‘Because It Was Hardcore and It Was Cool’: Masculinity as the Basis of Consent in Geochemical Sampling

Abstract

Geochemical samplers carry out manual labour in difficult and dangerous conditions while largely unsupervised. This paper explores questions regarding the labour effort provided by these workers which often goes above and beyond the level necessary to maintain employment and at times endangers their personal safety. This extra effort is provided despite relatively high levels of worker autonomy, low levels of supervision, and little apparent economic incentive. Analysis of worker-level interviews using a number of possible theoretical frameworks indicates that more coercive factors such as direct managerial control and employment insecurity are unable to fully explain sampler behaviour and, instead, participant accounts indicate a form of active worker consent to increased labour effort and risk taking. This is a gendered worker consent based on a form of contingent upon the specific context of geochemical sampling. These specific contingent factors are: a working class masculinity derived from the hard manual labour of the work; the wilderness context that facilitates tropes of ‘man versus nature’ reinforcing the masculine workplace culture and obscuring the appropriation of surplus by more easily allowing the workplace to be interpreted as non-capitalist; and a fraternal masculinity resulting from the crew-based workplace organization and highly male dominated workforce composition, intensified by the conforming pressure of isolated camp life. This specific masculinity forms a basis of consent by which the autonomy afforded to workers by the labour process of geochemical sampling helps rather than hinders the imperative of management to encourage workers to exert the maximum effort.