"Donut Time": Engineering Pranks and Masculinities at a High-Tech Firm

• In Event: 115 - Section on Asia and Asian America Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. The Sociology of Gender and Work across Asia and Asian America

Abstract

Labor scholars who studied software workplaces tended to assume a homogeneous engineering culture dominated by white males, leaving race and gender invisible. To address this oversight, feminist scholars examined femininity in technology, but remain failed to articulate masculinity. This study shifts the attention to explore how diverse masculine subjectivities are produced and figure into the discipline and productivity in the high-tech industry. Based on 46 in-depth interviews and 11 months of ethnographic observation in a large, national renowned, high-tech firm in Seattle, this study finds, to facilitate control, the high-tech corporation develops a pranking game called “donut email”, which is played in three formats (manager-initiated, hackers-initiated, and “brogrammers” -initiated). Joking practices like donut pranks become an important work floor game organized by managers to increase productivity and discipline, and a fertile arena through which different engineering masculinities are created, modified, and confronted with each other.Through observing three groups of engineers’ (white, Indian, Chinese) participation in joking practices, this study finds that three types of masculine subjectivities (brogrammer, hacker, coding peasant) are produced. These findings contribute to labor regime literature by unpacking how joking fits into labor process game scenarios. This study re-conceptualizes masculinity as a game-playing process as players mobilizes distinct masculine resources they accumulated in school and reinvested to workplace. Finally, this project contributes to gender study by presenting masculinities as a fluid meaning structure, outlining mechanisms by which diverse masculine subjectivities are produced and serve to increase productivity.

Author

• Tongyu Wu, University of Oregon