Airport security contradictions: Interorganizational entanglements and changing work practices

Abstract

Taking the highly-institutionalized, socio-technical domain of airport security as its empirical basis, the article focuses on interorganizational workplaces marked by public/private dialectics, and their impact on changing work practices, identity processes, and power-resistance relations. The empirical material stems from the ethnography that I conducted at an Italian international airport (April 2013–March 2015). Data include fieldnotes, interviews, and video recordings. Having described the institutional and operational scenario, I outline the contradictory pressures characterizing the considered setting, and the way security personnel make sense of and cope with them. Then I discuss a case of techno-organizational change concerning a technology in use at security checkpoints (Threat Image Projection). I show how the interorganizational context produces unforeseen and undesigned ‘second order’ change effects, and how such effects may escalate workers’ resistance. I close with some general reflections on ambivalent interorganizational working orders.