%0 Journal Article
%T Airport security contradictions: Interorganizational entanglements and changing work practices
%A Chiara Bassetti
%J Ethnography
%@ 1741-2714
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1466138117696513
%X Taking the highly-institutionalized, socio-technical domain of airport security as its empirical basis, the article focuses on interorganizational workplaces marked by public/private dialectics, and their impact on changing work practices, identity processes, and power-resistance relations. The empirical material stems from the ethnography that I conducted at an Italian international airport (April 2013¨CMarch 2015). Data include fieldnotes, interviews, and video recordings. Having described the institutional and operational scenario, I outline the contradictory pressures characterizing the considered setting, and the way security personnel make sense of and cope with them. Then I discuss a case of techno-organizational change concerning a technology in use at security checkpoints (Threat Image Projection). I show how the interorganizational context produces unforeseen and undesigned ¡®second order¡¯ change effects, and how such effects may escalate workers¡¯ resistance. I close with some general reflections on ambivalent interorganizational working orders
%K airport security
%K interorganizational workplaces
%K mission ambivalence
%K occupational identity
%K techno-organizational change
%K socio-technical systems
%K work practices
%K resistance
%K entanglement
%K sense-making
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1466138117696513