Becoming a worker
In 1953, sociologist Howard Becker published what appeared to be a how-to guide to smoking marijuana, Becoming a Marihuana User.
His three handy steps:
- Learn to smoke in a way that will produce real effects
- Learn to recognize the effects and connect them with drug use
- Learn to enjoy the sensations
The young scholar wasn’t (just) trying to get future sociology undergrads like me to learn to burn. He was teaching us about deviance — a topic for another day — and socialization.
Anyone who has changed careers or companies recently will recognize what socialization feels like at work. When I started in advertising, I had to learn a long list of terms I’d never heard before. And because I started at a Hispanic agency, I had to learn some again when I moved to a general market agency (I didn’t know the English term for a creative team, I just knew them as duplas).
Every job and company has language, dress, beliefs, and rituals that form its culture. Over time they become shibboleths, markers of in-group membership that exist mostly outside of the actual work.
The work is what we do; work culture is how we do it.
Because what we do (and how it contributes to company success) can be very subjective, how we work can be as important or more important than the actual work we do. Consistent attendance, duty, and adherence to dress codes are examples of performative work, but are still important to becoming a worker.
It can be benign, but it’s not always.
Underrepresented groups have to prove their in-group status above and beyond normal amounts of work socialization. Work culture is a cause of the need to code switch, something I’ve heard from Black women in particular. They’re often forced adapt to work culture by presenting typically white and male traits in a corporate world both defined and dominated by those groups.
As we enter an era of hybrid work, two critical management challenges will be sustaining work culture with remote employees, and creating more objective measures of work productivity. Where the two intersect, and where they shouldn’t, will be fascinating to observe.
