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Abstract

Legislation pertaining to difficult working conditions and subsequent regulations relating to professional risks factors constitute a fragmented and individualised corpus that is rooted in power relationships where gestures appear to occur in a vacuum. It is a domain where personal engagement has been euphemised – making it hard to portray the field as a bona fide study of professional physicality. The paper explores the gap between physicality as construed under law vs. the reality at work, based on an ethnographic survey of professional civil engineering divers. It uses building sites as a backdrop enabling analysis of the physical experience of “turning” (when divers are in motion, tied to fellow divers and working with objects) to illustrate the close links between physicality and power, analysed in material cultural terms.

Keywords

• physical work
• difficult working conditions
• techniques and objects
• self-control techniques
• power