O trem não pode parar: reformando uma oficina de locomotivas

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Leonardo Lemos da Silveira
• Orientador(a): Silveira, Rafael Alcadipani da
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Palavras-chave em Português: Práticas sociais; Arranjos materiais; Etnografia; Reparo e manutenção
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Social practices; Material arrangements; Embodiment; Ethnography; Repair and maintenance
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/11619

This thesis aims to analyse how organizations happens, constitute themselves as such in real time. Empirically, this was done based on intensive fieldwork carried out in the area responsible for repairing locomotives in one of the largest railway workshop in Brazil. From the ontological, epistemological and theoretical perspective I adopted Theodore Schatzki´s version of social practices as the basic reference. Schatzki proposes an ontology of social practices – called site ontology - to which the social site (or the context in which human coexistence unfolds) is composed of nexuses of practices (bodily doings and sayings) and material arrangements (objects, artifacts, bodies). In this approach, organizations could be understood as meshs configurations of practices and material arrangements. More specifically, I tried to analyze - mainly from the mechanics/electricians perspective - the bodily doings and sayings and materials arrangements involved in performing locomotives repair and maintenance activities that gives life to the workshop. The fieldwork, conducted through ethnographic methods, was based on 6 months of direct observation of the workshop day-to-day. Besides observation, data was gathered by images (photographs), documents and interviews. Following the actors and their practices I could show that the ‘workshop’ (in particular and any organization, in general), as a particular social phenomenon, could be treated as a mesh of practices and materials arrangements. I pointed out that the different activities (doings and sayings) of maintenance scheduling, allocation of manpower, identification of machines problems, inspection, adjustment and replacement of parts and components, performed by the maintenance programmers, the leaders and supervisors of teamworks, by the fails analysts, mechanical/electricians, whithin, and through different material arrangements (and elements) as the ‘office’, ‘the table’, the sheds, the ditches, the meeting room, the maintenance management system, the failures analysts worksheets, the Risk Analysis and Permissions of Work, locomotives, their parts and components, tools, to ensure the availability and reliability of locomotives, as well as the safety of employees, are what actually give ’life’ (animate) and ‘materialize’ ‘the workshop’. From what was observed in the field, I also used the notion of cyborg and cyborganization to describe and discuss how humans (mechanics/electricians ) and nonhuman (locomotives, parts, components ) not simply inter-act, but intra-acted. I revisited the concept of embodiment given that I realized in the fieldwork that the intra-actions with the machines were often lived by mechanics/electricians as involving bodily postures, movements and experience. In this case the sensory-perceptual abilities emerged as a decisive element to mechanics/electricians carry out their work activities. I also argue that the (mechanics/eletricians)-body is also subject, has an active role in organizational life, is capable of produce (not just reproduce) practices