Marie C.

Grasmeier The fear of authority

‘The Fear of Authority‘: Disciplinary Practices in Global Merchant Shipping

Presentation held at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference EASA2020: “New anthropological
horizons in and beyond Europe”, 21-24 July 2020 in Lisbon, Panel 059: “Sea Economies: Labour,
Infrastructure and New Techno-Environmental Horizons.”

Marie C. Grasmeier, © by the author

In my doctoral research, I explored processes of occupational boundary-work

(Lamont 1992; Wimmer 2013) among seafarers on global merchant ships. In this
presentation, I will focus on the significance of everyday practices of discipline.

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on a container ship with a multinational crew.

Besides, I could also use auto-ethnographic material I recorded at the time I was a
member of my field myself (Before I studied anthropology, I underwent training
as a nautical officer). Further, I did interviews with seafarers from Germany and
the Philippines ashore as well as during fieldwork on board. During data analysis
and writing, I attended an ethnopsychoanalytical peer-intervision group
(Grasmeier 2017).

The shipping industry features an almost complete globalisation, including its

labour market, and a racialised work organisation. Shipowners can choose their
workers on a worldwide labour market. On this global market, they usually recruit
seafarers for different positions in the organisational hierarchy from different
regions. (White) Europeans hold most of the senior positions while the junior
officers and ratings mostly originate from labour supply countries of the global
South. Thus, the ship constitutes a postcolonial space where global North-South
relations project into the well-defined space on the micro-level of interpersonal
relations among crewmembers. Against this background, specific forms of work
organisation exist in the shipping industry. Before I come to these specifics,
however, I will briefly touch on some more general provisions on the question of
domination in work organisations.

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

The management of every capitalist work organisation faces the challenge of

transforming purchased labour-power into actual productive labour (Marx 1887,
Ch. 6). The strategies employed by capital for solving this problem always contain
the moments of coercion and consent. Historically, with the advent of wage-labour
and industrial production, the main focus was on coercion and authoritarian forms
of organisation. With developing capitalist relations, there is a general tendency
towards consent as the primary means of workplace discipline. Luc Boltanski and
Ève Ciapello (2007) baptised the latest stage of this development since the
1960ies the “new spirit of capitalism”. The focus of management strategies shifted
from external control to proactivity and self-motivation on the side of the workers.
Now, work was to be organised in more or less independent teams. Flat
hierarchies were to replace the rigid iron cage of bureaucracy (ibid, passim).
These strategies of “manufacturing consent”, as Micheal Burawoy (1982) calls it,
rely on capital’s hegemony over the workplace culture.

In the shipping industry of the global North, too, there have been attempts to align
work organisation with the new spirit. With the surge of flagging-out and the
globalisation of the seafarers’ labour market, however, these attempts have been
abandoned with traditional forms of authority being restored (Aguilar Jr 2003;
Gerstenberger and Welke 2004, 80).

The results of my field research showed that the seafarers on board the ships
mostly cultivated an ideology of unconditional obedience, which they repeatedly
reproduced performatively through symbolic acts in everyday life. For instance,
Lisa, a deck cadet, gave me the following account. I had asked her in an interview
about the importance of formal hierarchies on board.

Lisa: And I couldn’t say that the formal hierarchy was unimportant for
the crew.
Marie: mhm. So also in leisure time?
Lisa: Also during free time. That starts with the distribution of seats
[in the mess room].
Marie: mhm

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

Lisa: so the bosun is not only sitting on his bosun’s chair at work, [...]
but he is also sitting on his bosun’s chair in his spare time.
Marie: mhm
Lisa: and that means that there is no flying change in the leisure time
at the places in the mess room. [...] Yes. And one bosun even, when he
had a conflict with another cadet, um, he exercised, yes, how can you
say that, he exercised subservience with us.
Marie: mhm
Lisa: For example, he said, “Where are you
not allowed to sit?” “Yes, on your chair, of
course”. And: “Yes, and why are you not
allowed to sit there?” “Yes, because it’s
your chair.” […] Yes, blatant! Isn’t it?
Marie: Yes [both laugh]
Lisa: I mean, that’s what he did to adult
people, you know?! [laughs].

Figure 1: Bosun's You can see a bosun’s chair in figure 1. However, Lisa
chair. used the term metaphorically for the bosun’s permanent
seat in the mess room.

Many of the seafarers in subaltern positions took it as a matter of course that

captains and officers could govern even their most private affairs. Helen Sampson
summarises this authoritarian structure with the words “the captain is king” (2013,
78). For instance, many seafarers, especially those who were new to the company,
let their hair cut in a military style before joining the ship in an attempt not to
provoke reprisals by their superiors. During an on board training on the ship’s
safety management, to give another instance, the quintessence of what we had to
learn was that the job of the ratings – that is seafarers in non-officer positions –
was just “to follow orders”.

This ideology of command and obey is contradictory in two regards. First, it

contradicts the practical demand on seafarers in the work process. In seafaring, the
nature of the job demands quite a lot of initiative by the workers due to its

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

contingencies. Especially in the light of ever-decreasing crew sizes, seafarers are

required to think of their own and solve problems independently. If every action in
the work process were actually to be taken only on command, if seafarers really
only functioned as will-less recipients of orders, the organisation would be
paralysed. Under such conditions, no ship could ever reach her port of destination
safely (Russo, Popović, and Tomić 2014, 173 f.). However, it seems necessary to
the seafarers to maintain the appearance of a quasi-military discipline on board.

Second, the shipboard culture of authority runs counter the ideology of the new
spirit of capitalism as I described above and which is also hegemonial in
management circles of the shipping industry. However, the new spirit of
capitalism has never been universal.

As Nancy Faser puts it: “Neo-liberal capitalism has as much to do with Walmart,
maquiladoras and microcredit as with Silicon Valley and Google” (Fraser 2009,
110; underlined italics in the original.), and Raewyn Connell adds: “where there is
Apple, there is also Foxconn” (Connell 2019, 59).

I interpret the symbolic practices of authority and workplace discipline on board

as an authoritarian counter-culture to the mainstream management discourse
promoting the new spirit of capitalism. But it is more than that: the contradiction
also promotes the production of ‘cultural difference’.

While Western seafarers, who occupy the leading positions on board, are trained
in the new spirit, their colleagues from labour supply countries have to undergo
vocational training that is characterised by a paramilitary style that aims at
educating docile and disciplined workers who internalised obedience (see: Ching
2017; Sampson 2013, 77), sometimes even involving practices of corporal
punishment (Grasmeier 2020). There seems to be a demand on the labour market
for seafarers trained in an authoritarian way which the market accommodates for
by the paramilitary training regime. The so produced difference, then, appears as a
primordial ethnic feature of the respective workers. It is, on the one hand,
appreciated by scholars of cross-cultural management when they find that, e.g.

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

East Asian seafarers were perfectly suited as subordinates to European officers by

virtue of their ‘culture’, which showed a higher “power-distance index” (Hofstede
1991) than that of the latter (see: Theotokas et al. 2007, 10). On the other hand,
novice European seafarers, notwithstanding their theoretical training in
progressive management techniques, learn from their superiors on board that their
colleagues and future subordinates from the global South could only follow orders
and, therefore, had to be treated accordingly. The following excerpt stems from an
interview with two German cadets who were about to become officers soon:

Peter: Well, a ship is actually a big kindergarten, you know? My first

officer also told me, he had a lot more experience [...], and it’s like a
big kindergarten. Yes.

Marie: What is like a kindergarten there?

Peter: Yes, well, I initially come from the industry [he means a factory
ashore in Germany], and we got our tasks there in the morning and
then it just worked, you know? But there [on the ship], you have to
monitor it more […]. So you [...] have to be more behind it, so that
things go the way they’re supposed to, you know? Well, you can’t
generalise that either, but that’s the way it is, yes.

In cases like this, it is often not apparent from the individual empirical data
whether the observed practices are instances of boundary-work in terms of ‘race’
or formal rank. Both categories are widely parallel in the social system of the ship.
What shows clearly is that the interviewee, here, constructs his Other as
immature, lacking professionalism and, therefore, in need of strong authority. This
motif of infantilisation also strongly resembles colonial discourses which
constructed the colonised subject accordingly (see: Fanon 2008, 16 ff. Said 1979,
40).

The authoritarian practices of discipline also affect seafarers’ everyday life beyond
the formal relationship as superiors and subordinates in the work process. I will
focus on two of these effects here. First, seafarers reported an omnipresent ‘fear of

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

authority’ which also became evident in everyday interactions during fieldwork.

Second, the authoritarian structure tended to transgress into the sphere of leisure
relations.

When I conducted my fieldwork on a container ship, I was formally employed as

a deck cadet although everybody on board knew that I was there as a researcher.
However, the seafarers ignored my researcher role most of the time. One effect
was that the officers treated me like they used to treat cadets, closely monitoring
my work including my research and strongly intervening in my daily activities. I
was often assigned work tasks where I had to work alone which was hindering my
research. Now, I could have spoken up and tried to negotiate my role on board.
They had no actual means of power to coerce me. However, every time I thought
about asserting myself in that way, I felt a strong fear of doing so. It felt like some
inner force was preventing me from acting in my interest and against the
authoritarian structure. I interpreted this as an expression of some neurotic
disposition of mine. I knew that I was one of those people who are not good at
saying “no”. I even doubted if I could ever be a good fieldworker if I was so shy.
When I discussed the phenomenon in the peer-intervision group, the participates
expressed the association that, most probably, the other crewmembers on board
felt the same way. I did not take this feedback seriously and stuck to my
interpretation of my paralysing fear as an idiosyncrasy. However, when further
analysing my data, I realised that seafarers reported an omnipresent “fear of
authority” time and again and I found many instances in my field notes where
they acted out this fear within their everyday interactions on board. For instance,
one nautical officer wrote about her thoughts while on board:

I have somehow never really perceived captains (and other ‘authority

figures’) as real people and have always been inhibited. I still
differentiate between ‘adults’ and me – and with adults, you do not
joke, you do not talk normally about this and that. [...] Whereby, that
is not only related to captains but generally to all those I would sort
into the category ‘adults’.

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

In the example, the officer expresses the fear of authority by feeling a childlike
dependence and inferiority towards the authority figure. The fear also showed in
instances where seafarers had to deviate from the hierarchical structure during the
work process in order to solve certain problems which did not allow strictly
following the line of command. In my dissertation, I described several situations
where such deviations from the hierarchical order caused crises of interaction
among the seafarers.

A further effect of the internalised fear of authority is that on the private relations
between crew-members. During fieldwork, I observed an instance where the crew
wanted to have a celebration together at a holiday. Forming private relations in
their leisure time is not an easy task for seafarers. Everybody you can interact with
on board is a workmate. Moreover, there are almost no peer groups of equal rank.
Almost everybody stands in a relationship of superiority or subordination with
oneself. The idea of these events was to suspend these formal hierarchies as far as
possible, for the time, to be able to enjoy some taste of normal life together.
However, such attempts regularly failed. Despite contrary intentions, the
seafarers, time and again, reproduced the relations of power, domination and
subordination, inherent in the formal structure, within their private interactions.

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Marie C. Grasmeier The fear of authority

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