets of metal, sides and gables, with sets of trap doors in order to construct vessels suitable for the collection of iron ore. The completed baskets are subsequently assembled on chasses suitable for railway transportation to the coasts of Sweden and Norway. Routine manufacturing work of the employees comes to constitute the empirical framework for my thesis; in particular I am interested in the assignments conducted in connection to the robotic welding system. The robotic welding system was delivered to Tuollavaara Transportation at the end of 2007, enabling an observation of how the implementation process evolved diachronically. In light of new working routines, the profession as a welder has to be renegotiated, which also suggests practical applications of new activities to be far from straightforward and smoothly adopted into the existing system. Quite the contrary, the advent of the robotic welding system radically rearranged the system of pursuits at this particular industrial site. As the routines changed, manual welding activities turned into preparations for and reparations after the activities of the robotic welding system. Not only did altered work processes engender the robotic welding system as the organizational focal point; they also served to articulate mundane activities and in particular the association between bodies, artifacts and spatiality. Interestingly, the occupation of the robot operators was coded feminine (this is in itself noteworthy, since only four women were employed by the organization), which in turn served to de-skill the assignments pursued in conjunction with the robotic welding system. As a consequence, men tended to leave – or never cared to enter – the profession.

De-qualification and feminization are intimately coupled, eagerly pampered by the ideology of the ’natural’ weakness of women (Connell 1987:243). Whereas the female robot operators are referred to as ‘mums’ and ‘mothers’, the robotic welding system turns into an obstinate child. The heterosexual matrix in which women are intimately linked to child caring practices is correspondingly reproduced. At the same time, processes of feminization and processes of computerization appear to coincide; just as men and machines constitute a naturalized coupling (Sommestad 1992:91f; Kleif and Faulkner 2003) the female welders at Tuollavaara Transportation and the robot were linked together and conveyed as a seemingly obvious combination./Jennie Olofsson

Jennie Olofsson
0920-491427

E-post: fornamn.efternamn@ltu.se