The labour of fun: masculinities and the organisation of labour games in a modern workplace

Abstract

The U.S. tech industry has been going through a re‐shuffling of labour forces, which destabilises the previous masculine structure. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic work and 46 interviews, this study finds that labour games have become a contested terrain where different groups of engineers promote their masculine selves. Brogrammers highlight their brogramming masculine habitus through initiating ‘pranking‐games’. Tech hobbyists embodied with video‐gaming habitus invest in the ‘number games’ through which they display their technological masculinity. Despite the divergent motives, two minority groups—coding peasants and female workers—choose to distance themselves from these labour games, which reinforce their marginalised status. These findings contribute to masculinity scholarship and the study of labour games by demonstrating how labour games organised on the engineering floor have become a crucial milieu for the construction of masculinities.

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