Book Review: Working Sober: The Transformation of an Occupational Drinking Culture

Abstract

Working Sober: The Transformation of an Occupational Drinking Culture, by William J. Sonnenstuhl (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 143 pp., $14.95 (paperback). There may well be, as old Doc Johnson used to insist, nothing quite like the gallows for concentrating one's mind, but for working folks the sudden prospect of long-term unemployment comes close. For a number of unions and civil service employees in New York City, something like that happened in the wake of the city's fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s. How one union turned economic duress into therapeutic inventiveness is the somewhat underplayed theme of Professor William J. Sonnenstuhl's Working Sober, a study of the fiercely self-protective Tunnel and Construction Workers Union, better known as sandhogs. As anyone even vaguely familiar with the building trades can attest, drinking-and the rituals, larger-than-life stories, subterfuges, cover-ups, missed deadlines, and occasionally sloppy work associated with it-is endemic in the worklife of a good number of blue-collar occupations. Sonnenstuhl shows clearly that this is something more than an elective affinity between dirty work and disreputable workers. In fact, his most convincing observations (at least to this reader) deal with the critical role that the staging areas of public drinking-the bars, pubs and hoghouses (changing rooms at mining sites)-have played in the recruitment and shaping (or daily selection) of this union's workers. Drinking with fellow sandhogs became a way first of establishing and then of renewing one's bona fides with them. Getting sloshed was the currency of belonging; standing for drinks around, a promise of more lasting and consequential reciprocal ties. Drinking lubricated the workday itself, eased its aftermath, and organized much of the workers' social life. (How it affected their family is only vaguely and glancingly mentioned.) In the somewhat stilted sociologese Sonnenstuhl tends to favor, the sandhogs experience their intemperate rituals as the means for constructing and reconstructing their sense of community. Drinking rituals solidify boundaries by enhancing members' sense of self and underscoring the obligations they owe one another; thus, they promote communal bonding among members (p. 82). But the point of Sonnenstuhl's study is not merely to chronicle what we know already too well. From both the historical sources he ably draws upon and my own discipline of anthropology, we have ample evidence of the varieties of constructive (Douglas, 1987) in multicultural places and times-the male bonding, stress reducing, identity annealing, repression lifting, fear defeating functions of elbow bending. If anything, the argument that drinking became a taken-for-granted fact of work life (p. 29) is overdetermined. The trick, as the subtitle of Sonnenstuhl's volume promises is to understand what turn out to be the crucial elements of its undoing. How does it come to pass that an occupational culture permeated by the ritual chemistry of gets sobriety? What prompts the transformation? How are the old ways of deconstructed? And, critically, with what sober versions of work, bonding, identity, story-telling, boundary maintenance, and reciprocity are they replaced? Here, as in most poorly understood cultural transformations, the play's the thing: what, with some detail and attention to chronology, actually happened? What was the sequence of events, actions and motivations of dramatic personae, new configurations of power and reciprocal obligations that stabilize new ways of working? And on this score, although the bare essentials are here, Sonnenstuhl's account is somewhat disappointing, reading in places more like Cliffs Notes than ethnography. (To be fair, he never claims to be doing ethnography; for six months in 1985, he used a variety of qualitative methods-some field visits to homes and work sites interviews with key informants, and extensive interaction with alcoholism program personnel-to get the story. …