Fishing for success without rocking the boat: Value conflict and work control in a maritime context

This paper deals with the role of work control in managing tensions between communitarian social organization and individualistic values. It uses data from a peripheral maritime community, where communitarian control is emphasized above all else; yet work there is organized as petty entrepreneurship, with expressed values on individualism and the Protestant Ethic. The dominant community institution controlling work (the Methodist Church), the structure of the work place and social organization of labor, and the face-to-face transactions concerning work and rewards that have allowed these conflicting ideologies to coexist on a day-to-day basis are examined. For example, entrepreneurial success is controlled by informal communal and church pressures, which encourage watermen to produce at the same levels. Consumption is controlled by community norms and gossip so that people have basically the same possessions. These practices, along with work information control mechanisms, curtail tendencies to convert individual work outcomes into community status. They permit a sense of individual freedom and success in the work place yet at the same time control it so that equality and communitarianism predominate.The author wishes to thank Steven Cole, Rose Laub Coser, Bill Gromfein, Lyle Hallowell, Robert W. Hodge, John McCarthy, Charles Perrow, Pat Roos, Ed Royce, Gerald Suttles, Eugene Weinstein, Glenn Yago, Stony Brook Research Seminar, and editors and reviewers ofQualitative Sociology for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.