Marie C.

Grasmeier 2019

Déformation Professionnelle as a Motif for

the Contruction of Occupational Identity: the
Example of Seafarers1
My name is Marie C. Grasmeier and I am a doctoral candidate at Bremen
University in the field of social anthropology. The subject of my doctoral thesis is
an ethnography about the occupational culture and everyday practices of the
construction of occupational identities by seafarers on board internationally
crewed merchant ships. This is, e.g., container ships whose crew consists of
people from several countries all over the world.

I investigated my research question by means of ethnographic fieldwork on board

merchant vessels. I also draw on autoethnographic data (cf.: Adams, Holman
Jones, and Ellis 2015; Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011; Chang 2008; Anderson
2006) that are available to me since I, as a former merchant seafarer, have myself
been a member of my research field.

The following presentation is just a small part of my research findings. I will

argue that former seafarers employed in shore jobs after quitting their ocean going
careers retain a strong sense of belonging and underline this sense by retaining
certain language, practices and behavioural patterns belonging to life at sea even
in the new occupational setting. In short, my thesis is that they orchestrate what is
called a “déformation professionelle” (Warnotte 1937) as a means of identity
performance.

Before I dig deep into theoretical considerations, I like to present an auto-

ethnographic story from my working life in the maritime industry:

Twelve years ago I started working as a researcher in a maritime

research institute at a university. About half of the workforce of this
institute were formerly active seafarers, like master mariners – this is
captains – and chief engineers. The other half were scientists and

1 Presentation held at the 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association in

Manchester, 23rd August 2019.

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Marie C. Grasmeier 2019

engineers from other disciplines such as marine biology,

environmental engineering or geography.
During the first weeks of my career I was asked to tidy up the server
room of the institute. While doing this, I found that in one locker there
were some empty old paint buckets and dirty brushes that must have
been there for several years. When I investigated the phenomenon by
asking my colleagues, they told the following story that had entered
the mythology of the organization:
Years ago, during one of our weekly staff meetings, it was agreed that
the walls in the server room were dirty had to be painted. The usual
procedure in the university would have been to inform the facility
management and request the painting job to be done. But in this case,
they did something else: the CEO and one senior researcher, both
former master mariners, decided to meet the next Saturday to get the
job done. And that is how it went. They met on a Saturday afternoon
and spent their free time painting the walls in the server room
themselves.
When my colleagues, who happened to belong to the non-seafarer
group, told the story, they showed a certain amount of amusement
about the solution chosen by the CEO and the senior researcher. The
latter, to the contrary, found their painting mission quite normal and
stressed that there was no need to bureaucratically contact facility
management to get such an easy job done. They also stressed that
they, as seafarers, were able to help themselves and did not need to
rely on the official procedure.
With regard to the topic of my presentation, I want to mention another
observation I made in the same institute: the employees who were
former seafarers used to use a lot of nautical terms in their everyday
language, usually out of context. The walls, for instance, were called
“bulkheads”, the floors of the university building were referred to as
“decks” and the CEO had the honorary titles “captain” or “the old
man”. Like in: “Good morning, good, that I see you. The captain
wants to talk to you, maybe you can show up in his office?”. When
they wanted to express that they were employees of the institute, they
said: “My name is in the ship’s articles here”.
The non-seafarer staff of the institute used to acknowledge this
practice with a mixture of amusement, embarrassment and
estrangement. The seafarers, on the other hand, acted as if this was the

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most natural way to speak and as if it needed much effort to speak in a

conventional way.
When it came to internal communication, this creative use of language
was usually tolerated by the non-seafarer staff. Only with regard to the
external presentation of the institute, e.g. when one of the former
seafarers had to hold a presentation at a conference, the use of
occupational slang was sometimes criticised as inappropriate and
shedding a negative light on the professionalism of the institute (Field
Notes).
For the interpretation I will first draw on the concept of “déformation
professionnelle” coined by the Belgian Sociologist Daniel Warnotte (1937). The
concept describes a tendency of occupational role bearers to unconsciously apply
certain occupational habits to other, non-work situations in dysfunktional ways.
That is, one applies behavioural patterns internalised during occupational life to
situations where these patterns do not fit the expectations in the non-occupational
setting. In other word: one behaves as if they are at work even in non-work
situations. Since such behaviour is likely to be inappropriate to the respective
situation, it may lead to irritations among other participants in the situation and
cause, in Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) words, a breech of the rules of interaction or
an interactional crisis.

According to Erving Goffmann (1986), social situations are characterised by

specific situational frames that determine the meaning of the situation and what
sort of behaviour is expected from and by the participants. For instance, I know
that the situation where we are now actually in is framed as a conference
presentation where you are the audience and I am the speaker. That means that I
expect that you sit and listen to my words. I also expect that you expect from me
to act in a certain way: that I speak about my research findings, that I do so by
using a certain scientific style and so on; short: that I perform my identity as a
scholar and a speaker. If one of you, just to mention an extreme example, would
now, for instance, start singing loudly, this would not fit the situational frame. In
this case, my concept of the situation would be thoroughly disturbed and I would

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not really know what to do next, how to continue the interaction, what “line of
behaviour” (Goffman 1967) I could pick up to continue my stream of action.

In case of the déformation professionnelle, this is exactly what happens: the frame
of the non-occupational situation is breeched by the out-of-place occupational
behaviour.

Nowadays, we could also describe the concept of déformation professionell in

Pierre Bourdieu’s terms as an occupational habitus (Bourdieu 1977; 1984; 1990)
that is objectively fitted to the social structure of occupational life but does not fit
the social structure of the non-occupational situation.

The idea of déformation professionnelle is also rooted in everyday knowledge and

is a common theme when it comes to clichés about members of certain
occupational groups. We can think here about the image of the teacher who cannot
stop teaching even in private situations, like when they at a party or in family life.
In this case, the idea of a déformation professionnelle is employed as a topos to
stereotype or attribute occupational identities to an out-group.

I will now come to my conclusion regarding the interpretation of the observations

presented above: I want to argue that in this case, the seafarers play with the idea
of déformation professionnelle, with the idea that they internalised a certain
behavioural style specific to life at sea and cannot abandon these behavioural
patterns when working in a shore office far away from oceans and ships and that
they employ this play to underline their belonging to the occupational in-group of
seafarers. Or, more specifically, to the occupational sub-group of shore staff who
had formerly been seafarers. By acting this way, they construct a boundary
between themselves as members of an in-group and the out-group of people who
have different occupational backgrounds.

This is what the anthropologist Frederick Barth (1969) in his theory about ethnic
groups called boundary work. According to Barth, to understand ethnicity, it is not
of so much interest what is the content of ethnic belonging, like language,
customs, diet, fashion, etc. This is what he called “the cultural stuff” (Barth

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1969:15). What is of interest to the theorist, so Barth, is rather the ways and
strategies that boundaries between ethnic – and other kinds of – groups are
created, maintained, shifted, blurred or even abolished. This is what is commonly
referred to as boundary work (Barth) or boundary making (Wimmer 2009; 2008a;
2008b).

This is not to say that déformation professionnelle, in the strict original sense of
the concept, cannot be a real issue for seafarers. There are many examples where
adaption to the life at sea can lead to maladaption to life ashore. For instance,
Gunnar Lamvik (2002) observed that families of seafarers in the Philippines
complained that their husbands and fathers behaved like captains towards their
crews when at home for vacation. In Momoko Kitada’s (2010) study on
occupational and gender identities of women seafarers, respondents reported that
certain behaviours learned at sea – and that where mostly perceived as
empowering by the subjects – where read as conflicting with their gender
identities as women by people ashore. In my own research, I made the observation
that seafarers on board were sometimes unable to maintain normal private
relationships with each other due to the fact that they at any opportunity
reproduced the internalised patterns of command-and-obey, of domination and
subordination, according to their rank in the shipboard hierarchy. The latter can
also be interpreted as an instance of déformation professionnelle.

In the above case material, however, the matter is different. The idea of adaption
to sea-life leading to a mal-adaption to shore-life is appropriated here creatively
and more or less consciously as a way to perform occupational identity and to
construct a sense of belonging to the collective of veteran merchant seafarers. The
orchestration of déformation professionnelle by the seafarers is here used as a
strategy of boundary work.

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