Traded, Waived, or Gassed: Failure in the Occupational World of Ice Hockey

Abstract

Data presented from participant observation among minor league hockey players reveals how workers react to individual and collective failure in their occupational world. Failure on the group level refers to losing hockey games. Failure on the individual level involves not making the team. A player can fail to make the team by being gassed, by being traded, or by being placed on waivers. Each of these ways has a separate meaning with a distinct set of experiences, consequences, and reactions. A continuum of failure in this occupational world is presented by describing the consequences of failed performance and the differing reactions among co-workers to each type of failure. Group reactions to failure in hockey involve the interruption of social relationships based on the ensuing separation from the status position previously held by the failed player. As one moves along this continuum of failure, co- workers view the failed player and react to him as if the failed no longer existed, as socially dead or at least socially very ill. This continuum of failure points out the interrelatedness of group and personal reaction to failure and how one feeds off and reinforces the other.