Masculinities in transformation? The green and digital industrial transformation of male-dominated jobs in northern Sweden

Abstract

In this presentation I will discusses how male-dominated work is changing in the digital and green industrial transformation in northern Sweden and how it is connected to changes in gender constructions and other gendered processes in the workplaces. The discussion is based on a synthesis of results from research conducted 2001–2021, mainly qualitative empirical studies of work, technology and gender in the mining sector in Sweden.

Although the development of the mining industry will not be as technologically deterministic and rapid as the usual dystopian and utopian visions predict, there will be major changes and new conditions for work, and this will be a challenge to the old, gendered mining workplace cultures and professional identities. Already we have seen that the implementation of new technology and reorganisation initially met resistance in the workplace. Workplace cultures and worker collectives seemed to be lagging behind, and here intertwined masculinities and miner identities linked to the old “macho masculinity” played a major role. There was also interaction with overarching myths and discourses about both mining and rural communities. One part of this was new gender encodings of the new technology and the new places – which created new organisational gender boundaries and new forms of inequality. But in our more recent empirical material we have seen indications that there seems to be new forms of masculinities and femininities emerging, which can provide openings for gender equality. Although mining work is still male dominated, we can see that new places, new technology, improved work environment and increased gender equality (more women) would mean that it will become difficult to preserve the old (“macho”) miner masculinity and to maintain the gender marking of mining work as male and the image of the miner as male. Overall, we have seen complex connections between gender, work and place for these male-dominated industrial workplaces and processes of both stability and change.

Presenter

Lena Abrahamsson is professor and head of subject for Human Work Science at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. She is also scientific leader of the strategic university-wide area “Creaternity” at the same university. Current research projects deal with the work of the future in the green and digital industrial transition, many of them with a focus on gender and organisation, in the Swedish mining and steel industry. In addition to this she is member of the board for Blekinge University.