Apparel at Work: Work Uniforms and Women in Male-dominated Manual Occupations

Bjerck, Mari Doctoral Thesis Apparel at Work: Work Uniforms and Women in Maledominated Manual Occupations PhD Series, No. 1.2017 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Bjerck, Mari (2017) : Apparel at Work: Work Uniforms and Women in Maledominated Manual Occupations, PhD Series, No. 1.2017, ISBN 9788793483750, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, https://hdl.handle.net/10398/9434 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/209009 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL SOLBJERG PLADS 3 DK-2000 FREDERIKSBERG DANMARK WWW.CBS.DK ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93483-74-3 Online ISBN: 978-87-93483-75-0 APPAREL AT WORK WORK UNIFORMS AND WOMEN IN MALE-DOMINATED MANUAL OCCUPATIONS 1 Apparel at Work Work uniforms and women in male-dominated manual occupations. Mari Bjerck Supervisors: Professor Anne-Marie Søderberg Department of Intercultural Communication and Management Copenhagen Business School Research professor Ingun Grimstad Klepp Consumption Research Norway (SIFO) Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies Copenhagen Business School Mari Bjerck Apparel at work. Work uniforms and women in male-dominated manual occupations. 1st edition 2017 PhD Series 01.2017 © Mari Bjerck ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93483-74-3 Online ISBN: 978-87-93483-75-0 All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and empirical themes related to the organisation and management of private, public and voluntary organizations. 3 Acknowledgements I started this PhD journey in 2009 and seven years, one marriage, three children and two cities later it is finally finished. There are naturally enough many people (and institutions) to thank. First and foremost I want to thank my superviser Ingun Grimstad Klepp for, well, just about everything that has to do with the dissertation. She recruited me to the innovation project which this dissertation is a part of. She has been my closest research leader, project leader of several projects, colleague, co-author, travel companion and an extremely engaged, accessible and encouraging supervisor. Thank you, Ingun! I also want to thank Lise Skov who for the larger part of this dissertation writing was my supervisor at CBS. She has been generous, inclusive and constructive in her guidance, and for that I owe her many thanks. She carefully left me in the guiding hands of Anne-Marie Søderberg who has seen me thorugh the process. Thank you Anne-Marie for contributing with detailed feedback and remining me to “don’t tell it, show it!”. I owe Consumption Research Norway (SIFO) at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (HIOA) many thanks for providing me with a fellowship and very competent and warm colleagues. SIFO colleagues have red thorugh different parts of my dissertation and articles at different stages. A particular thanks to the whole research group of Technology and Environment: Harald Throne-Holst, Pål Strandbakken, Ardis Storm-Mathisen, Anita Borch, Marie Hebrok, Nina Heidenstrøm, Kirsi Laitala, Ingrid Kjørstad, Dag Slettemeås, Gunnar Vittersø and Silje Skuland. A special thanks to Mari Rysst, Cecilie Basberg Neumann og Marit Vestvik for their participation in the Uni-Form project, good working relationship AND for the permission to use their fieldworknotes and interviews in the writing of this dissertation! In the research project at large I want to thank in particular Kari Ngo-Aandahl, Marie Brun Svendsen, Fritjof Henmark and Thrude Leirvik for their cooperation and constructive dialogue in our work meetings. Also – thank you NFR – the National Research Council for funding and believing in this project! I owe all female and male employees in the male-dominated occupations much gratitude for being so kind as to let me participate in their everyday life at work and to their employers who have let me in to their work spheres. Without you all there would be no articles and no dissertation! 4 I also want to thank those of you who have contributed to making this whole process possible for me and my family in our everyday life: Brit Berg, Bodil Bjerck, Vilde Saksen, Tore Saksen, Petter Bjerck and the staff of Gjøvik Kindergarten. And a big thank you to my sister, Gine Bjerck, for helping me with tranlations related to this dissertation. Last, but definately not least I want to thank my best friend, love of my life and father to our children, Espen Berg Saksen. Without him I would not be able to finish this. He has held the family together, kept everybody fed, (partly) happy and rested, while I have been away and continually writing. This dissertation is dedicated to Molly, Vilma and Iben – in hope for a bright future as women in the future labour market! Mari Bjerck Oslo, December 2016 5 Summary This dissertation is concerned with work uniforms for women in male-dominated manual occupations. As such, it has analysed parts of the gender-segregated labour market in light of material conditions that dress workers every day. This has been done on the background of a research and development project called Uni-Form funded by the Research Council of Norway. The dissertation presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork in six male-dominated occupations; construction, skilled manual work, industrial production, off- and onshore gas and oil production, industrial fishing and the Navy. It also analyses the project Uni-Form’s product development process and seeks to show how work research can benefit from employing more materiality-based studies. Work clothes and uniforms for women in male-dominated occupations have come in the form of men’s clothes or feminized copies of men's clothes where form and aesthetics have been adapted to the female body and female dress standards. There are several problematic aspects of work clothes and gender that points to premises of standardisation, which do not promote inclusion and recruitment or contribute to retaining women in the gender-segregated labour market. Research on workwear, uniforms and uniform dressing in general have largely documented that women dressing in uniform workwear are problematic in practical, functional and socialsymbolic terms, but it has not contributed with a larger study or shown how this can be solved in practice. The dissertation shows that despite the work uniform’s poor fit for many of the female workers, wearing it is crucial to their ability to be included (and excluded) in these occupations dominated by men. The work uniform is a part of a tacit dimension at work and is therefore not always evident in the conversations about work. When the dissertation deals with these tacit material relations through the fieldwork material it is evident that the work uniform turn out to reproduce gender constructions and work practices. In this lies a potential for the work uniforms to work as a change agent for the gender-segregated labour market. This applies both to the workwear becoming a part of a strategic and political discourse concerned with balancing the gender segregation in the Norwegian labour market, and by making work life studies more 6 materially structured. The dissertation also points out the tactile change potential of designing work clothes that are less standardized and more adapted to gender, body and work. Looking at the gender-segregated labour market and the standardization of workwear in this specific context, it can be argued that workwear as part of the working environment's material conditions and workers' everyday lives are a forgotten or neglected part of working life in politics and in working-life research. The neglect of workwear applies both to how clothes are designed to include a wide range of different people and occupational-specific work tasks, and the significance it is ascribed for working life in general. The most obvious effect of this neglect can be seen in women who are in an obvious minority in these occupations. This dissertation shows a clear connection between the physical, socio-cultural and material aspects embodied in the work uniform. It strives to contribute important insight into and contextual knowledge about women in male-dominated occupations that have not previously been presented. Simultaneously it points to concrete solutions that might better include women in male-dominated occupations.. 7 Sammendrag Denne avhandlingen omhandler arbeidsuniformer for kvinner I mannsdominerte yrker. Den analyserer deler av det kjønnsdelte arbeidsmarkedet i lys av materielle forhold som kler arbeidere hver dag. Dette er gjort på bakgrunn av et forsknings- og utviklingsprosjekt kalt Uni- Form finansiert av Norges Forskningsråd. Avhandlingen presenterer funn fra etnografisk feltarbeid i seks mannsdominerte yrker i Norge: bygg- og anlegg, håndverk, industriell produksjon, off- og onshore olje- og gass produksjon, industrielt fiske og marinen. Den analyserer også prosjektet Uni-Forms produktutviklingsprosess og søker å vise hvordan arbeidslivsforskning kan ha nytte av å anvende mer materielt baserte studier. Arbeidsklær og uniformer for kvinner i mannsdominerte yrker har kommet i form av mannsklær eller feminiserte kopier hvor form og estetikk er blitt forsøkt tilpasset kvinnekroppen og kvinnelige klesnormer. Det er flere problematiske sider ved arbeidsklær og kjønn som peker på premisser for standardisering som ikke fremmer inkludering og rekruttering, eller bidrar til å beholde kvinner i det kjønnsdelte arbeidsmarkedet som eksisterer i Norge i dag. Forskning på arbeidstøy, uniformer og uniformering har i stor grad dokumentert at kvinner som kles i uniform arbeidsbekledning er problematisk i praktiske, funksjonelle og sosiokulturelle termer, men det har ikke foreligget større undersøkelser av dette eller pekt på hvordan disse problematiske sidene kan løses i praksis. Avhandlingen viser at til tross for at arbeidsbekledningen passer dårlig til mange av de kvinnelige arbeiderne, er den avgjørende for deres evne til å inkluderes (og ekskluderes) i disse yrkene dominert av menn. Arbeidsbekledningen er en del av den tause kunnskapen i arbeidslivet, og er derfor lite tydelig i samtaler om arbeidet. Når avhandlingen tar for seg slike tause materielle forhold gjennom feltarbeidsmaterialet viser det seg at de virker reproduserende på kjønnskonstruksjoner så vel som arbeidslivspraksiser. Gjennom dette er det et potensiale i arbeidsbekledningen som endringsaktør for det kjønnsdelte arbeidsmarkedet. Dette gjelder både ved å inkludere arbeidsbekledningen som en del av den strategiske og politiske satsningen på å utjevne kjønnsdelingen i arbeidsmarkedet og ved å gjøre arbeidslivsstudier mer materielt strukturerte. Avhandlingen peker også på det taktile endringspotensialet som ligger i å utforme arbeidsbekledning som er mindre standardisert og tilpasset både kjønn, kropp og arbeid. 14 construction women make up only 8% of the workforce (Meld. St. 7 (2015-2016)). Hence, there are good reasons for referring to these and similar manual occupations as male-dominated. Women's relative subordination to men through educational choices are made visible in the labour market where the consequences are reflected in lower wages, part-time employment, poor pensions, an elevated retirement age and fewer leadership positions (e.g. Ellingsæther & Solheim 2002; Padavic & Reskin 2002; Holst 2009; England 2010; Reisel & Teigen 2014). Academic discussions of women who choose to work in manual, male-dominated occupations are preoccupied with understanding why so few women choose these occupations. Neumann, Rysst and Bjerck (2012: 242) suggest three explanations for this discussion. One is that the risk of harassment and sexual harassment, in particular, keep women from applying to these occupations (Yount 2005). Another explanation is that participating in occupations that do not require higher education goes against the emphasis of feminism on self-realization and economic freedom for women (England 2010). The last understanding is a gendered perception of women that presumes that women are uninterested in working in strenuous occupations where they may get dirty. This perception is rejected by Ferguson (1994) and Padavic (1992), among others. The Norwegian government is determined for gender equality to pay off for the individual and for society at large. They seek to create equal opportunities for men and women, largely due to the value created within the country by offering families greater occupational choices (Meld. St. 7 (2015-2016)). The government assists citizens in choosing non-traditional educations and occupations that contribute to a less gender-segregated labour market. To strengthen gender equality in the workplace, several labour organizations have also taken active steps to recruit for education, careers and leadership positions where there is an uneven gender distribution (Meld. St. 7 (2015-2016): 39). The government is particularly concerned with providing good tools and methods for creating equality and diversity in the workplace. Among other things, financial support has been given to explore the possibility for a certification of workplaces that meet a predefined standard for equality and diversity. Six indicators define this standard: 1. Diversity within management, 2. Regular career advancement, 3. Full-time positions are the norm, 4. Facilities are provided for employees with disabilities, 5. Claims of harassment and discrimination are handled adequately and in a timely manner, and 6. Equal wages for men and 15 women (Bråten et al. 2014; Meld. St. 7 (2015-2016): 40). In this dissertation, I will argue that this list is incomplete. If the Norwegian government is to succeed in achieving equality and diversity in the modern Norwegian workplace, it must better understand how work uniforms play into establishing gender segregation in the Norwegian labour market. Picture 1. Cover page of the newest Message to Parliament on gender equality (Meld. St. 7 (2015-2016)) Picture 1 presented above is the cover page of the newest Message to Parliament (Melding til Stortinget) on gender equality (Meld. St. 7 (2015-2016)) from the Ministry of Children and Equality. The title of this document is Equality in Practice and it deals with existing and future political initiatives for achieving equal opportunities for women and men in the labour market, among other areas of society. The cover photo depicts a woman dressed in workwear at what can be assumed is a male-dominated manual workplace. Her clothes are far cleaner than those I saw during my fieldwork for this study, but the point is that the picture’s main focus is a woman and her work clothes in a workplace context. Despite this, nowhere in this Message to 16 Parliament is there any mention of clothes, uniforms, workwear or any other material element that dresses these women and men every day for work. This is a crucial oversight. This dissertation underscores the importance of studying material conditions such as work uniforms and for giving these conditions the recognition they deserve in work research and in policy seeking to address gender-imbalanced labour markets. At the same time, this dissertation suggests ways of studying these material conditions that go beyond academic publications and extend to the concrete development of work uniforms. If women are to be integrated in the male-dominated labour market, it is important that this integration is based on a wider perspective of how the labour market works physically, socially and materially. Furthermore, it is important that we start considering how it can practically and materially be done in workplaces that welcome these women in various ways after they have left school. Research problematic and aim This thesis draws attention to the importance of work uniforms for the gender-segregated labour market. Work uniforms are here seen as more than the fulfilment of functional and safety requirements. They work as a social and symbolic instrument for the improved integration of women in various male-dominated occupations. The title of the dissertation, “Apparel at work”, reflects this dissertation’s concern with the clothes for work, but also how these clothes is at work in its context. Work uniforms determine much of the work that is done, but have not been devoted much space in the discussions about what constitutes working life, with an exception of issues related to safety and health. The materiality of work has an important function, both in socio-cultural and in practical contexts. Through careful study of uniforms in working life, this dissertation aims to fill a knowledge gap in the importance material conditions and objects have in determining gender equality in the workplace. This thesis emphasizes the importance of the materiality of work uniforms in order to achieve an empirically grounded understanding of gender-segregation in the Norwegian labour market. In this, the overarching research question is formulated as follows: What potential lies in the work uniform as an agent of change for the gender-segregated labour market? 17 This is an explorative research question that probes an area of central importance to politics and society as a whole, namely work and diversity. The significance of work uniforms for working life is underestimated and this thesis aims to pave the way for future, materially oriented studies of work and gender. This dissertation is concerned with material objects and their non-reflexive interaction with individuals. It shows how to illuminate tacit relations through work uniforms in interaction, and couples it with emic understandings of gender and how this integrates with practices related to work. The overarching research question will be answered by looking at work uniforms in light of ordinary consumption and as an important part of everyday consumer practice. It is the use phase of everyday consumption that is at issue here and the relationship between gender and work formed through the materiality of what is worn on the body, at work. Labelling the work uniform as a potential change agent points to its ability to change both the body of the person who wears it and the environments that surrounds it. The exploration of the work uniform's change potential will be made through the following four research problematics: 1. What is the work uniform’s potential for the inclusion and exclusion of female workers? 2. How do work uniforms have the potential to challenge and reproduce work practices and gendered constructions? 3. In what ways do work uniforms have the potential to reveal tacit and embodied understandings of work environments? 4. In what ways does the innovation of work uniforms provide potential for change of the gender-segregated labour market? These questions are answered through the four articles included in this dissertation, which address the position of standardized work uniforms in male-dominated work environments. This dissertation shows how workwear affects the execution of work and how it is integrated into the interaction between individual actors in the workplace. Looking closer at workwear and uniforms reveals tacit and explicit relationships between work practices, gender constructions and uniformed workwear. The contribution of this dissertation will be to explore the importance of uniforms for women´s integration into male-dominated occupations and to look at how work uniforms partake in interactions between co-workers and how they impact their work in general. 18 This dissertation will also highlight ways to reveal embodied conditions when studying material objects, and consider what potential that lies in the uniform for change and innovation. Ultimately, these questions will culminate in a discussion of whether the work uniform has potential for change. If the work uniform is a symptom and a sign of masculine dominance penetrating the sphere of work, it could be possible to improve a gender-segregated labour market by altering work uniforms. This thesis will address this challenge directly towards the end. In addition to contributing to knowledge about work uniforms in relation to gender constructions and work practices, an overall aim of this dissertation is to open up a field for studying material culture within work research and policymaking. This aim is twofold: Firstly, I seek to advance the importance of materiality in workplace studies. Work uniforms must be taken seriously as an essential component of workers' everyday lives. Secondly (and this is an extension of the first aim), if detailed studies of these material realities are taken seriously, it might be possible to talk about work uniforms as a challenge to and an opportunity for equality and equal rights in the labour market. The occupations women choose may be as much determined by the material clothing that they see themselves dressing in every day as are their opportunity for career advancement. Contribution, background and motivation The study of women and work uniforms in six, manual male-dominated occupational categories speaks directly to the gender division of occupational spheres in Norway. In work research, concrete bodily experiences through clothes are given voice primarily related to health and safety issues at work (e.g. Klemsdal 2003; Frøyland et al. 2004). Some studies have been conducted on the relationship between clothing and work. These are mainly placed within a culture-historical tradition where the development of clothing for individual groups has been studied, such as for postal services (Larsson 2008), male politicians (Pettersen 2004), and the police (Finstad 2000; Drege & Nyttingnes 1999; Young 1997), as well as studies where clothing is included as one of several elements (Conradson 1988). When it comes to the uniform or work wear as a design product, several functional analysis of this type of clothing has been conducted. Petersen and Riisberg (2015) has studied the interplay between different actors involved in the design process of uniforms for health care professionals 19 that both answears to functional analysis and individual actors concerns with self-presentation and identity. However, few studies, especially of women in male-dominated occupations have thematised the use of workwear at the intersection of work, clothing, body and gender. A study by Carol Wolkowitz (2006) is an example where body, work and gender is analysed through industry workers, service workers, and prostitutes, but here clothes have been taken out of her analysis. Much research has been done on women in the Norwegian military and many strategies have been suggested to recruit and retain women in military positions. Unfortunately, few of them have actively dealt with uniforms as a possible route towards gender equality and diversity. One study that does examine uniforms briefly comes from Ellingsen et al. (2008), appearing as part of a pilot study of the recruitment of women to the Norwegian military. In this study, the authors point to the paradoxical fact that after 25 years of having women in the military, uniforms and equipment have yet to be adapted to female soldiers. They see this as a symbol of a monolithical structure in occupations where the female body does not fit in. Here, uniforms instead become an illustration of women’s differentness. Women and men’s material conditions in the workplace are not considered a contributing factor to the gender-segregated labour market. However, in the male-dominated occupations in this study, the standardization of work clothes is an important common feature. These clothes are obligatory for all workers but is mainly grounded in forms and sizes common for male workers. Women who work in the male-dominated occupations break with the gender-segregated labour market, but this is despite of common work uniform practices. This dissertation is about these clothes and women, and how understanding and changing their material conditions may contribute to changing the gender-segregated labour market. Background and motivation This dissertation is one of the outcomes of a larger research and development project called Uni- Form: Workwear for Women in Male-Dominated Occupations (referred to as Uni-Form) led by a large Norwegian sports and workwear company. The project consortium was initiated by this anonymised Norwegian sports- and workwear company and Consumption Research Norway and consisted of two academic institutions (Consumption Research Norway known as SIFO and the Norwegian Work Research Institute known as AFI), a public sector institution (the 20 Norwegian Defence Logistics Organization known as NDLO) and the Norwegian sports and workwear company. This project was concerned with developing knowledge about workwear products and services for women in male-dominated occupations. As a starting point, this study looked at the few work garments that already existed for women in these occupations, which were unsuccessful. They did not sell well on the market, and the workwear company wanted to know why and what they could do to improve sales. This research project also started by looking at why there was so little knowledge about women in male-dominated occupations – particularly regarding their use of uniforms and workwear in the intersection of work, body and gender. The project was funded through the Norwegian Research Council’s program for User Driven Innovation over a four-year period. This project started in 2009 and ended in 2013, and all four publications attached to this dissertation stem from this project. The Uni-Form project and its implications for the doctoral study will be addressed at greater length in the methods section of this thesis. Research on uniforms and uniformation in both historical and contemporary studies have noted that women and uniformation is problematic. Our contribution to this project innovating work uniforms for women in male-dominated occupations is not simply to point out problems with uniformation but to arrive at how these problems can be solved in practice. On a more elevated level, we wanted to study how practice-oriented clothing and work research could be utilized in concrete product development. This was to be done through the following main problematic specified in the project application: Develop competence-based products for women in maledominated occupations, with technical and social functionality that will contribute to increased well-being and improved integration of women into workplaces. These competence-based products for women were to be developed through the following objectives: 1. Describe women's experiences, challenges and preferences in relation to workwear and uniforms, and how uniforms and workwear are used and experienced by female users. 2. Describe how gender is marked and communicated at a selection of male-dominated work spheres. 3. Describe the user contexts for uniforms and workwear, including the relationship between the use of work clothes and private clothes for sport and leisure. 4. Improve workwear through practice-oriented clothing and work-life research. 5. Develop new product concepts and marketing strategies for workwear for both sexes in male-dominated occupations. 6. Improve military clothing for 21 soldiers of both genders. 7. Improve information strategies to ensure that greater clothing functionality can be achieved through proper usage. In the fulfilment of these objectives it was a challenge to translate between social sciences where the development of concepts and ways of understanding are central, to design where thoughts are meant to be given a tangible form. The relationship between the material, technology and society was both a theoretical and methodological challenge in this project. We believed the project could contribute to this discussion, which had been more dominated by theoretical development than empirical operationalization. To achieve these objectives, we needed a broad knowledge base on the use of workwear and uniforms. The project attempted to contribute to a greater understanding of the work clothes' user context, which was to give the workwear company opportunity to improve their products and information strategies. In addition, the ethnographic research was intended to lead to further scientific publications and contribute to the completion of this dissertation. The articles presented in this dissertation and two other publications from this project is further elaborated in the next section. The articles The issues set forth in this introduction will be answered on the basis of four articles. These are: A. Bjerck, M (2013). En borrelås til besvær: Kvinnelig uniformering på minefartøyer. [A Velcro that upsets: Female uniforms on Navy vessels.] In P. Strandbakken & N. Heidenstrøm (Eds.) Hinsides symbolverdi: Materialiteten i forbruket. [Beyond symbolic value: The materiality of consumption.] Novus forlag: Oslo, pp. 121-144. Abstract: The Norwegian Defence Logistics Organisation (FLO) had in 2010 provided a selection of its naval force at a minesweeper in Norway a new work uniform (M / 04) for testing. The new version of the jacket provided the possibility for a more feminine shape in the work uniform; with a shorter shoulder width and narrower waist line provided by a Velcro strap. This bookchapter is based on one specific material object; the Velcro straps in the waist of the jacket in the work uniform M / 04. The empirical data are gathered through fieldwork on two of the Norwegian Navy vessels. The debate over the Velcro 22 straps reveals many important discourses about being a woman in a workplace dominated by men. Above all, it points to how women and men negotiate gender through certain clothing practices within a predetermined uniform regulation. Keywords: materiality, work, uniforms, gender, clothes B. Bjerck, M. & Klepp, I.G. Clothes matter: Work uniforms in Norwegian maledominated manual occupations. Submitted to Journal of Material Culture in May 2016 Abstract: The importance of material conditions and artefacts – uniforms and worwear, in particular – for working life are only to a limited degree taken serious in working life studies. This article will try to fill this gap by asking: What relevance does materiality, in the form of work uniforms, have for workers in everyday work life? This article addresses that question by comparing some of the structural conditions and constraints framing such clothing with particular meaning they carry for everyday users. The article will discuss how work uniforms operate within work practices, and the effect they have on one other. By doing this, we hope to show that studying work practices through clothing might provide new knowledge about the physical and social aspects of work. Keywords: materiality, work, uniforms, clothes, ethnography, gender C. Klepp, I.G. & Bjerck, M. (2014) A Methodological Approach to the Materiality of Clothing: Wardrobe Studies. In International Journal of Social Research Methodology. 17(4), 373-386 Abstract: The material is not just ‘a carrier’ of different types of symbols, but an active element in the practices (Latour 1996). Bringing this to the fore requires new research methods. This article discusses a methodological approach we call wardrobe study which allows for analysis of the way in which clothes relate to each other on the whole or within parts of the wardrobe. More specifically, we discuss how this method can contribute to 23 increasing the materiality of clothes studies. The theoretical point of departure for this approach is a practice theory in which the material enters as an integral part (Shove & Pantzar 2005). First, the article briefly discusses developments within the study of dress and fashion. Second, the methods combined and developed in wardrobe studies are discussed. The emphasis here is primarily on the weaknesses of the individual methods in practice-oriented dress studies, but also on how they jointly can contribute to the wardrobe study. Key words: Method, materiality, clothes, wardrobe D. Bjerck, M. Developing work uniforms for women: The role of ethnographic research. In Journal of Business Anthropology 5(1), 137-153 Abstract: This article is concerned with the ethnographic research done in a Norwegian product development project aimed at developing workwear for women in male-dominated manual occupations. Making use of ethnographic methods and analysis can be valuable in showing how users’ experiences and practices can be studied. It can also be useful in areas where there is poorly developed language and concepts for formulating and discussing products, such as with workwear. This article aims at answering how ethnographic studies might contribute to the development of products and services. Understanding people and things in their everyday relations and achieving actionoriented results may be a challenge to the innovation and development processes. This article explores the challenges that lie in studying the use of clothing in specific work contexts as well as capturing and mediating this experience with workwear in use. Keywords: Uniform, gender, ethnography, innovation, product development In addition, the following co-authored publications have contributed to the perspectives set forth in this dissertation:  Neumann, C.B., Rysst, M., & Bjerck, M. (2012). En av gutta: Kvinner og klær i mannsdominerte arbeiderklasseyrker. [One of the guys: Women and clothing in male- 30 than men. The relative measurements for the ratio between the length of the back, the waistline and the hips are also different for women than they are for men (Neumann et al. 2013). This is often (though, not always) taken into account in the design of civilian clothes, but is seldom considered when it comes to workwear and uniforms (Neumann et al. 2013). A direct consequence of the lack of design to accommodate women is evident through the use of work pants with rather narrow and straight constructions in the waist. When work pants do not fit women in a size they would normally wear due to the shape of its narrow hips, women have had to use a larger waist size. This also effects the length of the pants as they are usually not provided in a variety of lengths, only in different waist sizes. One of the results of wearing a larger pant is that the overall form does not fit the woman’s body. It is narrow in her waist but wider in her thighs, and is unnecessarily long. This ill fit impaired the practical details designed into these pants – one of them being the kneepads, which ended up sitting below the female worker’s knees due to the extended length of the pants. Unless they continuously pulled the pants up before sitting down, these women lacked any knee protection when working on hard concrete floors of construction sites, for example. The second problem is related to the socio-cultural work context, which shows that suitable clothes are not only an aspect of a physical nature of bodies and the garments they are dressed in. Suitable clothes are clothes that make the body socially acceptable and able to fit into everyday social contexts, claim Klepp and Rysst (2016: 1). According to Petersen and Riisberg (2015: 60), even though uniforms are not normally considered part of the fashion system understood as a system of rapidly shifting aesthetic preferences, the current fashion ideals manifest themselves in the cut, material and silhouette of the design. Research on uniforms show that women in male-dominated occupations seem to need to present an asexual appearance in both action and in dress (Garber 1992; Neumann et al. 2012), which differs from femininity as it often is performed. Working in skirts has thus been unpopular both socio-culturally and functionally, as it appears in Finstad’s study of the police (2000). How women dress suitably in garments based on male standardization, is not only an issue of how the clothes fit the body, but also an issue of how these clothes are felt on the body by the wearer. These two problematic aspects of work clothes and gender points to premises of standardisation, which do not promote inclusion and recruitment or contribute to retaining women in the gender- 31 segregated labour market. Research on uniforms and uniform dressing in general have largely documented that women dressing in uniforms are problematic in practical, functional and socialsymbolic terms (Joseph 1986; Craik 2005; Kidwell 1989; Barnes & Eicher 1997; Larsson 2008). Looking at the gender-segregated labour market and the standardization of workwear in context, it can be argued that the work clothes as part of the working environment's material conditions and workers' everyday lives are a forgotten or neglected part of working life in politics and in working-life research. The neglect of workwear applies both to how clothes are designed to include a wide range of different people and occupational-specific work tasks, and the significance it is ascribed for working life in general. The most apparent effect of that neglect can be seen on women. Gender constructions and material bodies at work Work clothes and uniforms for women in male-dominated occupations have come in the form of men’s clothes or feminized copies of men's clothes where form and aesthetics have been adapted to the female body and female dress standards. Whether women themselves, through the work uniforms, want to be distinguished as different or show solidarity to occupations where gender is downplayed is one of the aspects of women and uniforms that is investigated more thoroughly through this thesis. This section will treat gender constructions related to the material body as we find it in gender theory and further in the emic constructions at work. Having gender as a central object of study presupposes the category gender as given. It is fruitful to problematize the category of gender because it has been and still is under scrutiny and particularly related to how the relationship between sex and gender should be understood. Donna Haraway (1988) uses the term situated knowledge to point out that the importance of gender, when one studies it, cannot be understood as a fixed category with unproblematic references. Gender is in this dissertation understood as relational (Connell 2002). Gender is something that people do, it is an on-going process and not biologically predetermined and contained in the body (Butler 2006; West & Zimmermann 1987). Candace West and Don H. Zimmermann argued that "gender is not a set of traits, nor a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of some sort" (1987: 129). This laid the foundation to see gender as produced and reproduced in repetitive everyday interactions based on cultural expectations related to how people categorized as women and men should present and behave 32 themselves (Rysst 2008: 24). Gender is learned through interaction with others in terms of how one responds to behaviour (West & Zimmermann 1987: 129). This is an important aspect in the study of women and in the study of female work uniforms in male-dominated occupations. The term heterosexual matrix, used by Butler (2006), refers not only to how gender is learned but also to how this learned gender behaviour is reflected in the society as a whole. This point to a cultural process that neutralizes body, gender and desire. The term heteronormativity (Ingraham 1996; Butler 2006) defines gender as a binary category. It refers to an empirical understanding of how women and men deal with gender, and in this dissertation it will be used in the analysis of work practices where social norms and institutionalized assumptions treat heterosexuality as the norm and variations from this norm as deviant. Gender and the material body Studying gender in a universe defined by masculinity may be subject to interpretation challenges surrounding gender and material conditions. The empirical field has to treat the specific material body as the basis of social gender in order to reflect the emic constructions of gender and the physically dressed body. Poststructuralist gender theorists like Butler do not focus on the body as carrier of meaning in itself, but believe that one must make the material into a priority object of study (Langås 2008: 10). To include the material she will turn to the idea of the material as a process that produces experienced properties of materiality as its effect (Butler 1993: 9; Langås 2008: 9). Judith Butler (1990, 1993) theorizes gender by using performative gender theory, i.e., gender as a performative category. To Butler, gender is a constant process where one constructs identity. You become a woman through constant repetition, and not by being born with a biologically determined sex. In her formulation of gender, Butler turns upside down the distinction between sex and gender and claims that it is gender (not sex) that is primary in determining the way we appear and act (Mortensen et al. 2008: 77). Biological sex is therefore an effect of socially constructed gender (Mortensen et al. 2008: 77). The performative aspect of gender therefore implies that the gender effect is not naturally given, but must be adapted, reproduced, repaired and cited (Mühleisen & Lorentzen 2006: 278). However, a problem with Butler and her performative category is that it is difficult to find a satisfactory answer to how to integrate material (anatomically sexed) bodies in the analysis 33 when biological bodies are only understood as socially constructed (Moi 1999; Rysst 2008). This is one of the reasons why Toril Moi takes a sharp confrontation with Butler and other poststructuralists in her essay collection, "What is a woman?" (1999). In this collection, Moi wants to develop a theory of gender in which the body – and not language-based subjectivity and identity theories – is at the centre (Mortensen et al. 2008: 257). In the 1960’s dominant gender theories biological gender appears as an ahistorical and strangely disembodied thing, Moi (1999: 53) claims, without contact with the concrete historical and social significance contexts. The problem with this is that how this is done is no longer related to the body and thus creates works with a "fantastic abstraction level" (Moi 1999: 54) without providing the specific, situated and materialistic understanding of the body that they initially wanted to reach. Nina Lykke (2008: 100) points out the importance of social constructionism for feminist gender theory: its unintended by-product is that the body and material can be reduced to what Haraway calls, "a blank page for social inscription" (1991: 197). As I see it, this is also a challenge in relation to the analysis of women and female work uniforms in male-dominated professions. Empirically, it appears that women and men in the study present a strong relationship between biological anatomic gendered bodies and social gender. Gender is inscribed in children's bodies from the moment the child is born (and even beforehand). At this moment, certain social norms and expectations are followed. Butler argues that biological sex is as socially constructed as social gender. This is problematic due to the fact that the existence of material, anatomical bodies become under-theorized and difficult to interpret in light of the empirical fieldwork material in this study. Butler’s theory also becomes difficult to apply to a study analysing gendered bodies in uniforms as the physical, gendered body is so important in the analysis of clothing practices. Women and men as biological or material (anatomically gendered) bodies constitute the main core of this study's research design as well as the empirical field. Dealing only with gender as a social and cultural entity complicates the analysis of materialized bodies. Therefore, I agree with Moi and include bodies as material sizes in my analysis. Women and men are not homogeneous groups and how gender is constructed also varies between women, between men and between women and men (Neumann et al. 2012). Butler´s approach is problematic in this study due to her disregarding the physically biological body. Her understanding of performative gender, on 34 the other hand, is helpful to this study and will be utilized. The idea that social gender is produced and reproduced through certain material structures is something that will be developed further in this dissertation. This is evident particularly in Article B and in the concluding discussion of the work uniform’s potential as reproducing and challenging work practices and gender constructions. I will therefore use Butler´s theories of gender as something that is done, physically and socially, relationally and processually. Emic constructions of gender In my articles presented in this dissertation there are several analyses of practices related to material objects as expressions of gender. In many ways it seems that the close, empirical descriptions of gender in everyday life collide with the central focus of feminist gender theory to eradicate the distinction between biological sex and social gender. With an ethnographic standpoint, the workers’ understandings and applications of gender as emic constructions represent a challenge of interpretation for the researcher’s analysis, because it is based in the empirical field and cannot be taken to be universal categories of femininity and masculinity. Gender is, after all, something we both gain knowledge about and something that is essential to knowledge (1999: 211). Hanne Haavind (2000: 210) characterizes gender more empirically grounded as a cultural significance system that not only is used to categorize the human body, but also can place all sorts of phenomena as respectively female and male. She claims that the social participants know the system as a code that is built in and works through the verbal language and body language. In that, what we often call male-dominated or female-dominated arenas and activities is symbolic meanings of gender that connects social structures with subjects’ bodies, which appear as peoples’ femininity and masculinity. Applied to my study, work uniforms is a part of this system and work as a code where the anatomically gendered body is recognized and distinguishes the masculine from the feminine. Masculinity and femininity are terms to name the cultural and social expectations we have towards women and men on a generalized level (Neumann et al. 2012: 243), and only give meaning when they are interpreted in relation to each other and seen as mutually constitutive (Connell 1995: 68). The expectations of femininity in male-dominated occupations were tied to stereotypical understandings of women as having weaker physical strength than men, being 35 reluctant to take on hard and dirty manual labour and being preoccupied with appearance. These expectations become problematic for women who enter male-dominated spheres, especially since they are the opposites of male stereotypes fronted in these occupations which could best be described by the term “real men” (Neumann et al. 2012). In that, a female worker must show that she is just as tough and able to do her job on the same terms as her male colleagues. As such, it became important for the female workers to show distance to the expectations of femininity in order to be included as “one of the boys” in the work sphere. It is in this space that the female workers’ position in the work arena is negotiated through their work uniform (this issue is described particularly in Article A). To understand this negotiation and how the expectations for biological sex to take emic forms in male-dominated occupations, I build on two categories that Anne Iversen (2006) found in her study of industrial work with female employees: arbeiderlikhet (worker equality) and kjønnsulikhet (gender inequality). The negotiation of female workers’ position can be understood as a negotiation between a community of solidarity among the workers, resulting in security, unity, loyalty and protection – a sense of "we" versus "them" – and gender as difference where there are two sexes, men and women, which naturally suit different occupations (Iversen 2006: 28-29). The understanding of worker equality and gender inequality in an equality discourse will be further analysed in the concluding discussions. The work uniform is a vital part in under-communicating gender difference and over-communicating workers’ sameness and communion of workers. This is one of the reasons why the work uniform is so important for the (female) workers and for the study of male-dominated manual occupations. 36 3. Consumption, materiality and practice This theoretical chapter will deal with everyday consumption as we find it through the use of work uniforms. It will approach this everyday consumption through a practice-oriented theory. This is done in order to grasp the material aspects of working life. It shows the importance of material objects in everyday consumption through an explicit focus on gender, clothing and work practices. It also discusses the challenges and opportunities this provides for a research and development process. The theoretical framework presented in this chapter reflects the theoretical perspectives used as a basis for analyses in the articles included in this dissertation. It also presents further theoretical perspectives that are discussed in the concluding part of the dissertation. This theoretical framework is, together with the previous chapter, important in order to understand how I empirically answer the main research problematic about what potential lies in the work uniform as a change agent for the Norwegian gender-segregated labour market. This chapter will firstly treat the role of consumption in everyday life as a routinized activity in that it will stress the importance of materiality and present practice theory approaches as a way to analyse work uniforms in use at work. Practice, in the form of internalized knowledge related to the use of work uniforms, is an important concept throughout this dissertation. Practice theory helps us understand how work uniforms are incorporated and used in the everyday practices at work. The understanding of this issue enables a discussion of the social relations and practices it fosters in relation to work uniforms. The theoretical framework will show the role of everyday consumption in research and development processes by suggesting how to study work uniforms, gender constructions and work practice in developing “competence-based products”. To develop competence-based workwear was an objective in the Uni-Form project, which this dissertation is a part of. One of the aims of theorizing product development is to understand how this competence-based workwear can be interpreted and linked to user-driven product development. This is done in order to discuss the implication of competence-based work uniforms for the gender-segregated labour market in the last concluding chapter, and as a basis for the article concerned with the role of ethnography in product development. Here, scripts (Akrich 1992; Latour 1992) and 37 domestication (Silverstone 2006) are important concepts. This helps us understand the relationship between work uniforms and their users, or more concretely, it helps us understand the relationship between the design of work uniforms and their uses. Everyday consumption as routinized activity In consumer research there has been a general tendency to focus on the spectacularities of consumption (i.e., those parts of consumption that have been extraordinary and conspicuous) as well as on individual choice, rational decision-making, point of purchase and commodification (Gronow & Warde 2001: 4). In other words, conspicuous consumption and the symbolic and communicative aspects of consumption have been dominating consumer studies (Gram Hansen 2011: 62). This mode of study has not been easily applied to the analysis of other groups in society and has caused problems for consumer researchers who conduct studies in a field where economic and cultural resources are unevenly distributed (Strandbakken & Heidenstrøm 2013: 9). Over the last few years, however, there has been a shift towards understanding more routine and ordinary consumption, such as the consumption of ordinary items, contextual and collective constraint, conventional and repetitive conduct, and practical contexts of appropriation and use (Gronow and Warde 2001). Work uniforms are indeed such an aspect of ordinary, everyday consumption, although women dressing in work uniforms may themselves feel that they are made the object of extraordinary attention. Work uniforms are taken for granted and often considered neutralizing in the context and practices in which they appear. When this dissertation focuses on everyday consumption, this is done within an understanding of everyday life that denotes “our everyday processes of making meanings and making sense of the world” (Mackay 1997: 7). In this lie the unpredictable, the improvised and the routinized within each actor’s life. This involves routinized activities that we repeat daily, and denotes connections between the materiality, things, and human actors in everyday life. Clothes, body and materiality Clothes are a suitable subject for the study of the relationship between the body and materiality as they break down the distinction between nature and culture (Wilson 1985). In social theory, interest in the body has in part been attributed to the rise of consumer culture, which is described 38 placing a great deal of value on visual appearance and facilitating the display and selfsurveillance of the body (Shilling 2004; Faser & Greco 2005; Howson 2004). This development sparked renewed interest in earlier research on the importance of the body for social interaction (Goffman 1963; Foucault 1979; Mauss 1979; Elias 1982; Bourdieu 1984). Clothes have the ability to transform the body (Andrewes 2005) and can be seen and studied as “lived garments” (Miller 2005; Küchler & Miller 2005). The body does something to the clothes, and the clothes do something to the body (Andrewes 2005). Anthropologists, such as Tim Ingold, Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai contributed to an understanding of the biography and commoditization of ”things”. The social life of things was put in focus along with the ways goods move through different systems of ownership, commoditization, and exchange (Appadurai 1986). This new interest in materiality had an important base within consumer research. The focus on the body in exploring the materiality of clothes has contributed to the exclusion of other perspectives of the material. As in most social sciences, the linguistic turn and subsequent postmodern approaches have been dominating. This means that materiality and artefacts typically has considered passive and undifferentiated entities; something by which could be inscribed meaning through speech, text or signs (Damsholt & Simonsen 2009: 9). According to Tine Damsholt and Dorthe Gert Simonsen (2009: 9) this has provided the non-linguistic world of artefacts with a limited space. Much of clothing research has focused on understanding the driving forces of the changes in fashion (Kawamura 2005) and not focused on how clothing practices has been done in specific context. In sharp contrast, ethnological and anthropological studies have shown that people’s clothing practices are surprisingly boring (Hill 2005), stable, and characterized by anxiety (Clarke & Miller 2002; Klepp 2004). In order to get a better understanding of how clothes are used and why, we need more knowledge of the material framework of everyday dress practices. In much the same way as I treat gender in this dissertation, I view materiality as processual, relational and performative. According to Damsholt and Simonsen (2009: 13) doing materiality becomes a question about looking into how materiality is being done in specific contexts. In this way, materiality becomes an active verb focused thorugh practice. In an attempt to develop a study that explains the relationship between individuals, a system of clothes and their actual use and doing of clothes this thesis has made use of a theoretical framework that focuses on both 39 materiality and practice in consumption. This is done in accordance with recent developments in consumption studies. Alan Warde (2005) claims that a majority of consumption studies lack a theoretical platform. He suggests using practice theory as a conceptual apparatus, and together with Elizabeth Shove and Mika Pantzar (2005) he thereby reintroduces theory in form of practice theory in consumer culture studies. Following the reading of Warde (2005) by the sociologists Pål Strandbakken and Nina Heidenstrøm (2013: 15), a practice theoretical approach could provide insight through various studies of consumption by 1. Studying human actors between choice and structure, 2. Considering both use value and symbolic value and, 3. Studying structures and routines of everyday life. All these three are important aspects of the study of work uniforms and women in which focusing on practices at work provides a theoretical platform. Practice and materiality Practice theories are “a set of cultural and philosophical accounts that focus on the conditions surrounding the practical carrying out of social life” (Halkier et al. 2011: 3). The term practice is understood here as a fundamental unit of social existence. It is redeveloped from central works of a range of great social researchers such as Bourdieu (1984), de Certeau (1984), Giddens (1984) and Foucault (1979) who have in common that they pay special attention to routine, shared habits, techniques and competence. The fruitfulness of a practice-oriented approach is that it decentres the key objects of dominant social theories – minds, texts, and conversations – and instead emphasizes bodily movements, things, practical knowledge and routines (Reckwitz 2002: 259). Reckwitz has defined practice in relation to materiality as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another” (2002, p. 249) in which things and their use is an integral part. As Shove and Pantzar write, “all practice has a material aspect” (2005). Theories of practice aim at overcoming the limitations of the classical models of human action and social order where the social is understood as involving more than the mental qualities (Shove et al. 2007). For practice theory, “objects are necessary components of many practices – just as indispensable as bodily and mental activities” (Reckwitz 2002), and particular things are indispensable resources for the practice. Shove and Pantzar’s (2005) attention to the Nordic walking sticks show us not only how things are acquired, appropriated and used 46 practices (Shove et al. 2007: 149). This dissertation shows how this takes place and creates a specific link between gender construction, work practices and workwear to the gendersegregated labour market. Here the innovation of work uniforms has the ability to contribute to change of the material conditions facing women who decide to break the pattern within the gender-segregated labour market. Implications of theoretical framework for empirical discussion The way products are actively put together and combined in a process of consumption refers to the competencies required by the consumer and the products as such. This places competence as a central theme of how to approach the study of relationships between products and users (Shove et al. 2007: 16). In this equation, the competence integrated into the product must also be taken into account. The use of scripts and domestication shows that users are constrained in their involvement with the clothes in that there are certain scripts and intended uses built into artefacts (Rohracher 2005: 11). At the same time, users also create specific social practices of use that may not be intended or planned in the product development process. “People do not just submit themselves to the scripts or preferred readings of a technology,” Rohracher claims, they actively “define their manner of usage” (Rohracher 2005: 11). This may be particularly true of technical products, but also describes the incorporation of work uniforms into workers´ everyday lives. Here, the female workers find their own ways to adjust and fit their work uniforms to their bodies, work tasks and socio-symbolic structures, as it will be shown in the empirical analyses to follow. This thesis takes its outset in the use phase of consumption, i.e. what happens after a product is acquired. This involves a mix of objective characteristics, cultural and symbolic motifs, and aesthetic, social, economic and technical factors that are different for different products (Strandbakken & Heidenstrøm 2013: 20). This sets the framework for the use of ethnography in product development. It is the ethnographer’s job to place focus upon those unintended and surprising uses of products. In this way both its transformative properties – enabling inclusion into a work community – and its challenging abilities – changing user scripts and intentions of the garments and how one sees gendered attributes belonging to certain occupational categories – come into play when developing work uniforms. 47 Innovation is inherently uncertain in that the outcome seldom can be predicted. In addition, a developed understanding of innovations over time has made the innovation process increasingly specialised by discipline, function and by institution (Pavitt 2005: 88). Where the idea of rationalism is present in the bureaucracy of organisations, it may constrain innovation in that, following Smircich and Stubbart (1985), there is not just one but multiple rationalities at play. March (1994: 11) points to the individual choice made by decision-makers in organisations who “use stereotypes in order to infer unobservable from observables.” He further recognizes that “they form typologies of attitudes and traits and categorize people in terms of the typologies” and that they look for information but overlook unexpected things in their search for the expected (March 1994: 11). In terms of innovation, this would hinder knowledge production and limit an organisation’s ability to learn in arenas that are least familiar. Much of the study of innovations in the making revolves around capturing issues of clothing practices and experiences. It also revolves around tackling the relationship between the articulated knowledge and the silent embodied practice of knowledge. Leaving it up to the users to formulate their experiences and embodied practices tied to the products at hand leaves much work in the hands of the user. In an innovation process, those users who are not able to articulate their competence of clothing would not benefit in the design of improved products. That female (and male) wearers of workwear may not be able to articulate their user needs directly to the researcher reveals the importance of capturing the informal and the invisible through the social lens, which Cefkin (2010: 50) stresses. By bringing in ethnographic methods and putting material and social aspects at the forefront, as it is done in the present study, enables a deeper understanding of work uniforms in a user context. The ways in which this is done will be discussed in greater detail in the next section, which will address methodological issues. 48 4. Research design, methods and field This dissertation is based on empirical material that was gathered in the research and development project Uni-Form. In this project we made use of a triangulation of methods: participant observation, practice study and wardrobe study. These methods are based within a qualitative research tradition, and in the anthropological tradition of ethnographic fieldwork. The way the methods within the fieldwork were assembled emanates from the focus on clothing that dresses the workers, and for the PhD project in particular, my concern was to grasp the embodied knowledge within this specific work context. This chapter will firstly deal with the research design that formed the basis for the choices of methods. Thereafter, I will outline the specificity of methods employed and reflect on how specific techniques were used in the fieldwork context in light of my personal experiences. It is worth mentioning that I was not the only researcher to gather the data used in this dissertation. Two other researchers were involved to varying degrees. Both researchers, like myself, belong to the social science tradition 5 . The last part of this chapter is concerned with the choices of occupations and access to workplaces and takes a closer look at the occupational fields. Research design This dissertation draws on growing international research on clothing and fashion as well as work research where gender is central. How clothes can help to improve well-being and the integration of women in male-dominated occupations are only explored to a minimal degree. Much of the research done on clothing and clothing practices has focused on symbolic and communicative aspects of clothing. Besides defining the status of clothing research, core concepts in the literature have been identity, fashion and language. The research on identity, fashion and language has not been well anchored in daily life and working life studies, and has seldom had anything in common with the more object-based costume research at museums. Against that background, there has been unexploited potential in research that to a larger degree has its base in the actual practice and materiality of clothing. This potential is exploited in the research design of this study who relates practice and materiality to embodied knowledge. 5 The distribution of fieldworks is emphasized in Table 2, as presented below. 49 Studying embodied knowledge In recent years, there has been a change in clothing research with new contributions to the study of body, clothing and appearance. Amongst others, Daniel Miller (2005) has dealt with the bodily experiences of clothing by developing the concept “lived garments.” One of the problems with many of the issues related to lived garments is that it makes it difficult to study the actual practices tied to the clothes since we do not have access to other people’s experience with clothing, only their verbal expressions. One of the ways to surpass this problem is to use the researcher’s own experiences as material for analysis, as Eva Knuts (2006) has done in her study of the wedding dress. This self-reflective strategy nonetheless has methodological weaknesses, among others due to the lack of distance between the material object and the researcher. Dress and fashion studies are an interdisciplinary field that encompasses a number of different approaches and therefore also a variety of methods. According to Lou Taylor, an important divide is between the object-centred methods and the curator/collectors versus academic social/economic history and cultural theory approaches (1998: 238). Like much social research, the latter has been dominated by textual analysis and qualitative interviews – methods dependent on verbal statements. Concepts that are used to describe clothes and textiles are often unclear in the sense that one word can refer to very different things. This is true both for concrete materials (e.g., flannel) and statements about something perceived as ‘classic’ or ‘comfortable’ (Klepp & Bjerck 2009). The linguistic imprecision applies to both written material, such as women's magazines and advertising, and everyday speech. Much of what concerns our clothing practices will be tacit knowledge. Our body feels when something is wrong, but is only to a lesser extent able to explain why (Klepp 2008). Moore and Sanders point out that the centrality of language in the Western (analytic philosophical) tradition is difficult to surpass, and recognize as a main challenge the translation of the non-linguistic, such as practices tied to clothing through the medium of language (2006: 11). One of the scientific problems in studies of materiality is to capture non-verbalized experience and to translate the non-verbalized experience of clothing in use into a written academic language. Object-based research, on the other hand, more often uses clothing as a primary source. But as Taylor points out, this is often derogatorily referred to as a “wholly descriptive 'catalogue' tradition” (Fine and Leopold 1993: 94). In Norway, much of the object-based research deals 50 with folk costumes. But neither methods nor results from this object-based research have fed into the international study of dress and fashion. One of the reasons is that their object of study is defined as something else other than clothes and fashion, namely folkloristics and tradition. Researchers in fashion studies, on the other hand, have taken change for granted and studied fashion, not clothes. It is important for the sake of the study to attempt (starting with the design of the research) to look beyond the emphasis on words in the choice of methods and to apply tools and approaches that take bodily practices and non-linguistic materiality into account. As Moore and Sanders (2006: 11) correctly points out: [I]t is not just that practical knowledge need not – or cannot – be brought into language, but that language-based models and concepts of meaning may be wholly inappropriate for understanding such knowledge. Because body language is not a system of signs in the way that language is, semiotics and semantics cannot stand as the basis for our understanding of embodiment and/or embodied knowledge. The verbalisation of practices, which Moore and Sanders point to here is the main challenge to overcome when choosing methodological strategies. In the choice of methods I have not relied on the female worker’s ability to give a direct and sensible answer. To solve this challenge a triangulation of methods was used. Fieldwork was used as a basis for my methodological approach and during fieldwork three specific methods were employed: participant observation, practice study and wardrobe study. Through this, verbalised experiences as well as knowledge of the clothing in practice were obtained. As a supplementary method interviews were conducted at each field site. On two of the sites (offshore and onshore oil and gas production) it was not possible to do fieldwork, so here I primarily made use of interviews. Fieldwork is inherently qualitative and stems from an anthropological methodological tradition. Two of the articles have research design as a primary or secondary subject with a focus on the use of wardrobe studies and the use of ethnographic research in the product development process. In this part of the dissertation, I will provide an overview over the methods used and the methodological choices taken throughout the study. These articles will thereby supplement and in some areas overlap this section dealing with research design. The PhD candidate undertook most of the data collection, but the data collected by the other researchers have also been included in the analysis for this thesis. When I describe the fieldwork, methods and personal 51 experiences in the field, I speak only on behalf of myself. I have access to the other researchers’ notes, pictures and interview transcriptions, but I do not have access to their own, private and embodied interaction with the field – in other ways than what their written notes and presentations describe. In Table 2 below, the methods, occupations and number of women and men interviewed and tested are outlined. The table also provides an overview of the articles where the material has been used 6 . The occupations that appear in a highlighted font represent the occupations where I performed the fieldwork. 6 Note that Article D operate with a different total amount of interviews, 67. This is in reality a combination of transcribed interviews and written conversations. This should have been specified in the already published article. I have chosen to use the amount of transcribed interviews in Table 2 and in the overall dissertation. 52 Table 2. Overview of occupations, work spheres, methods and articles where material have been used. Occupational category Occupation Work site Fieldwork Transcribed interviews women/men Product testing women/men Articles in dissertation Construction Carpenter Building construction x 1/7 - Article B Article D Article C Carpenter Building construction x 1/1 1/0 Article B Article D Article C Carpenter Building construction x 1/4 1/1 Article B Article D Article C Road worker Road construction x 1/1 1/1 Article D Article C Industrial production Process operator Paper production x 5/0 3/0 Article B Article D Article C Process operator Plastic production x 5/3 4/0 Article B Article D Article C Skilled manual work Electrician Electrical components x 2/3 - Article B Article D Article C Stone mason Stone masonry x 1/0 1/0 Article D Article C Car mechanic Mechanical workshop x 1/1 - Article D Article C Offshore oil- and gas production Oil drill mechanic Platform - 1/0 1/0 Article B Article D Article C Onshore oil- and gas production Process operators and mechanics Land based - 5/0 - Article D Article C Industrial fishing Fisherwoman Industrial fish trawler x 1/0 1/1 Article D Article C The Navy Diverse Minesweeper x 2/4 6/9 Article A Article D Article C Diverse Mine trawler x 3/0 - Article A Article C Article D 6 occupations 14 work sites 30 women /24 men 19/12 53 Methods In the study of work uniforms and women in male-dominated occupations, participant observations were made of women and men and their clothes at their various workplaces. This method is based on the anthropological fieldwork in which participant observation is crucial (Nielsen 1996; Stewart 1998; Pelto & Pelto 1996). Fieldwork can in fact mean a use of various methods even though participant observation, according to Stewart (1998), Nielsen (1996), Pelto and Pelto (1996) and Bernard (1994) is the main feature of an ethnographic study, or an ideal if we believe Falzon (2009). Bernard (1994) claims that although you cannot claim to have done fieldwork by desk research in the form of constructing a questionnaire, sending them out and waiting for replies, fieldwork can entail data collection like door-to-door sampling, face-to-face interviews and pure observation. In fact, though not all fieldwork involves participation, all participant observation is fieldwork (Bernard 1994). Fieldwork was conducted in selected workplaces with a selection of women – often with women who were the minority among many male colleagues – on their work clothing and uniforms. The choices of occupational fields and work spheres will be further elaborated upon in the section entitled Field arenas. The aim of using participant observation was to gain empirical understandings of female and male workers and their interaction both with one another and in relation to their work uniforms and other material surroundings. In the fieldwork I accompanied women around in their work spheres, helped out with the work they did and took part in their daily routines. I took coffee breaks with colleagues, got dressed in unisex wardrobes and where the fieldwork setting required me to do so, I shared cabins with their colleagues. On the Navy vessels, I shared a cabin with five young men and in the industrial fishing trawler I had access to a cabin for six hours at a time, switching with another fisherman. In this way I got the opportunity to experience working life as a female worker in a male-dominated occupation, even for just a short while. 54 Pictures 3, 4, 5. Participant fieldwork in three occupations: industrial fishing, construction and the Navy. I wanted to find out how both uniforms and other items were used and how gender was communicated, or under-communicated at work, for example through accessories, style changes, makeup, jewellery etc. By wearing the clothes myself, where possible, I also gained access to the embodied experiences with these clothes and how these experiences are integrated into the work and into social interactions. This is illustrated in the Pictures 3, 4 and 5 presented above, which show me involved in participant research in three of the field sites: fishing, construction and in a Navy vessel. In the pictures, the fit of the clothes are visible; the clothes are too big and too narrow in all the wrong places. This restricts the movements and hinders much of the work tasks. By wearing the same clothes as the workers I also wanted to find out how the clothes these female and male workers use could contribute to inclusion and exclusion, and how the apparel functioned as reproducing or challenging everyday practices related to clothing and gender. Participant observation was needed to study the practice of work and to gain experience that could be used to find potential for improvements in regard to work uniforms. I entered the field contexts trying to stand out as little as possible. It was important to observe use patterns, as well as the variations in clothing. In addition, workers' verbal and nonverbal communication about how the clothes functioned in the work contexts was noted during the fieldwork. Very specific issues were also noted such as fabric type, functionality, wear and tear points, colours compared to dirt, storage, washing and maintenance, and so on. There may be challenges in acquiring knowledge about the experiences of others related to clothing, because such experiences are 55 individual and physical and not always easy to put into words. To resolve this issue, I also used work uniforms during my fieldwork, to gain my own experiences with these clothes in use. The practice study on the other hand, meant a move in and out of the participant role, becoming more of a pure observer and registering behaviour and movement in relation to the clothes. This enabled a closer look at the repertoires of movement – or the “techniques of the body”, as Mauss (1979) would term it. Here the female workers were the focus as compared to their male colleagues. In the practice study I wrote down, photographed or videotaped how clothes were used, how they integrated with the work the female workers did and what social relations the users and the workwear were a part of. I registered how men or women wore outfits differently or similarly, and I observed and registered how gender was communicated or undercommunicated in the work spheres through garments, bodily repertoires, accessories worn (jewellery, hairdo’s, make up, etc.), as well as in the verbal communication between female and male workers. When I looked closer at the learned and developed bodily actions during the practice study in light of Mauss´ (1979) understanding of techniques of the body, I saw embodied aspects of a given socio-cultural context within the work sphere. This revealed conditions evident in the use of particular work clothes such as the fact that women internalise bodily repertoires of their male colleagues and that the values embedded in the clothes identify you as an appropriate or inappropriate member of the work environment. A not so familiar type of method used during field work was a wardrobe study (see also Banim et al. 2001; Woodward 2007; Skjold 2014), which I have an elaborated presentation of in Article C. In the wardrobe study, each daily outfit was registered. This meant that the women had to be taken away from their work tasks so that I could talk to them more intimately about their work clothes and, if possible, look into their wardrobes to see and register what they contained. The physical form of the wardrobe was also documented through photographs. Doing a wardrobe study and looking closer at the physical space of the wardrobe I tried to answer questions about the clothes and where it were kept. Were they kept in a locker or did they hang freely in a dressing room? Did the women share wardrobes with male colleagues or did they have their own dressing rooms? Were the clothes locked away? Were there separate places for dirty and clean clothes? What did the wardrobes entail? Were the clothes taken home or kept at work? Were there any differences between the male and female wardrobes? This method of inspection 62 Nevertheless, I stood out. I am a woman and was younger than many of the workers during my fieldwork. I did not have particularly good skills to offer the occupations I participated in, and at all times I had a notebook in my pocket and a camera close by. All of this made me a conspicuous observer. And yet, there were others who had these exact physical (dis)abilities (except the camera) but nonetheless participated in the work sphere – namely, the apprentices. Apprentices were a common sight in the work spheres I studied. Some came and stayed on for long periods of apprenticeship; others lasted only a short while. For most of the day, apprentices followed specific workers around, shadowing them on the job site, dressed the same but with far fewer skills to offer than their colleagues. My role was much the same. In this way, I quickly took on the role of a young, female apprentice. Within the week I spent at each site, this role provided me with loads of information and a growing contextual knowledge about the clothes in use. At each site, my understanding of women, of clothes and of the gender-segregated labour market increased. I owe much of this access to the work uniform I wore. It provided me a level of access and embodied understanding about the clothes in use, which has enriched my understanding of this field of research. Field arenas When it came to choosing field sites, the main criteria was that the employees had to wear required workwear either provided by the company or bought according to their own initiative, due to the nature of the work (dirty, dangerous, and strenuous). It was important to look at several work environments within multiple occupations, and a main goal was to involve as many women as possible in the study. This meant that we had to concentrate on more than one work environment since women were in such a minority within each occupation and work environment. The workwear company that we collaborated with preferred that the selection of professions balanced outdoor and indoor work, and that it varied in intensity. We hoped to vary between work spheres that had both many and few women, while the workwear company was interested in gaining access to larger firms and companies. 63 Figure 1. Map of Norway and fieldsites. Source: Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) http://www.nina.no/Forskning/Kart-og-data Fourteen work sites across six different occupational categories were included in the study. The fourteen work sites studied included four work sites within construction, two work sites within industry, three work sites within skilled manual work, one fishing trawler, two Navy vessels and two oil and gas production sites. These workplaces, the methods used and the people interviewed are elaborated upon in Table 2, presented above, and the locations of the field arenas are located in Figure 1, above. All of the occupational field sites were located in Norway, and the companies ranged in scale from multi-national corporations, to large-scale businesses with several branches in Norway to small-scale businesses with specific, local affiliations. The construction occupation was the largest occupational group in this project. It was also the occupational group that the workwear company was most interested in. The work spheres consisted of four construction sites, one roadwork site and three building construction sites at different locations in Norway: south, mid, inland and the capital. In these four work sites, there 64 was only one female employee at each site. The nature of the work in this occupational group was characterized by manual, often labour-intensive work with the use of machines and other equipment that eased the work tasks. This occupational group was specifically exposed to differences in weather and temperature and was particularly dependant on high visibility and protective gear such as helmets, protective boots and gloves due to the nature of their work. Their work clothes mostly consisted of a two-split suit with a work jacket or sweater and work pants, as opposed to a whole coverall. Here workers often combined private items with the required workwear. High visibility clothing dominated the workwear for outdoor use, and darker or more greyish colours were frequently worn for indoor work. Construction was an occupation where there was much alternation between indoor and outdoor work either on a daily basis or periodically. Skilled manual work 7 is a widely-defined occupational group characterized by work that is done mainly by using hands and simpler tools. In this study, the work spheres consist of electrical production, car mechanic and stone masonry. The work sites were located in the inland, middle, and southwest part of Norway. Within electrical production, there were two female workers, while in the two others, there was only one female worker at each site. Workwear within skilled manual work was similar to that of construction, but here there were fewer high-visibility garments as this consisted of mostly indoor work. Industrial production differs from skilled manual work in its use of large machines with the intent of mass production. The sites we gained access to were located in the same town and produced paper and plastic objects. These work sites had the highest amount of women with five and eight women respectively at each site. In industrial production, the workwear was also mainly two-split and mainly dominated by required garments. Dark colours such as black and dark blue were predominant in this occupation, with the exception of the colour red, which for the representatives was the signal colour of industrial safety. This was mainly indoor work and thus not subject to frequent changes in temperature or weather. The oil and gas production sites consisted of one land-based site and one offshore site, and here we only made use of interviews due to the restricted access to participatory fieldwork. At the 7 Skilled manual work is used to translate the Norwegian occupational group Håndverk. Note that the term “handicraft” is used about this occupational group in the published articles C and D. 65 land based site, we interviewed five women from different occupational groups. All of them did manual work, wore work uniforms in the form of coveralls and were in the minority at their worksite as women. In the offshore site we interviewed one woman, who was the only oil rig mechanic on that particular oil platform. The land-based oil and gas production sites were located in the western part of Norway. Much of the work was done outdoors, but also alternated between indoor and outdoor work and challenging tasks like climbing in high drill towers to repair and maintain equipment. In this occupational category, there were strict rules and regulations regarding safety. These regulations could be seen in the work uniforms in their use of highly visible and flame retardant coveralls. The industrial fish trawler in this study was located in the northernmost part of Norway and belonged to one of the larger multinational companies. Here, there was one woman on board. Everyday work for the fishermen and fisherwomen was dirty, wet, cold and smelly, in addition to being subject to the occasional stormy sea. The work took place outside, pulling in large fishnets from the trawler or inside, processing the fish and arranging storage in freezer rooms or cold fresh fish storage. This set special needs for the workwear they used. Even so, the workers in our study had no formal work uniform provided by their employer and wore a lower standard of clothing compared to workwear in the other occupations. They mainly used oilskin coveralls to protect against fish entrails and other spills, but boiler suits were also used underneath. They acquired all their own workwear, with the exception of protective boots, and were only paid a low monthly stipend for clothing expenses. The special needs for work uniforms in this occupation were difficult to meet with the workers’ own resources, both in terms of economy and knowledge. In this way, their workwear differed greatly from what we found in other occupations. The workers on board of Navy vessels were given plenty of resources but did not have the same degree of dirt and spills as in the industrial fishing. These vessels were located in the western part of Norway, but frequently travelled on special missions or exercises along the Norwegian coast. On board the mine trawler, there were three women and on board the mine sweeper, two women. There were large variations in the work roles on the vessels, which included mechanics, machine operators, deckhands, chefs and navigators. Working in a public sector institution, the Navy workers had to obey special safety and work environment demands. They were given 66 workwear from bottom to top and from inner to outer layers, and there were strict rules about the use of civilian clothing in addition to what type of uniform to use and how to use them in any given occasion. On board the Navy vessels, we met the strictest regulations for workwear and the strongest incentives for abiding by the rules. These are further elaborated in Article A. Conducting fieldwork at various field arenas could be considered problematic, but the chosen occupational fields cover different parts of Norway, different types of manual labour and different company sizes. These fields also exhibit wide variation in the apparel used, in how that apparel is managed and in what is required by these work uniforms. However, each of the chosen occupational fields has in common that they are male-dominated and highly manual occupations, requiring workers to dress according to guidelines needed for the nature of the work and/or according to regulations set by the employer. In the field described here, there are representative variations of the occupations labelled as male-dominated and manual that build upon shared characteristics. In this sense, these occupations and field sites can be compared together in a way that is relevant for the sake of generating knowledge about the gendersegregated labour market in Norway and its work uniforms. The next section will treat issues of multisited ethnography and comparison in particular. Multisited ethnography and comparison Anthropology has traditionally favoured long-term ethnography that concentrated fieldwork for several months in one site. Multi-sited ethnography, first described by George Marcus in the Annual Review of Anthropology in 1995, rose to challenge this traditional conception of ethnography. Labelling it as an emergent methodological trend, Marcus suggested a move away from conventional single-site locations to serve more complex objects of study in “multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, the ‘lifeworld’ and the ‘system’” (Marcus 1995: 95). The shift I made between work contexts, occupations, clothes, people and places has given me the opportunity to compare between the different work spheres, people and practices and to involve as many women as possible in the study. Although some might claim that doing a multi-sited study such as this implies a loss of in-depth knowledge, this way of conducting research and gaining knowledge was a fruitful one for the object of study. Doing a comparable study of practices and materiality involves not only following people, but 67 also following things and, in this case, practices. Although I am not primarily following people or things as Marcus (1995) identified as main strategies in multi-sited ethnography, I have chosen to follow a work practice tied to material objects. This practice occurs in different work environments between individuals and things. Doing a multi-sited ethnography is in that regard particularly relevant as it enables a comparison of how virtually the same garments are used in a variety of different contexts by a variety of different people. Doing fieldwork in occupations that have been carefully selected represents a valid vantage point for comparison. It enables the study of practices under different circumstances, occupations and work environments, building the study and collecting data bit by bit. Through each of the techniques and fieldworks, an understanding of the female workers’ relation to work uniforms was formed. This enabled a comparative analysis of practices tied to clothing in use and facilitated the building of a comprehensive contextual understanding of the gender-segregated labour market. Choosing a multi-sited fieldwork and executing comparisons between them enabled an in-depth study of practices instead of one in-depth study of a particular work environment, thereby providing a “thick description” of the subjects as Geertz (1973) has termed it. This does not mean that the context of each fieldwork was overlooked for the sake of comparison. Rather, it means that by using practices and work uniforms as a vantage point for comparison, different groups may be studied in relation to one another with regards to different occupations, gender (men and women), positions (worker and management) and contexts (local and global). 68 5. Research implications The theoretical approaches, research strategy and methods that I have presented in this dissertation build on my involvement in the innovation project Uni-Form. This was a research and development project that can be termed as ethnographic applied research. The project has made use of qualitative research methods, and has set forth both flexible and exploratory research questions. Its main objectives have been to gain an understanding of the gendersegregated labour marked through certain male-dominated and manual occupations and its material conditions as they appear in work uniforms. In this research work, I see, in particular, three dilemmas that have effect on the production and dissemination of knowledge. This chapter will examine these dilemmas and, in doing so, scrutinize the implications raised by participation in a large scale research project. This chapter will also address challenges that can appear in a study at the intersection of research and product development. Some of these challenges are described in Article D, but this chapter will complement this article by looking directly at the dissertation’s implications or dilemmas in knowledge production. Applied research project Applied research – or applied ethnography, which is a more suitable term for the research done in Uni-Form – uses ethnographic theories, methods and findings to solve human problems. It is a scientific attempt to add to useful knowledge (Pelto 2013: 7). Doing applied research in this project meant entering into a field where there was little knowledge, and conducting fieldwork to generate empirical understandings for both an academic audience and for stakeholders from private and public sectors (the workwear company and the Norwegian Defence Logistics Organisation). In addition, Uni-Form had a very specific purpose: to explore the potential for innovation, and, secondly, to contribute to innovation. This was the research mandate for the project, and it is upon this basis that this dissertation is written. Engaging in an applied project that speaks to a wider audience is challenging in that it may set forth other claims than basic research. Among other requirements, an applied project often demands that the researcher is able to deliver and disseminate analysed results or preliminary analytical reflections within a short amount of time. This could be a challenge for meeting ethical demands for openness and independence and to provide valid and reliable research 69 results. However, if these demands are satisfied, engaging in applied research work can be rewarding in several ways. Firstly, collaborating with private sector companies can provide a broader perspective if both parties participate in and discuss the research work prior, during and after analysis. Secondly, having commercial interests may help increase the relevance of research outside an academic audience. In the project work at hand, some preconditions have affected the empirical material and have consequently affected the analysis of this material, both after and during the research process. There are, as I see it, three main dilemmas related to science and knowledge production in this study. The first is tied to the production of knowledge about a given field of study that had its basis in an applied research project. This had predefined goals concerning what this knowledge had to generate. The second concerns an alternating relationship between research in the field, the analysis of research and the dissemination of results to the private and public sectors. This is described in detail in Article D, but here this is discussed in relation to knowledge production and dissemination. The last dilemma is concerned with the action-oriented part of the research in which new products were introduced and tested. Here the researcher initiated and participated in a change process in the field. I will address these dilemmas for the remaining part of this chapter. Knowledge production – openness and independence The research strategy in this doctoral study has been explorative, not in the sense that it has relied on secondary data but in the sense that the research process necessitated working out a research question, building a theory and moving between inductive and deductive thinking (Spjelkavik 1999: 125) in an unexplored field. The research thereby inhabits elements from both inductive and deductive thinking and can be termed as abductive or retroductive (Ragin 1884: 47). Knowledge production will always be socially constructed in the sense that research is not a neutral activity where data speaks for itself. We as ethnographic researchers will always enter a field with a preconceived understanding, and this is partly co-constructive for empirical knowledge. The interaction between the researcher and her surroundings is what brings forth knowledge. This is a social constructivist inspired approach to the philosophy of science and builds on the idea that social phenomena do not exist independently of our knowledge of them. 70 The outcomes of the project Uni-Form were to benefit the Norwegian society (improved integration of women), the workwear company (improved products, improved sales), the Norwegian Army’s Logistic Organization (improved products, improved integration) and the research institutions involved (knowledge, scientific publications, a doctoral degree). In other words, there were many institutions and sectors involved, and thus many objectives to satisfy. In addition, the research description ensuring funding from the Research Council of Norway put forward several preconceptions about the field that placed gender, clothes and body in relation to the gender-segregated labour market. These are all part of the construction of the field and denote how social phenomena, human actions and their connections to the material must be understood in a context where the researcher is also involved. The contextual significance of the field in ethnographic studies is emphasized by Hammersley (2011) and is also reflected on in this dissertation. The study of work uniforms and women, and the development into competence-based products are dependent on this contextual relationship and its interpretation in order to be developed into apparel and to have an impact as a change agent for the gendersegregated labour market. Nonetheless, the research questions formulated prior to fieldwork reflect the preconceived notions of women and apparel that ensured project funding through the Research Council of Norway. In that way, the preconceived connection between gender, clothes, body and work clearly formed the basis of study, but did not steer the results or the conclusions made in the project. This is evident in Article D, which describes the ambiguity of the results in the development process. Predetermined goals have brought about a discussion of knowledge production, in light of openness, accountability and independence. This is by no means restricted to applied research. Research communities interact with society in general, and when society funds research, it wants something in return (NHES 2016: 33). The ability to perform independent and open research is one of the most central ethical demands of research, according to the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees (NHES 2016). This idea is also applicable to studies within applied research. In order for independent and open research to take place, NHES (2016) has set forth ethical guidelines, some of which highlight the relationship between the commissioner and the research institution. These guidelines state that the applier or commissioner has the right to “steer or influence the subject and issues addressed, but not the 71 choice of method, results or conclusions drawn by the researcher on the basis of the results” (NHES 2016: 33). In the project Uni-Form, the Research Council of Norway acted as commissioner, and the workwear company acted as the formal applicant and project leader. The project – with its research and development plan – was nevertheless planned in collaboration between research institutions and the private sector. This means that the approach and objectives of the project were defined both scientifically and commercially. The scientific and commercial interests were manifested in a signed stakeholder agreement that ensured the research institutions AFI and SIFO the rights to the publications, results and methods. This agreement secured the commercial interests of the workwear company in that the publication and dissemination of results to the broader public had to wait a two year period until a majority of the product development process had been completed. The research work in project Uni-Form that concerned methods, results or conclusions was decided on by the research institutions. The choices of fields and the research questions and problematics are outlined in this dissertation so that it is clear what parts of the project has been steered by the workwear company, and in what ways. Altogether, this ensures that ethical considerations related to openness and independence in the research process at hand have taken place. Knowledge dissemination – innovation in the making Article D shows that the research results that came out of the study and were disseminated to the project manager and the project group of Uni-Form was neither driven by any particular project participants nor driven to satisfy a particular objective or confirm a hypothesis about a particular market for work uniforms. This is evident in the article’s description of the conflicting or ambivalent results that were presented to the company´s research participants. In addition, the research problematics in the project were open and the research question in this dissertation is explorative. The dissemination of results was done through presentations and discussions after a particular round of fieldwork and at the end of a series of fieldworks. These were labelled work meetings due to their informal nature and the way findings and preliminary interpretations were discussed among the research participants. There were seventeen work meetings in total, in fourteen of which I presented results from my fieldwork. In addition, a concluding project summary report was written. 78 utvalget av metodeteknikker er annerledes. Intervjuer og deltakende observasjon er kjente metoder, mens praksisstudier og garderobestudier kanskje ikke er like kjent. (Klepp & Bjerck 2012). Praksisstudiene ble gjennomført som observasjoner av kvinnene og deres mannlige kollegaer. Målet var å finne ut hvilke klær som ble brukt, men også hvordan klærne ble brukt av kvinnelig personell. Hovedfokuset var på hvordan kvinnene brukte klærne, men mennenes klesbruk ble også registrert. Her var den konkrete påkledningen i hverdagen viktig, men også hvordan klærne ble brukt i relasjonene mellom personellet. Hvordan kjønn ble kommunisert eller underkommunisert gjennom bruk av sivil og uniform bekledning, tilbehør, hårfasonger, sminke og smykker var viktig å gripe fatt i. Garderobestudiene (Klepp & Bjerck 2012) innebar å registrere hele eller deler av garderober. Gjennom garderobestudien ble all uniformsbekledning og annet tøy ombord på minefartøyene registrert. I tillegg snakket vi om klærne og hvert enkelt plagg under registreringen. Vi diskuterte hvilke valgmuligheter for pålagt uniformering personellet hadde, hvordan valg om bekledning ble tatt og hvordan Sjøforsvarets uniformsreglement ble overholdt eller brutt. Det ble også benyttet klestesting av nyutviklede uniformer på minefartøyene. Dette ble gjort i to runder, først et mer ordinært feltarbeid med de ovennevnte metodene og etter flere måneders bruk av nytt tøy ble det gjort et nytt feltarbeid med større fokus på det nylig uttestede tøyet. Dette ga blant annet verdifull informasjon om gammel og ny uniform slik at klespraksiser knyttet til begge uniformene kunne sammenlignes. I Sjøforsvarets minefartøyer ble det gjort uttesting av to uniformer. Den ene uniformen var en spesiell fartøysbekledning beregnet på dekksmatrosene. Den andre var arbeidsuniformen M/04 som skulle erstatte M/2000. Det er denne arbeidsuniformen som i hovedsak omtales her. Datamaterialet ble samlet gjennom feltdagbøker med lengre utlegninger av dagens hendelser, samtaler og gjøremål, tapede intervjuer som senere ble transkribert, samt bilder og filmsnutter av bekledningen og personellet i hverdagslige situasjoner. 5 kvinner og 4 menn ble intervjuet på minefartøyene, men i feltarbeidene var hele besetningen om bord inkludert. 3. Sjøforsvarets uniformer I Forsvaret er det et klart reglement som bestemmer hvilken bekledning som til enhver tid er korrekt. Sjøforsvarets uniformsreglement sier at det er en plikt å bære uniform i daglig tjeneste, 79 ved formelle anledninger og ved sammenkomster av tjenstlig og sosial art hvor vanlig praksis tilsier at (uniform) er korrekt bekledning 10 . En hovedregel er at alle med samme eller tilsvarende arbeidsforhold ved en avdeling eller et fartøy skal ha ensartet bekledning og ved formelle oppstillinger skal bekledningen være ensartet for samme kategori personell (Vestvik & Bjerck 2012:13). Dette reglementet, og uniformene som deles ut til Sjøforsvarets soldater, setter imidlertid ikke funksjonalitet og individualitet for hver enkelt bruker i fokus. Besetningene på Sjøforsvarets fartøyer brukte i hovedsak to typer uniformer om bord. Den ene var et tjenestantrekk for hverdag- og innendørs kontorbruk. Den andre var en mørk blå arbeidsuniform, som hadde et utseende de fleste forbinder med marinens klær. Tjenesteantrekket fantes i egne kvinnemodeller, men disse var ikke spesielt vel ansett blant den kvinnelige besetningen. Og så hadde de [jentebukser], men de er helt umulig [å bruke], for de e liksom mini i livet og størrelse esel i lårene, og så går de inn [som] spagetti i beina igjen. [-] De e helt rar. Så da går du for guttebuksene da, så kan du ha de litt lavt i livet og... De e bedre. Og så får du skjørt da te den ene uniformen, og det e jo for jenter spesielt. Men de og e veldig smal og høye i livet. (Kvinnelig offiser) Denne kvinnelige offiseren fortalte at hun valgte å bruke herremodellen fordi den modellen som betegnes som «jentebukse» hadde en helt annen form som var mindre tilpasset hennes kropp og bruk. Dette er på ingen måte unikt. Arbeidsklær og uniformer for kvinner som jobber på typiske mannsarbeidsplasser er i dag enten klær som er produsert for menn, eller kopier av mannsklær der snitt og eventuelt estetikk er blitt tilpasset kvinnekroppen og kvinnelig klesskikk. Erfaringer gjort av arbeidsklærprodusenter, slik som Workwear bedriften, men også internasjonal forskning viser at dette sjelden er vellykket. Mange opplever at denne tradisjonelle uniformen er tilpasset et “upersonlig” hierarkisk fellesskap, mens det feminine er knyttet til individet, den individuelle kroppen, noe som er vanskelig å forene i et konformt antrekk (Vestvik & Bjerck 2012). Arbeidsuniformen M/2000 var lik både til kvinner og menn med faste størrelser uten tilpasningsmulighet. Jakken og buksen var laget i flammehemmet bomull og kom kun i få størrelser. Generelt var det behov for større utvalg når det gjaldt størrelser av uniformene. Det ble etterlyst større variasjoner i bredde og lengde slik at personellet skulle kunne få bedre 10 Uniformsreglementet for Sjøforsvaret SAP-7 (F), 2007, s.19. 80 tilpassede klær. Det virket også som om tekstilene ikke hadde god nok kvalitet til de påkjenninger klærne ble utsatt for. Kvinnene hadde egne behov når det gjaldt klærne, og hvordan de passet og fungerte for dem, men de ønsket ikke en egen kvinnemodell som skilte seg fra mennenes. Bekledningen skulle være lik for alt personell, slik at de ikke skilte seg ut. Noen gjorde likevel justeringer på klærne ved å sy om litt på snittet, for å få dem til å passe litt bedre, og det var også tilfeller av annen tilpasning av bekledning blant begge kjønn. Arbeidsuniformen ble brukt av alle om bord, fra maskinister til kommanderende på minefartøyene. Med så ulike jobber, fra maskinrom til bro, ble en felles uniform nødvendigvis lite funksjonell til de ulike arbeidsoppgavene, uavhengig av kjønn eller kroppsfasong og størrelse. I stor grad forble besetningens bekledning lik, og dårlig tilpasset, spesielt til kvinnenes kropper. Den nye arbeidsuniformen M/04 var ment å bedre uniformen for flere ved å ta tak i tilbakemeldingene. Forsvarets arbeidsuniform M/04 ble dermed en forbedret versjon av den tidligere arbeidsuniformen M/2000. Den var justert i snittet for å skape en bedre passform og i jakken var det lagt til en strammefunksjon med borrelås i livet. Den kom i et nytt forbedret tekstil som skulle være mer behagelig i bruk og slitestyrke og hadde en del nye detaljer. Den kom i flere størrelser fra 42-60. Både det mannlige og kvinnelige minepersonellet ga uttrykk for glede over at de endelig hadde fått en arbeidsuniform med en mer funksjonell passform. Kvinnene følte seg bedre og mer kvinnelige i denne uniformen sammenlignet med den forrige (Vestvik & Bjerck 2012:41), og borrelåsene i livet på jakkene var en av grunnene til dette. Likevel, det innledende sitatet i kapittelet viser at det å skulle vise sin kvinnelighet gjennom uniformen ikke var uproblematisk, hverken i forhold til egne preferanser, andres blikk, eller arbeidsgivers reglement. 4. Borrelåsens funksjon Uniformsreglementet sier ikke bare noe om hva du skal ha på deg til enhver tid, den underlegger også bæreren en forpliktelse når det gjelder personlig holdning og oppførsel i uniform. Det er som regel ikke tillatt å kombinere sivile- og uniformsplagg, og det er bestemmelser som begrenser bruk av smykker og ur, hårfasong og kosmetikk (Vestvik & Bjerck 2012). Dette strenge reglementet gir ikke mye rom for å markere og kommunisere kjønn, men som vi skal se forekom det likevel en forhandling om kvinners bekledningspraksis. Som sitatet antyder er det stor kompleksitet i materialet om kvinners uniformering der borrelåsen er et materielt 81 utgangspunkt for en større diskurs om hvordan kvinnene gjør sin kvinnelighet gjennom arbeidsbekledning. Men borrelåsen er også et godt eksempel både på en symbolsk og på en rent praktisk funksjon for begge kjønns tilpasning av uniformen. Uniformene fantes altså i ulike størrelser, men disse var få og basert på en maskulin standard kroppsfasong. Faktiske fysiske forskjeller mellom (de fleste) menn og kvinner gjelder i all hovedsak at kvinner har bryster, er noe mer innsvinget i livet og svaie nederst i ryggen enn menn. I tillegg har kvinnene smalere skuldre og ofte kortere armer og ben enn menn (Neumann m.fl. 2012: 244). Disse forskjellene speiles ikke i uniformene til Sjøforsvaret og arbeidstøy generelt. Mannens kropp er normen, og estetikken i uniformen er forbundet med maskulinitet. Tidligere erfaringer med uniformene, slik kvinnene beskrev, var nettopp at passformen var generelt dårlig. Borrelåsen på jakken i den uttestede arbeidsuniformen M/04 skulle svare på utfordringen med tilpasning til kjønn og størrelse. Avhengig av hvordan borrelåsen ble festet kunne innsvingen reguleres. En konkret tilbakemelding var at den forrige jakkemodellen var for bred over magen og flere av de kvinnelige ansatte gikk derfor ned en størrelse for at den skulle passe. Dette førte i sin tur til at jakken ble for kort til ermene. Jakkens passform til mange kropper av begge kjønn var derfor feil. En av kvinnene som deltok i det første feltarbeidet fortalte at hun ville ta hjem den gamle arbeidsuniformen for å sy den inn i livet selv om hun ikke visste om det brøt med uniformsreglementet. På den måten kunne hun tilpasse uniformens snitt til sin bruk, uten å skille seg for mye ut fra de andres uniform. Hadde hun derimot hatt denne nye arbeidsuniformen kunne hun brukt borrelåsens innstrammingsfunksjon og sluppet å sy. Et annet resultat av at jakken kunne reguleres med borrelåsen i livet var at den fulgte kroppens bevegelser bedre. Dette var spesielt viktig blant både de mannlige og kvinnelige dekksmatrosene som ofte trakk den vind- og vanntette ytterbekledningen over arbeidsuniformen. Det var likevel tydelig at borrelåsens funksjon først og fremst skulle benyttes av minefartøyenes kvinnelige soldater. De mannlige testpersonene i studien forklarte at de trodde borrelåsen var en fordel for kvinnene, og at kvinnene kunne benytte seg av den for å føle seg mer kvinnelige. Kvinnene bekreftet at de følte seg mer kvinnelige når de benyttet seg av strammefunksjonen. Kvinnene var likevel blandet i responsen på borrelåsen og brukte i varierende grad strammefunksjonen i jakken. “Altså, vi er ikke utstillingsdukker, vi er her for å jobbe” sier den 82 kvinnelige fenriken i det innledende sitatet og peker på viktigheten av arbeidstøyet som symbol på motivasjon på arbeidet. De ønsket først og fremst å bli inkludert. Et av grepene for å inkluderes på arbeidsplassen var å se like ut, visuelt, som sine arbeidskollegaer. Det ble derfor stilt spørsmålstegn ved borrelåsens funksjon; var den virkelig nødvendig? Kvinnene følte seg mer kvinnelige, men det var ikke nødvendigvis en ønsket effekt av uniformen for kvinnene selv. En av kvinnene mente at den nye arbeidsuniformen gjorde at hun følte seg finere på jobb enn hun gjorde tidligere. Arbeidsuniformen M/2000 ble til sammenligning omtalt som en «striesekk» og innstrammingen i den nye uniformen kunne dermed brukes for å få mer form på uniformen. At kvinnene som hadde testet uniformen likte strammefunksjonen, gikk ifølge dem selv ikke på det at de ønsket å vise frem sine kvinnelige former, men at borrelåsen førte til en bedre passform og mer bevegelighet i uniformen. Mennene, selv om de sa den ikke var i veien, så ikke helt hvilken funksjon den skulle ha for dem. De pekte derimot på at det måtte være fint for deres kvinnelige kollegaer å få strammet inn uniformsjakken slik at den passet bedre. En av mennene i studien som testet den nye arbeidsuniformen hadde en smal kropp og var veldig fornøyd med borrelåsens strammefunksjon i jakken. Han brukte den nettopp for at den skulle passe bedre i livet og rundt magen. Han slapp dermed å velge mellom en jakke som enten var for vid i livet eller for kort på armene. Den nye uniformsjakken satt dermed (potensielt) bedre både på kvinnene og mennene. Likevel var denne borrelåsen ansett å være en funksjon tiltenkt kvinnene. Det er verdt å merke seg at denne mannen ikke ble ansett som mer feminin gjennom bruken av borrelåsen. Brukt av kvinnene derimot, og spesielt i kombinasjon med andre kvinnelige markører, ble det et visuelt tegn på kvinnelighet og femininitet som var diskutabel i denne arbeidskonteksten. Tilbakemeldingene på uniformsjakkens borrelås peker mot en større debatt om kvinner og arbeidsbekledning. Hvordan være akkurat passe kvinne på arbeidsplassen? Hvordan kle seg deretter? Den kvinnelige fenriken som uttalte at hun ikke var en utstillingsdukke fanger denne debatten fint. For henne var arbeidskonteksten en plass for å gjøre arbeidet sitt, ikke for å se bra ut. Arbeidet og likheten med sine mannlige kolleger ble overspilt og utseendet (bekledning og øvrige kvinnelige markører) underspilt. Sitatet kan dermed tolkes tredelt: 1) hun er ikke der for andres betraktende blikk, 2) hun ønsker å bli tatt seriøst som en del av et arbeidsfellesskap uten for mye vekt på annerledesheten som kvinneligheten representerer i denne konteksten og 3) 83 kvinnelighet, slik den fremstilles her, ses som et hinder for inkluderingen i fellesskapet, for å bli det de kaller “en av gutta”. Sitatet sier også noe om hva det vil si å føle seg vel (“ingenting som er bedre enn å føle seg vel i arbeidsuniformen”), som ikke kun er en teknisk egenskap ved et plagg, og sitatet legger også føringer for kroppsidealer i samfunnet for øvrig (“holde inn magen”). På denne måten ble arbeidsuniformen brukt som et prinsipp for inkludering i arbeidsfellesskapet og en måte å balansere sin kvinnelighet i en kontekst dominert av maskuline tradisjoner. Uniformen blir slik en viktig tilpasningsfaktor i dette yrket. 5. Uniform som tilpasningsfaktor Å bruke uniform i arbeidet ble ansett som praktisk av mange grunner. Blant annet var det enkelt med en fast bekledning som ble brukt på arbeid, noe som flere av besetningen om bord på de to fartøyene trekker fram. Ved å ikle seg en pålagt arbeidsuniform lettet det forberedelsene til jobb ved at de visste akkurat hva de skulle/måtte ha på seg. Flere av kvinnene i besetningen satt pris på å slippe å bruke tid foran klesskapet for å plukke ut et arbeidsantrekk. Det sparte også deres sivile bekledning for smuss fra arbeidet og kostnader ved innkjøp av nytt tøy. Enda viktigere var det likevel at alle om bord benyttet samme bekledning fordi det satt rammene for arbeidsfellesskapet, uansett kjønn. Samtidig var det generelt et problem med å få klær som passet fordi det var få størrelser å velge mellom. Den kvinnelige offiseren som i sitatet ovenfor forklarte at hun syntes det kvinnelige tjenesteantrekket var rart og passet dårlig, antydet også at den kvinnelige formen forsvant helt gjennom mannsuniformen. Den ga henne ikke anledning til å vise at hun var kvinne. I en studie av Gro Beate Drege og Beatrix Nyttingnes om kvinner i politiet uttalte en av politikvinnene: “Får på deg vesten, du blir veldig kjønnsnøytral, slips, vernestøvler og belte fullt av ditt og datt, du er ikke mye kvinnelig i uniform. Uniform er maskulint” (1999: 43). Uniformene kler således menn til profesjonelle menn, mens kvinner kles til profesjonelle personer gjennom feil kjønn. At uniformene i Sjøforsvaret kan sies å ha som effekt at kvinner ikles feil kjønn, bekreftes gjennom sitatet fra den kvinnelige offiseren. Dette dreier seg likevel ikke kun om passform og funksjonalitet; sosiale og symbolske aspekter spiller også en stor rolle. Et gjennomgående trekk blant kvinnene på minefartøyene var evnen til å kunne tilpasse seg sin arbeidskontekst. Å kunne gjøre viktige fysiske, sosiale og profesjonelle tilpasninger til den mannsdominerte arenaen var viktig for å bli akseptert som en likeverdig arbeidstaker. Når det 84 gjaldt den sosiale tilpasningen fortalte kvinnene på hver sin måte om en krevende arbeidshverdag. Når kvinner entret den mannsdominerte sfæren, skjedde det noe – både med kvinnene og med mennene. Kvinner fortalte historier om hvordan de følte at de hadde måttet jobbe ekstra hardt for å vise at de kunne gjøre jobben de var satt til å gjøre like godt som mennene. De hadde måttet “tåle” et hardere miljø med griseprat, historier om “typiske kvinnfolk” og en til tider ekstremt direkte språkbruk. Samtidig måtte de bruke den samme uniformen som menn til tross for at det ikke passet deres kropper. Tilpasningen var dermed av både fysisk og sosial art. Menn fortalte på sin side om hvordan de forsøkte å begrense praten sin, og ta de tyngste takene og oppgavene, for å gi sine kvinnelige kollegaer en hjelpende hånd. I dette skildres en endringsprosess som best kom til uttrykk i beskrivelsene av, og fra, den kvinnelige delen av besetningen. Vanskelige perioder i starten av et arbeids- og/eller utdanningsforløp, hvor kvinnene var i mindretall, hadde formet dem og deres syn på seg selv. En av kvinnene om bord beskrev det på denne måten: ... jeg tror jeg er blitt mye tøffere i trynet, mye mer hardhuda. Så jeg vil jo egentlig kanskje beskrive meg sjøl som gjerne litt mer... tøffere i kjeften enn mange andre gutter ombord. Og det kan jo veie for og imot for all del, men du blir litt sånn at du bare ikke blir tråkka på så lett. Når du da kommer i sivilt, og du merker forskjell på mine venner hjemme i samme aldersgruppe som jeg er i, jeg føler ikke nå lenger at vi er helt... jeg føler meg veldig mye eldre. […] Ja, jeg tror det er som kvinne og, med erfaringer, alle opplevelsene jeg har hatt, all motgangen og medgangen og sånn, har formet meg som en person (Kvinnelig fenrik). Kvinnene oppga også at de følte de måtte jobbe mye hardere enn sine mannlige kollegaer for å vise at de kunne gjøre en god jobb. Dette ble bekreftet av mennene om bord på fartøyet. Når det kom en kvinne om bord ble hun ofte vurdert strengere ut fra om hun var skikket til arbeidet, og tålte en ekstra stor arbeidsbelastning. En mannlig matros uttalte at dersom det kom en kvinnelig matros om bord fulgte han litt ekstra med på henne. Han forventet ikke det samme av henne som av en mannlig matros, men kravene til henne var høyere. En kvinnelig matros som ikke innfridde kravene ble veid ut i fra at hun var kjønn, en kvinne; “ja, ja, jente!”, mens en mannlig matros ble veid ut ifra sin personlige egenskap, “latsabb”. 85 At det var innført kvotering av kvinner i Forsvaret gjorde dette spesielt utfordrende for kvinnene. De måtte i enda større grad enn i andre mannsdominerte yrker bevise sin kompetanse og forsvare sin rang. Dette var grunnen til at noen av kvinnene var imot kvotering. Igjen ble ønsket om å ikke skille seg ut gjeldende: Eg e mot kvotering og imot eget jente/kvinne-opptak, fordi eg syns det setter oss til siden og i en særstilling, som vi ikkje har behov for når du jobber i det yrket til vanlig. Da har du på en måte lyst til å være likestilt. Og jo flere sånne ting som blir gjort, som roper ut: Nei, dokker en annerledes... Jo verre syns eg egentlig det e. Eg syns det gjør oss en bjørnetjeneste (Kvinnelig offiser). Kvinnene var i utpreget mindretall på minefartøyene; fra tre til fem kvinner blant femti til seksti menn, og det var heller ikke gjort spesielle tilpasninger eller reguleringer til dem om bord på båtene. Det var ingen rene kvinnelugarer, og de delte lugar med opptil fem mannlige kollegaer. Dette var både fordi kvinnene selv ønsket det og fordi det vanskelig lot seg gjøre på en annen måte i et ellers trangt bebodd fartøy med lugaroppdeling etter rang. Å passe inn ble derfor en viktig faktor. Med dette som bakgrunn var det forståelig at kvinnene selv ikke tok til orde for å fremme sin posisjon som kvinne i en mannsdominert kontekst, men heller jobbet for å få aksept i det fysiske og sosiale arbeidsmiljøet. I hvert fall i begynnelsen. Det å dele lugar og å bruke samme arbeidstøy som sine mannlige kollegaer ble sett på som en viktig del av arbeidslivet om bord og beskrevet som “en del av opplegget”. Kvinnene som søkte seg til Sjøforsvaret burde “vite hva de går til”. I dette synes samspillet mellom det materielle og ikke-materielle å ha stor betydning. Vektleggingen av fellesskap, og arbeidet med å etablere en likhet mellom den kvinnelige og mannlige besetningen gjennom arbeidet om bord, gjenspeiler mye av det Anne Iversen (2006) fant i sin studie av verkstedindustrien med kvinnelig ansatte. Hun identifiserer to aktive diskurser i denne konteksten; arbeiderlikhet og kjønnsulikhet. Arbeiderlikhet viser til fellesskapet som etableres mellom arbeiderne som resulterer i trygghet, samhold, lojalitet og beskyttelse (Neumann m. fl. 2012: 244). Opplevelsen av en felles skjebne gjennom arbeidet gir en opplevelse av likhet og et grunnlag for et “vi” som ikke er kjønnsnøytralt, men som derimot har en maskulin slagside (Iversen 2006: 28). At kvinnene i større grad enn mennene må bevise 86 sin kompetanse og endre seg til å bli tøffere i kjeften, og tåle mer for å bli inkludert i fellesskapet, viser til denne maskuline slagsiden. På minefartøyene var det også en utbredt forståelse av kjønn som grunnleggende forskjellig, noe som viser til kjønnsulikhet som var den andre aktive diskursen Iversen fant i sin studie. Dette resulterte i “en forståelse om at kvinner og menn gjør forskjellige ting, passer til å gjøre forskjellige ting, tenker forskjellig og ikke minst handler forskjellig” (Iversen 2006:29). Om bord på fartøyene kom dette til uttrykk gjennom en grunnleggende forståelse av at arbeidet som ble utført var av maskulin art og at kvinnene derfor var mindre skikket til å utføre arbeidet enn menn. Det ga også utslag i et syn på kvinner som i sin natur var utpregede ordensmennesker, tålte mindre tilsnakk, var jålete og opptatt av sminke og interiør. Mennene derimot var i følge dette synet grove i sine uttrykk både av verbal og fysisk art, og de likte å snakke om damer og biler. I sin rendyrkede form synes det dermed som om kvinnelighet faktisk er en hindring for inkluderingen til fellesskapet. Anstrengelsen for å bli “en av gutta” og å passe inn speiler dermed tilpasningen kvinnene gjør og understreker betydningen av denne diskursen om arbeiderlikhet i en kontekst av kjønnsulikhet (Neumann m. fl. 2012: 245). Tilpasningen som kvinnene hadde måttet gjøre gjennom skolegang og yrkesvei danner således en viktig kontekst for arbeidstøyet. Ikke minst var den fysiske tilpasningen ved bruk av uniformer en avgjørende forutsetning. Å kle seg i en arbeidsbekledning som var beregnet på menn og maskuline tradisjoner var forventet av dem. Ikke minst var dette noe kvinnene selv påla seg for å bli tatt på alvor som en profesjonell arbeidstaker og del av fellesskapet. Ansvaret for å passe inn falt helt og holdent på kvinnene selv, mens det var opp til de mannlige kollegene å avgjøre om kvinnene passet inn eller ikke. Først når kvinnene hadde vist at de var en av gutta, ville de kunne motta sine mannlige kollegers anerkjennelse (Neumann m. fl. 2012:248). 6. Uniformen som taus tilpasning Materielle objekter fungerer som en setting, skriver Miller (2010:50), de gjør oss klar over hva som er passende og upassende. Men som mye annen taus kunnskap virker de best når de er uartikulert og uutfordret. Som et resultat av tilpasningen til yrket og den sosiale konteksten hadde kvinnene selv vent seg til dette og reflekterte i mindre grad over tøyet som ble gitt dem. Taus kunnskap, teoretisert av Michael Polanyi (1966), er en type kunnskap som ikke lett lar seg artikulere, men som ligger som forutsetning for menneskelig handling, væren og viten. Gram- 87 Hanssens begrep om “kroppsliggjorte vaner” og “institusjonalisert kunnskap” (2011:65) innenfor praksisteori favner likeledes denne ikke-refleksive “kroppsliggjorte” interaksjonen med det materielle. Uniformen er del av en slik taus setting, de er noe som blir tatt for gitt og danner ved det rammen for arbeidshverdagen i yrker som ikke har for vane å artikulere sin kompetanse på klær. Andrewes (2005: 32) hevder at det ikke er kun kroppens utseende som endres av klærne, men at noe også endres innad i kroppen. Dette gjør klærne desto mer kraftfulle. De bestemmer store deler av arbeidet som gjøres, men vies ikke mye plass i diskusjonene rundt hva som utgjør arbeidslivet, annet enn når det dreier seg om sikkerhet og helse. Det kan tenkes at kvinnenes bruk av uniformer ikke kun utgjør en visuell likhet, men også at det er med på å kle kvinnene sosialt og kroppslig inn i et fellesskap. Det materielle har på denne måten en viktig funksjon, både i en sosial-symbolsk og praktisk sammenheng, som ikke kan skilles fra hverandre. Både den kvinnelige og mannlige besetningen reflekterte i svært liten grad over uniformene som bra eller dårlig. Det var derfor tidvis vanskelig å snakke om uniformene de bar hver dag, fordi kunnskapen var stum og lite artikulert og reflektert. Dette løste vi gjennom metodene i garderobestudiene, ved å knytte fortellinger om uniformene nærmere de konkrete arbeidssituasjonene de tok del i. Det faktum at svært få, om noen, hadde spurt etter annet og mer passende tøy, uansett hvor lite fornøyd de var viser en utbredt oppfatning om at de tok til takke med det de fikk utdelt og kunne bestille. Det var også slik at de kvinnelige arbeidstakerne helst ikke ville skille seg ut ved å be om spesialtilpasset tøy fordi de var kvinner. Dette føyer seg inn i tilpasningsdiskursen – hadde de valgt dette yrket, måtte de ta de forutsetningene som kom med det. Et av de viktigste symbolske trekkene ved uniformen var således at den fungerte som en måte å kle seg inn i et fellesskap både fysisk, sosialt og profesjonelt. Dette betegner Jennifer Craik (2005) som uniformens “åpne” betydning. Det ga dem en enkel måte å kle seg visuelt som “en av gutta” og ga dermed en mulighet til å skille seg minst mulig ut. Dette var en vel så viktig funksjon ved uniformen, som at den skulle sitte godt, føles god og ha en optimal funksjonalitet. Vi fant at dette ofte førte til at kvinnene selv underspilte en side av dem som tenderte mot å fokusere på deres eget utseende på arbeidsplassen. En utbredt holdning var, av både av menn og 94 samtidig ønsket de å bli sett som kvinner og ikke som menn. En slik ambivalens ble uttrykt av de fleste av kvinnene om bord på fartøyene. Det å være “passende kvinne” var mer åpent for tolkninger enn først antatt, og det var noe som varierte fra kvinne til kvinne. Noen var mer opptatt av, og brukte i større grad, typiske feminine markører; men alle var klare på at det var viktig å føle seg vel i arbeidsuniformen og at dette hadde innvirkning på trivsel og selvfølelse. Dette gjaldt både som kvinne og som del av minefartøyet. For å inkluderes var det altså viktig å være akkurat passe kvinne og feminin på arbeidet. Proper bekledning kunne dermed relateres til korrekt bekledning både i henhold til uniformsreglementet og som passende kvinne i arbeidskonteksten. På denne måten var det andre som avgjorde om kvinnene lyktes i tilpasningen, mens de selv hadde det fulle ansvaret for gjennomføringen. Gjennom å utfordre, som i julebordkonteksten, eller bekrefte, gjennom daglig uniformering, den propre uniformeringen satt de konteksten på prøve. Den ble ikke den samme som før, selv om kvinnene sørget for å endre og tilpasse seg det eksisterende arbeidsstedet. Storm-Mathisen og Klepp (2006) hevder i sin artikkel at en riktig klesnorm for kvinner er kravet om kledelige klær og at dette vil si klær som får fram det ved kroppen som er mest i tråd med gjeldende skjønnhetsidealer. I dette brukes også uttrykket å føle seg vel som en rettesnor. For kvinnene om bord på minefartøyene brukes også argumentet om å føle seg vel, men dette regnes i forhold til deres tolkning om å være en passende kvinne til arbeidskonteksten heller enn i forhold til gjeldende skjønnhetsidealer. Her spilte narrativer som ble fortalt om andre kvinners bekledning i yrket en stor rolle og fungerte som en rettesnor for bekledning. Historier som ble fortalt av både kvinner og menn om lettkledde kvinner og overdrevent fokus på utseende; sminke, hårfrisyrer og velstelte negler de var redde for å brekke ga uttrykk for hvilken type kvinnelighet som ikke burde utvises på jobb. Opplevelsen av ubehag knyttet til balansegangen mellom å kle seg slik en selv har lyst til og å kle seg som omgivelsene, var noe de fleste av kvinnene i Klepps studie oftest fortalte om i relasjon til yrkeslivet (Klepp 2009: 88). Innsatsen i å finne klær de føler seg vel i gjaldt i mindre grad kvinnene om bord på minefartøyene, fordi de måtte forholde seg til et fastlagt uniformsreglement. Likevel var det tydelig i den kvinnelige uniformeringen at det foregikk en stadig forhandling om bekledning om bord. Denne hadde selvsagt uniformen som forhandlingsarena, men bruken av feminine markører var en viktig del av det. Borrelåsen i den 95 nye uniformsjakken kan sies å være et resultat av en fremforhandlet kvinnelighet i uniformen, sett fra FLO. Men den ble også en del av den stadige forhandlingen om kvinnelighet om bord. Karoliina Ojanen (2009) skriver i sin studie om finske stalljenters bekledning om hvordan grensene for stalljentenes fellesskap reguleres symbolsk ved hjelp av utseende og bekledning. Heller ikke i stallen var det sosialt akseptabelt å se pyntet ut, til tross for fraværet av menn. Femininitet eller kvinnelighet var ikke uvesentlig, det måtte bare utvises på riktig måte, og til riktig tid. Dette krevde en egen skjønnsmessig vurderingsevne og kompetanse som kvinnene opparbeidet seg gjennom erfaring. Det som er interessant når man legger kjønn til grunn for begge analysene er at både fraværet og tilstedeværelsen av menn ga to så like utrykk. Arbeidskonteksten i Sjøforsvarets minefartøyer og i den finske stallen tolkes som kontrollerende rom der kjønn gjennom bekledning stadig utfordres. I tråd med det Ojanen (2009) fant i sine studier kledde kvinnene om bord på minefartøyene seg i henhold til gjeldende normer på arbeidet og opprettholdt slik den interne ordningen i fellesskapsfølelsen. Dermed ble andres kontrollerende blikk avgjørende for hvordan uniformen føltes på kroppen, uavhengig av om det var et mannlig eller kvinnelig blikk. Borrelåsen synes å være en løsning for dilemmaet om å ta seg godt ut som kvinne, føle seg vel og samtidig bli inkludert på arbeidet. For dem som ikke synes borrelåsen tråkket over grensen for det propre og passende var den en subtil materiell funksjon som gikk forbi enhver symbolverdi. I kraft av sin innstrammingsfunksjon gjorde den det mulig å ta seg godt ut, men samtidig delta i fellesskapet ved at uniformen ellers var identisk med resten av minefartøyets personell. Borrelåsen gjorde det mulig å variere innstrammingen fra tid til annen. Den la også til rette for en romlighet i uniformen som ellers var bundet av et strengt og fastlagt reglement. Således fungerte borrelåsen som en forhandlingsarena for kvinnelighet. Romligheten, som kunne brukes både av kvinner og menn, ble tolket og brukt mer strategisk av kvinnene som en oppvisning i femininitet. Det var dette som også gjorde borrelåsen så farlig. Ble den brukt kraftig innstrammet og av en kvinne som allerede inkorporerte flere feminine markører, kunne den tippe lasset fra det propre til det upassende. Dette ble tydelig i det den kvinnelige fenriken uttrykte i innledningen; den kan gjøre kvinnene til utstillingsdokker. Og det var ikke derfor kvinnene arbeidet i Sjøforsvaret. Om ikke kvinnene passet på å være akkurat passe kvinnelige gikk det på bekostning av inkluderingen til arbeidsfellesskapet. På den måten 96 kunne de heller ikke bli “en av gutta”. Historien om borrelåsen til besvær synes dermed å være en historie om ambivalens. Å være innenfor, men samtidig på utsiden. Å være for mye eller for lite. Spillet om å være akkurat passe. En ambivalens som kommer til uttrykk i en liten, men absolutt ikke ubetydelig materiell detalj. 97 7. Article B Clothes Matter. Work uniforms in Norwegian male-dominated manual occupations. Bjerck, M. & Klepp, I.G. Clothes matter: Work uniforms in Norwegian male-dominated manual occupations. Submitted to Journal of Material Culture in May 2016 1. Introduction Clothes are involved in a number of everyday routines (Gronow & Warde 2001) that, among other things, can be characterized as automated and thus invisible even to the person who practices them. The importance of material conditions and artefacts – uniforms and work clothes, in particular – for working life is only to a limited degree taken serious in working life studies. This article will try to fill this gap by asking: What relevance does materiality, in the form of work uniforms, have for workers’ everyday work lives? This article addresses this question by comparing some of the structural conditions and constraints framing such clothing with the particular meanings they carry for their everyday users. This article will discuss how work uniforms operate within work practices, and how they affect one another. By doing this, we hope to show that studying work practices through clothing might provide new knowledge about the physical and social aspects of work. Craik (2005) points to the fact that uniforms signal equality, community, regulation, hierarchy, status and roles, but that they also have “open” and “hidden” lives, or explicit and tacit meanings. One of the explicit meanings may be affiliation to an occupation or company, while a tacit meaning may be male dominance. Uniform and workwear is in many male-dominated manual occupations constructed on the basis of the male body and masculine norms and traditions. This gendering, according to Craik (2005), goes against the intentions of the uniform, which is to visualise hierarchies and push aside individual differences. Looking closer at work uniforms reveals these tacit and explicit relations between work practices, gender constructions and uniformed workwear. 98 This article is written within a larger ethnographic study that investigates uniform workwear in fifteen different work sites that falls under the categorization male-dominated manual occupations in Norway. Here, we will use four occupations spread out across seven work sites. These four are typical skilled manual work occupations based within different work spheres: carpenters at construction sites, process operators in industrial production, electricians in industrial production and mechanics in offshore oilrigs. The workwear in the three first work sites have relatively informal structures tied to safety, health and physical work environments. The last have strict demands for workwear and safety that is incorporated into handbooks on safety regulations as well as into on-site, well-established structures tied to the acquisition, redistribution and maintenance of work uniforms. We want to use these four occupations in order to see if regulation and structures surrounding the work uniforms affect the context-specific uses of work uniforms. Firstly, we will elaborate on the structural conditions and involvement of employers in the implementation, redistribution and ownership of work uniforms. This treats the physical structures surrounding these garments and describes the work uniforms in detail. Secondly, we want to discuss how work uniforms function for the users, namely the workers. Having done that, we will then discuss the implications of using work uniforms and how this challenges work practices and gender constructions at work sites, as they are tied to notions of workers’ well-being and appropriate dress. We hope to show how material conditions in the form of uniform workwear have implications for workers’ everyday lives. 1.1. Workwear and working life studies Few, if any studies of have been concerned with workers in outdoor-based male-dominated occupations at the intersection between work, clothes, body and gender. Wolkowitz (2006) analyses body, work and gender in her book about the industry worker, the prostitute and the service worker, but here, unfortunately, clothes are taken out of the analysis. In working life studies in general, concrete bodily experience is given a voice, so to speak, first when it is connected to health and safety. Two examples are Klemsdal’s analysis of the construction industry (2003) and Frøyland et al. (2004) whose study concerns dropouts and exclusion in that same industry. 99 The marginal position of clothes in research on working life can be seen as a result of two different factors. One is that clothing is considered to be a topic of female interest and tied to the domestic sphere (Svensson & Waldèn 2005; Turney 2009), and is therefore omitted in such studies. The other is that clothes have been understood and studied through a particular lens, namely fashion (Klepp 2014; Skov & Melchior 2011), and workwear is not encompassed by this term. This is in line with Simone de Beauvoir’s (2000: 13) view of fashion as something that keeps women pinned to a superficial life, away from matters of importance. Still, there are some studies of the relationship between clothing and work. These are mainly within a culturehistorical approach, either as studies of the development of clothes for individual groups such as postal services (Larsson 2008), male politicians (Pettersen 2004) or for the police (Finstad 2000; Drege & Nyttingnes 1999), or studies where clothes are included as just one of many elements (Conradson 1988). That there was little or no knowledge of the functional demands and esthetical expectations employees had to their workwear, as well as of the socio-cultural sides of the work clothes in use, was the background for our study of workwear and uniforms in male-dominated occupations. Workwear is an essential part of all workers’ physical, social and symbolic daily life. Even so, this is seldom articulated. Research has mainly focused on the way clothes are talked about, rather than the actual use and practice of the clothes. In order to surpass this need for knowledge in such an unarticulated and tacit field, we used methods that put focus on work practices and relations to clothing. 1.2. Practice study and methods The choice of methods is based on an understanding of practice where materiality is in the center. The term practice is here understood as a fundamental unit of social existence. It is redeveloped from central works of a range of researchers, such as Bourdieu (1977, 1984), de Certeau (1984) and Giddens (1984) who have in common that they pay special attention to routine, shared habits, techniques and competence. The fruitfulness of a practice-oriented approach is that it decentres the key objects of dominant social theories – minds, texts, and conversations – and instead emphasizes bodily movements, things, practical knowledge and routines (Reckwitz 2002: 259). 100 Reckwitz can be useful in this context as his definition of practice includes materiality: “A routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities ‘things’ and their use, background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (2002: 249). Theories of practice aim at overcoming the limitations of the classical models of human action and social order where the social can be understood as more than mental qualities (Shove et al. 2007). For practice theory, “objects are necessary components of many practices – just as indispensable as bodily and mental activities” (Reckwitz 2002) and particular things are indispensable resources for the practice. Shove and Pantzar’s (2005) attention to the Nordic walking sticks show us not only how things are acquired, appropriated and used routinely, but also how the uses of these items allow actors to be actively involved in reproducing and re-inventing the practice itself. Much like the broader scope of this article, they point to the importance of materializing social theories of practice. In our study of work uniforms, we hope to contribute to the relationship between materiality and practice. When we wanted to gain insight into the practices of work and dress, it was important to be present in the “natural context” where workers performed their daily routines. This made fieldwork a natural choice. We employed three main field strategies: participant observation, interviews and wardrobe studies. These were used in order to gain access to the tacit dimensions of work practices. Tacit knowledge, theorised by Michael Polanyi (1966), is a type of knowledge not easily articulated, but a predisposition for human action, being and knowledge. Gram-Hansen’s notions of embodied habits and institutionalised knowledge (2011: 65) within practice theory also encompass this non-reflective, embodied interaction with the material. Workwear belongs to this tacit dimension as it is taken for granted and thereby forms the frame for everyday work. Focusing on work practices implied being a participant observer (Bernard 1994) of how workers used their workwear. The practical and functional aspects of workwear in routine work life were important, but also how the clothes took part in relations between workers. In the participant observation, we acted as apprentices and followed workers around in their work sphere, helping with the work they conducted and their daily routines, taking coffee breaks with colleagues and getting dressed in unisex wardrobes. We moved in and out of the participant role to observe and 101 register behaviour and movement in relation to the clothes at work. In that, we internalized experiences related to the socio-cultural structures of work spheres and had the opportunity to share the experience of working life, even if it was only for a short while. The research interview is a well-known method. We made use of semi-structured interviews that helped us gain insight into the informants’ own world views (Kvale 1997), here focusing on experiences with workwear. We interviewed male and female workers and those who dealt specifically with the acquisition of workwear at work sites. Within the four occupations in this article, we conducted fieldwork at six different work sites: three construction sites, two industrial sites with process operators and one industrial site with electricians. At on- and offshore oil production, restricted access to work locations only allowed us to perform interviews and review photos of what the workers saw in typical work situations. All said, we interviewed 39 workers – of which 22 were women and 17 were men – at eight different work spheres within four occupational groups. However, many more contributed through observation and conversation in the participant observation. While the first two methods are well known, wardrobe studies are probably an unfamiliar strategy for many researchers. Clothing researchers developed it as a direct response to the challenge of overcoming some of the tacit or unspoken dimensions of clothing (Banim et al. 2001; Woodward 2007; Hansen 2008; Klepp & Bjerck 2014; Skjold 2014). This methodological approach facilitates research that grasps the materiality of clothing as an active element in practices. Tying clothes closer to practices and analysing the ways in which clothes interplay with the whole or with parts of the wardrobe can reveal the unarticulated, tacit dimensions of clothing practices. We conducted wardrobe studies of all workwear and private clothes (where possible) by talking about each garment and discussing options for obligatory workwear, how they decided on every day dress, and how work site rules and regulations were abided by or broken. This enabled a closer look into the repertoires of movement, or the “techniques of the body” as Mauss (1979) would term it. We noted how workwear was used in the work context, how it was integrated with the work and what social relations it enacted. We also registered how men or women wore outfits and how gender was facilitated at the work spheres through garments, 102 bodily movements and accessories. This revealed tacit knowledge and embodied structures evident in the use of particular work clothes, such as the fact that women internalise bodily repertoires of their male colleagues and that the values embedded in the workwear identify you as an appropriate member of the work environment (Bjerck 2013). Enabling identification and exhibiting (correct) values in a work context was an important issue for the employees’ implementation of uniform workwear in the occupations in our study. Descriptions of uniform workwear and the implementation and structures surrounding appropriation, redistribution and ownership will be the focus of the following section. 2. Implementation, redistribution and ownership Uniforms are, in clothing research, divided into uniforms (such as those for the military), quasiuniforms (like standardized workwear) and informal uniforms (such as sports equipment) (Craik 2005). This article’s concern is the quasi uniforms, which we have termed “work uniforms.” The work uniforms at our work arenas were standardized so that management decided what trousers, sweaters, jackets or other garments the workers should wear at work. The work uniforms took part in complex routines and interactions between different owners and users, work environments and social relations, as well as material structures such as wardrobes, washrooms and other facilities. Small, but important variations could be observed in the workwear that the workers wore in the four occupations studied. At construction sites, most had a two-split dress with work jacket or sweater and work pants, as opposed to a whole jumpsuit. High visibility clothing dominated the workwear for outdoor use, and darker or more greyish colours were frequent for indoor work. This was an occupation where there was much alternation between indoor and outdoor work either on a daily basis or periodically. In industrial production, workwear was also mainly twosplit and dominated by required garments. Dark colours, such as black and dark blue was most often used in this occupation, with the exception of the colour red, which was the signal colour for the representatives of industrial safety. This was mainly indoor work without being subject to frequent changes in temperature or weather. Workwear in the electrical industrial site was very similar to that of construction with the same amount of pockets and loops on the trousers, as well as knee paddings and a hammer holder. However, here there were fewer high visibility garments as it consisted of mostly indoor work. 103 We saw a stark contrast of uniform workwear within the occupations in oil and gas production. Much of the work happened outdoors, but the workers also alternated between indoors and outdoors work. The work also required challenging tasks like climbing in high drill towers to repair and maintain equipment offshore. Here there were strict demands on safety, such as requiring highly-visible and flame-retardant jumpsuits, rules for use and specific regulations for the garments provided by the employers. It seems that the overall intention of the workwear in this specific occupation was to protect the workers in different ways against weather and shifting temperatures, and against accidents and injuries at work. Much of this resembles uniforms found in the military. What differs is that the military has written rules and regulations concerning its contextual uses and uniform outfits that facilitate proper dress (Bjerck 2013; Vestvik & Bjerck 2012). By regulating how to dress and what to dress in, the employers made choices of the workwear used in everyday work on behalf of their employees. Most of these rules and regulations were less formalised and more implicit in the occupations in our study. Workwear that bear such a close resemblance to regular uniforms was primarily implemented in order to dress their employees similarly. The regulations formed their company profile, a common visual expression for the company’s external representation. The implementation of everyday work uniforms was a relatively new development in many of the work spheres in our study, dating back only a few decades. It was initiated when the workers and work sites became visual to clients and the public, and in at least two cases, it was directly motivated by what was described as unwanted attention towards dress and appearances. The industrial plant producing electrical cabinets introduced obligatory work uniforms when the production site opened up for client and company visits. This led to new demands on the cleanliness and tidiness of the physical work sphere, and came at the same time as a stronger focus upon health, environment and safety at the work site. The production site had previously been home to wet clothes, jackets and other clothing items, as well as a large collection of work items. Demanding predefined uniformed workwear for all workers led to rules about leaving private clothing at home and requiring work clothes to be confined to on-site wardrobe facilities. Rules were also established for keeping work spaces clean and for workers apparel to keep neat thorugh the workday. In this way, the company’s managers were able to control what was 110 Dressing the body in work uniforms implies incorporating knowledge of how to be an appropriate worker. This reproduces a social order and shows “which desires are regarded as desirable and which norms are considered to be legitimate” (Reckwitz 2002: 245). For the women in the study, the argument for comfortable dress related to focusing on work tasks and being an appropriate woman. As a manager at an industrial production site claimed, if workers were too occupied with how they looked and what they wore, they had no place in a maledominated occupation. The work they did was much more important than the clothes they wore, she stated. Appropriate dress implied the use of workwear that did not attract too much attention towards the wearer and his/her appearance. A female carpenter expressed the embodied know-how of her work practices by comparing dressing for work to dressing in her private life. She told us that while in her spare time she would wear a tight fitting tank top with narrow straps on a hot summer’s day, she would immediately change into a t-shirt that covered most of her upper body and parts of her upper arms when she entered work. This was explained by referring to a feeling of appropriateness in work practices; she did not want to remove too much of her work clothes nor reveal much of her body at work. Her boss at the construction site similarly described limitations for female dressing at work in that they should not reveal too much of their bodies and cover themselves in workwear. Otherwise, male workers might not be very productive at work and female workers could get a bad reputation, he claimed. This resembles the motivation for implementing workwear at one of the industrial production sites. It points to learned bodily and mental behaviours connected to concrete physical objects that place comfort and well-being as mental and embodied flexible categories. There are no observations that show that male employees are not able to do their job properly if women show off parts of their body, but it is a fact that both women and men in our study hide their bodies in workwear (see also Neumann et al. 2012). Work uniforms show a distinct affiliation to a company or occupation and enable the workers to dress into an occupational category. This is one “open” and explicit meaning of a uniform (Craik 2005). However, participating in the work practice also implied that performance related to the heteronormative 12 12 Judith Butler’s (2006) term heteronormativity refers to an empirical understanding of how women and men deal with gender in the work practice where social norms and institutionalized assumptions treat heterosexuality 111 female gender had to be toned down. This is part of the “hidden” and tacit life of the uniform (Craik 2005.). It has as a discursive function to curb men’s desire and, in doing so, secure effective productivity (Neumann et al. 2012: 250). Being dressed as all the others in a work sphere meant that workers reproduced the work practices in form and attire. This is what shaped the feeling of well-being in this context. To point to the cultural and social expectations we have towards women and men at a generalised level (Neumann et al. 2012: 243), the terms “masculine” and “feminine” make sense when they are interpreted in relation to each other (Connell, 1995: 68). Gender is here understood as relational (Connell 2002), and as process, something that is done (Butler 2006; West and Zimmermann 1987). Butler’s term “heteronormativity” show how ideas about heterosexuality organise people’s lives in modern society (Butler 2006). This is particularly true when it comes to occupations that are segregated as masculine or feminine, so-called “horizontal segregation” (Dahlerup 1989). Certain occupations are dominated by and associated with one sex, which attracts higher status and more prestige to the jobs men do (Bloksgaard 2011). The occupation of electrician is one such gendered-dominated, male occupation in Norway 13 . Even though, in the constructivist gender perspective that we follow in this study, you can be a man or a women in several different ways, it is nonetheless central that there are very specific frameworks as to how we can act as men or women if we want to be perceived as meaningful in society (Bloksgaard 2011). These cultural ideas forms expectations related to behaviour that are appropriate and inappropriate depending on whether you are a man or a woman (Bloksgaard 2011; West & Zimmerman 1987). In the industrial plant producing electrical components, one of the two female electricians described the use of the company’s workwear as a burden. This was related to the workwear in itself and in what the clothes represented to her and to others who observed her. For her, the work uniform was primarily problematic when she moved outside of the production area, which was her everyday work sphere. An arena where this was particularly visible was in the canteen where everyone in this particular electrical company gathered to eat their lunch. Here top-level managers, lower-level managers, general administration, engineers and electricians congregated. as the norm and variations from this norm as deviant. Butler uses the term “heterosexual matrix” as a way to explain the cultural process that neutralizes body, gender and desire (Butler 2006). 13 As opposed to in Romania where it is a gender-mixed occupation (Bloksgaard 2009) 112 In this large, open-aired space, all variations of daily work clothing was visible: suits, ties, jeans, shirts, jackets, t-shirts, skirts, knit sweaters, sweatshirts bearing the company logo, different elements of uniform workwear in combination with private garments and full uniformed workwear. The garments in the room varied, but the division between private work clothes and uniform workwear was most visible. The female electrician was very preoccupied with the number of garments that were private (optional) and those that were uniformed (forced), and that this amount was associated with the type of work position within the company. She claimed that the higher up in the hierarchy you are, the higher number of private garments you can wear. The division between areas where the female worker found her workwear appropriate and inappropriate became apparent both through observation and during conversations. The female worker rarely ate her lunch in the canteen and she changed her clothes before and after traveling to and from work. For her, the uniform workwear’s appropriateness was confined to the particular work sphere of the production area. She explained that she did not run personal errands like grocery shopping in her workwear. To her, the choice of work and its connected status became too visible and shameful. Her younger male colleague, on the other hand, explained that he did all sorts of private matters wearing his uniformed workwear. He claimed that it provided him with positive feedback from women and he seemed to be proud of the status and attention he claimed by wearing his work uniform. That the exact same uniformed workwear could have two such different implications for the wearer signify a connection between gender and the socio-cultural connotations that workwear represents. Being dressed in uniform workwear outside the work context could be problematic for the female electrician because it broadcasts to observers an untraditional choice of occupation and a kind of femininity that does not comply with heteronormative expectations in society (Butler 2006). The expression that workwear and work practices form together is thereby what determines whether the apparel is considered appropriate and comfortable for this female electrician. This shows that uniform workwear is interrelated and depends on the work practice and its context in order to be appropriate. Material objects themselves also work as a setting in that they make us aware of what is appropriate and inappropriate, Miller (2010: 50) writes. However, as much other silent knowledge it works best when it is unarticulated and unchallenged. As practices are routinized bodily activities, a social practice is the product of 113 training the body in a certain way so that when we learn a practice, we learn to be bodies in a certain way (Reckwitz 2002: 251). To our female electrician, this learned practice restricted her to a very specific work context. The use of obligatory workwear contributes to reproducing work practices and silent structures that surround work clothes. Ultimately, these are important aspects in how workwear impacts the everyday lives of workers. Clothes are of central significance here, as a way to subordinate and establish community. As such, workwear has an important function for practices at work, both in a social-symbolic and practical connection that cannot easily be separated. In this way, work practices have been tied to notions of comfort and appropriateness that reproduce practices through materials such as those found in uniform workwear. Work practices denote ways of being and doing work in a specific context, and at the same time, set guidelines for how to embody and act out gender according cultural and societal expectations. Practices are reproduced through imitation, but they may also involve adjustment, interpretation and alteration (Halkier 2011: 9). Work practices and the notions of appropriate workers was in this way challenged and negotiated through workwear. 4. Conclusion This article has tried to answer what relevance work uniforms has for workers’ everyday lives. Initially, it seemed that the primary function of uniform workwear was to provide the wearer with a specific form of authority and affiliation with a group. It had the potential of giving the wearer a common aesthetic, an ability to identify with an occupation and rapid recognisability. However, clothes should not be reduced to wearers of symbolic messages, for as Miller formulates, “The sensual and aesthetic – what clothes feel and look like – is the source of its capacity” (2005: 1). Systems surrounding work uniforms were arranged so that they complied with the motivations for implementation. This means that decisions surrounding acquisition, structures surrounding redistribution and ownership of the garments were placed out of the hands of the end user. This enabled the employer to maintain control over the specific form, function and aesthetic character of their workers’ clothing. Through that, employers continuously renegotiate everyday work on behalf of their employees. 114 This complicated daily life for many workers. In particular, the tacit meanings they attached to their work uniforms through their ways of using them denote negotiations of gender and constructions of appropriateness. Comparing how the garments were supposed to function in everyday work life and the structural conditions for this predefined work uniform with their significance in the work context, makes evident that the way work uniforms are dealt with and what garments are made available to the employees has connotations for how workers understand themselves and others in their everyday work. We might say that material preconditions lay the foundations for one’s socio-cultural understandings of work life. Altogether, this article point towards important factors in how clothing functions in work practices. Clothing matters within a work sphere as it sets particular frames for work practices, both in how it is structurally conditioned and how workers appropriate it. It is a shame that clothing remains a “ghostly presence” (Woodward 2005: 131) both among people in the occupations in the study and within much materially-oriented work research. As much as clothing is a promising topic for the study of practices, practice theory is opening up exciting new ways to understand clothing. . 115 8. Article C A Methodological Approach to the Materiality of Clothing: Wardrobe Studies. Klepp I.G. & Bjerck, M. (2014) A Methodological Approach to the Materiality of Clothing: Wardrobe Studies. In International Journal of Social Research Methodology. 17 (4), 373-386 1. Introduction In this article, we will discuss analyses of relationships between clothes, and between the clothes and the user through a method, which we call the wardrobe studies. More specifically, we will discuss how this method can contribute to increasing the material element – as opposed to the symbolic element – and how this method may be a fruitful approach to other research fields. Wardrobe studies are a methodological approach that analyses the way in which clothes relate to each other on the whole or in parts of the wardrobe. The term wardrobe may be taken literally or metaphorically as one may have a number of wardrobes for various occasions and situations. Some may be for social functions, work, or exercise. Others may be for different aspects of ourselves, as indicated by the expression “out of the closet” in relation to homosexual men. These different wardrobes may, but will not necessarily, be physically distinct or mutually exclusive. We will begin by discussing developments within the study of dress and fashion. In the effort to make these studies more based on the material and physical as opposed to symbolic element, the focus is on the relationship between the body and clothes. As an alternative approach, we propose the study of the relationship of clothes to other clothes within a greater whole (the wardrobe) as a way to highlight the materiality of clothing. The theoretical point of departure for this approach is a practice theory in which the material enters as an integral part (Shove & Pantzar 2005). Second, the methods combined and developed in wardrobe studies are discussed. This is illustrated with examples from studies from The Norwegian Institute of Consumer Research (Statens institutt for forbruksforskning [SIFO]). The project touches on different kinds of wardrobes; workwear in male-dominated manual jobs, sportswear and leisurewear, and clothes that are no longer used. 116 2. Clothing and materiality In just a few years the study of dress and fashion have changed from being scattered between a number of disciplines and institutions, into a field of study with a high degree of international exchange, unifying institutions, and publishing channels. At the same time as fashion studies were changing, focus on materiality and the human body increased. The connection between the material and the body, both developing as a research area around the same time, inspired the emerging field of dress and fashion studies and opened a rich field of research. Dress and fashion studies are now an interdisciplinary field that encompasses a number of different approaches and therefore also a variety of methods. Clothes are a suitable subject for the study of the relationship between the body and materiality as they break down the distinction between nature and culture (Wilson 1985). In social theory, interest in the body has in part been attributed to the rise of consumer culture (Fraser & Greco 2005; Howson 2004; Shilling 2004). This development sparked renewed interest in earlier research on the importance of the body for social interaction (Bourdieu 1984; Elias 1982; Foucault 1979; Goffman 1963; Mauss 1979). Clothes have the ability to transform the body (Andrewes 2005) and can be seen and studied as ‘lived garments’ (e.g. Küchler & Miller 2005; Miller 2005). Anthropologists, such as Tim Ingold, Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai contributed to an understanding of the biography and commoditization of ‘things’. Within consumer research, books from Campbell (1987), Douglas and Isherwood (1979), Miller (1987), and Slater (1997) were important in increasing the understanding of consumption as a relationship between the social and the material. The focus on the body in exploring the materiality of clothes has contributed to the exclusion of other perspectives of the material. According to Lou Taylor (1998: 238), an important divide is between the object-centred methods; the curator/collectors vs. ‘academic’ social/economic history and cultural theory approaches. Like much other social research, the latter has been dominated by textual analysis and qualitative interviews, methods are dependent on verbal statements. Since the material is verbal, analysis and text production seems easier, but it also limits what these methods are suited to analyzing. 117 Moore and Sanders (2006: 11) recognize the translation of the non-linguistic, such as practices tied to clothing, through the medium of language as a main challenge. Much of what concerns our clothes practices will be ‘tacit knowledge’. Clothes are involved in a number of everyday routines (Gronow & Warde 2001) that, among other things, are characterized by being automated and thus invisible even to the person who practices them. Our ‘body’ feels when something is wrong, but it is to a lesser extent able to explain why (Klepp 2008). One of the scientific problems in studies of materiality is to grasp the nonverbalized experiences and to translate the non-verbalized experiences of clothes in use into written academic language. 3. Wardrobe studies In English the term wardrobe has two meanings: one refers to spaces of storage, and the other to a collection of clothes. The first meaning is also covered by the term closet (Hansen 2000: 102). This duality points to the clothes, but also points to the material frames within which they are kept. These frames refer not only to the physical walls of the closet, but to an entire structure of different storage spaces with corresponding criteria for where and what clothes should be kept and how clothes should be moved between them. Maintenance, cleanliness, acquisition, and disposal are parts of that structure, as is the practice of dressing in which garments and accessories are chosen and put together. Wardrobe studies as a method is developed within an understanding of practice where materiality is at the core. The term practice is here understood as a fundamental unit of social existence. It is redeveloped from central works of a range of great social researchers such as Bourdieu (1984); de Certau (1984); Giddens (1984); Foucault (1979). Reckwitz (2002: 249) has defined practice in relation to materiality as ‘a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another’ in which ‘things’ and their use is an integral part. As Shove and Pantzar (2005) write, ‘all practice has a material aspect’. Practice theory therefore decentres the central objects of dominant social theories – minds, text, and conversations – and instead emphasizes bodily movements, things, practical knowledge, and routine (Reckwitz 2002: 259). In order to get a better understanding of how clothes are used and why, we need better knowledge of the material framework of everyday dress practices, whether for work, leisure, 118 sports, or social events. Our contribution is to address this as a methodological challenge where we build on well-known methods and close dialogue with a network of interested and competent researchers 14 . Due to its emphasis upon practices and attempt to grasp materiality, this combination of methods may also be used within consumer studies, design studies, business studies (marketing, user-centred innovation), cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and by anyone who is interested in the micro-dynamics of everyday life. The material is not just ‘a carrier’ of different types of symbols, but an active element in the practices (Latour 1996). Bringing this to the fore requires new methods. 4. A four-cornered closet The wardrobe study consists of an inventory of clothes in a wardrobe. Much like Sophie Woodward (2007) has done by studying the process of finding clothes that fit through a fieldwork entailed sitting on a bed and observing young women getting dressed. We follow the material frames for practices; the clothes, the wardrobes, laundry baskets and uniform storage rooms. The goal is to look at the relationship between the individual item of clothing and the larger material totalities. This approach is of course not new. It is at the core of what is called the Diderot effect (McCracken 1988): if you paint the wall you immediately notice that the floor looks more worn. Yet the focus on the relationship between individual objects and series is also very relevant in a more concrete sense (Brük 1995). A first rate ski boot is useless without its twin, just like a suit jacket without its matching trousers. Table 1. An overview of the methods combined in wardrobe studies Method Dominant discipline Limitations Scope Interview Sociology Language based Narratives, interpretations Fieldwork Anthropology Generalizability, access Context Inventories/records Ethnology Relationship between Relationship between 14 Researchers at SIFO; Kirsi Laitala, Silje Skuland, Marie Hebrok. Important international participants have been Kate Fletcher, Sophie Woodward, Joanne Turney and Karen Tranberg Hansen. Read more about the network and its participants at: http://www.cbs.dk/forskning/institutter_centre/projekter/wardrobe_network/menu/wardrobe_netvaerk 119 part and whole part and whole Laboratory testing Textile engineering The isolated reality of the laboratory Technical qualities The method combines and preserves well-known methods such as qualitative research interviews, field work, inventories, and laboratory testing. In Table 1 they are presented in order from the most language based to the methods that use clothes as study objects. Inventories and records are methods that are particularly important in museums and collections. In our use of these methods, we refer primarily to the ethnological tradition. We will look at some of the limitations of these methods along with the contribution of wardrobe studies. Table 2. An overview of the projects from which the examples in the text are taken. Project name Goal Scope Clothing Disposal Why are clothes disposed of? Disposal seen in relation to women’s’ clothing habits Why and how do Norwegian women around the age of 40 dispose of their clothes? Clothes that women have stopped using Textile Waste From waste to material resources in a grave to cradle perspective - A stakeholder approach to the textile value chain How can a multidisciplinary approach to waste reduction contribute to reducing the material flow and turning waste into material resources? Clothes that families have stopped using Leisure Wear Leisure and Sustainable Development: part of the problem or part of the solution? Explain the increase in consumption within the sports and leisurewear market in Norway. Map the environmental discourses and discuss the barriers for participation Clothes used in families for three main activities: Skiing, bicycling, walking/ running Uni-Form Work clothes for women in Develop competence based products for women in construction, industry, Clothes used for work in the relevant occupations 126 All clothes contain traces of the ways in which they have been used. These traces shed light on the story of their use, particularly in the context of repair and mending. Repairs of clothes are an important question in terms of environmental impact. When asked, ‘Do you repair clothes?’ responses are often characterised by general assumptions that ‘nobody’ repairs clothes ‘anymore’ (Klepp 2001). Yet by going through a larger number of discarded garments in order to see what and how they have been repaired, we learn what kinds of repairs have been carried out and on which kinds of garments. Questions of who have done the repairs and why will not be answerable by the study of clothes alone, but the wardrobe study allow us to combine questions with a registration process and therefore link between the material and the explanations. Furthermore, by registering the degree and the type of wear and tear for a larger number of garments it is possible to say something directly about practice. This, in turn, may then be analysed in conjunction with what informants have said about the clothes or their clothes habits generally (Klepp 2004). 4.4. Laboratory testing; artificial repetitiveness The laboratory is the ideal of positivist knowledge. Here the phenomenon that is to be studied is isolated from all contextual influence and the study thereby becomes positive and repeatable and by the same token removed from reality. In order to conduct laboratory tests we must acquire clothes from the informants and physically move them to the laboratory. The connections the wardrobe studies make between concrete objects and practical use and associations makes it possible to connect knowledge from laboratory back to real examples. Testing provides knowledge about the textiles’ actual properties in relation to predefined scales and measurements. They can therefore easily be compared to each other or to demands defined in regulations, labelling systems, or in tenders. What we do not know as much about, however, is the relation between these abstract scales and the reality they simulate. Since we study practice, we either have to find methods to translate between abstract measurements and real life or use the knowledge about clothes that testing provides together with other information. When we have both clothes and knowledge about their social life, we will be able to combine these two perspectives and extend our understanding of the tests' relation to practice as well as the material preconditions and consequences of practices. A number of questions which are important for developing better life-cycle assessment analyses and other tools which are used in 127 environmental research are dependent of this kind of knowledge. Today the question revolves around product lifetime both as a limited social and technical phenomenon (Environmental Resources Management [ERM] 2010; Resource Recovery Forum 2004). One example of laboratory testing to increase the understanding of practice can be found in the project Uni- Form, where one woman’s story about her work clothes went contrary to assumed truths about the actual properties of the textiles. The woman had a high-risk occupation with strict safety measures and extensive contact with toxic crude oil. She said that the oil constantly seeped through the clothes and onto her skin. She therefore changed several times a day. Her constant clothes changes could easily be interpreted as an example of women not fitting in workplaces where you have to ‘get your hands dirty’. The employer had generally strict demands regarding safe clothing for his employees, and there was no reason to doubt that the requirements for oil resistance were also under control. The woman’s experiences then contrasted with the assumed properties of the employer’s clothing. The tests showed that the boiler suits did not pass the tests for oil resistance that apply to such clothes (Almgren & Schander 2010). By providing information about some of the material elements in practice, tests like these give us greater opportunity to understand what motivates actions. Among the various projects, Textile Waste is the one that most systematically uses laboratory tests as part of the wardrobe study, where as many discarded garments as possible will be collected and analysed further at SIFO. We will, as far as possible, use standardized scales to describe the clothes’ condition, and this information together with information about the use and age of the clothes will be used in comparison with tests of corresponding garments. In this way we seek knowledge about the relation between tests and actual use. We will gain a better understanding of what kind of technical ageing contributes to short stage of use and thus how this can be prevented, as well as how clothes are worn out, through washing or through use. The analysis will contribute to the project's overall questions concerning what may contribute to reducing the material flow (Laitala & Boks 2012; Laitala, Klepp & Boks 2012). 5. New questions require new methods Despite the fact that the study of dress and fashion is a growing discipline, much still remains to be done. We have increasing knowledge of how people think, talk, and write about clothes, and about the production of clothes and fashion. Important methodological approaches include 128 discourse analysis, qualitative research interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork among academic researchers. Within the museum world and folk costume studies, analyses of preserved costume material have been conducted. While stability, authenticity, reconstruction and revitalization, or style historical periodization have been central perspectives in this type of research, fashion, change, identity and body have been dominant in the other. We still know little about how women and men, young and old, actually dress and why. Costume research has addressed a very narrow field of current – and past – clothes practices and in a too limited degree been able to relate what they call costume to the study of dress and fashion more generally. The problem with much of the academic research is that the perspective has been too narrow. The focus on explaining clothes as fashion, and thus change, has provided little critical distance to the industry that gets its livelihood from telling us just this; that we constantly have to buy something new to be beautiful and happy. It has given us little capacity to recognize stability and problems with developing perspectives on sustainable clothes consumption. We hope that wardrobe studies can inspire research that to a greater degree manages to integrate different perspectives and methods – and thus contributes to opening up new perspectives. The theoretical work concerning practice breaks down the distinction between subjects and objects and between nature, culture, and society. It opens up new possibilities of uniting natural and social sciences. We have very different methodological traditions, and it will take time to fully see them in context. Method triangulation has so far been about using several (often language-based) social scientific methods, both quantitative and qualitative. Compared to the major changes that the theories of materiality actually try to accomplish, these are quite modest steps. We hope that wardrobe studies can inspire the exploration of methods that to a greater degree capture materiality, not limited to studies involving clothing. The very challenge wardrobe studies take as a starting point is a desire to incorporate the materiality and practice common in a lot of research today. It has been referred to as an ‘ontological turn’ that has swept the social sciences reviving the concern among anthropologists for the relations between theory and practice. Recent discussion of ontology can be seen to represent a turning back to practice in response to a prolonged period of debate around representation and discourse, influenced by philosophical concerns with ‘anti- 129 representationalism’. In the article we have drawn similarities with methods developed for other research fields that do not include clothing, such as talking-whilst-walking interviews relating to gardens, and natural environments (Hitchings & Jones 2004), and interviews related to items such as the study of what people have on their walls (Londos 1993). Experiences from the wardrobe studies will be able to be further developed for studies of subjects other than clothing. Studies such as those inspired by Latour, who sought to pursue things and their practices, and in studies of sustainability. In the understanding of consumption we have more knowledge of the market itself — what is bought and sold and what people say they do — than we know about how things are actually used. Things are drunk and smoked more than they are bought and sold and people have the tendency to respond ‘politically correctly’ to questions that are asked of them. Studies of materiality’s frames and slots can therefore contribute to paint the full picture. One area, for example, can be the use of medications and different forms for health and appearance-related preparations. A ‘wardrobe study’ here can reveal what a family has, how old they are, the relationship between the preparations and the information that comes from the Health officials, and how they are stored both in relation to temperature, availability, and categorization. This is a typical theme where one can expect many right answers about what one asks, and where researchers can also reveal patters that the informants themselves were not aware of (such as connections to expiration dates and age). Sustainability is the other field worth mentioning here. Sustainability stands out because it so obviously encompasses both what we as humans do and the way that ‘nature’ is influenced by these actions. The issues are therefore inherently multidisciplinary and methods suitable to break down the distinction between these sciences are therefore particularly relevant. Methods inspired by wardrobe studies are particularly relevant here in relation to seeing how the way things are used fits together and depends on each other. This can be studied with a starting point in special leisure interests such as leisure boats, pets, fishing, or golf, but also in connection energy use. Such perspectives show the relationship between assets and activities. If we look at the relationship between children’s toys and access to toys, this is quite evident. Toys not only have an environmental effect in production, but they also influence the indoor environment and pollutants. What children have, where and how often they are played with, whether they are 130 used for show, or simply take up space is therefore relevant for understanding the consumption patterns. Research, like all other practices, is not just about what we say and think, but also about what we take for granted, do and have. Research, too, has a spatial organization and an infrastructure. Interdisciplinary collaboration and access to both social and natural scientific traditions and infrastructure provide the possibility to develop methods that allow for the updated understanding of reality that is found within practice and materiality studies. Just as the material culture that is the object of our studies carries in it distilled ideology, so does the materiality of the research world. These material structures contribute to constraining and opposing the changes that these theories open up. 131 9. Article D Developing work uniforms for women: The role of ethnographic research Bjerck, M. (2016) Developing work uniforms for women: The role of ethnographic research. In Journal of Business Anthropology 5(1), 137-153 1. Introduction In innovation research, particularly within science and technology studies, the design process has been focused on technological objects and systems. This may produce scientific and technological knowledge that leads directly to the design of new products, systems, processes or services, but research involved in the design process need not be technological in its form. The ways justifications, perceptions, practices, considerations and structural conditions for how products and services actually figure into people’s lives are challenging to grasp, taken for granted and neutralized. When it comes to clothing and work uniforms, which is the topic for this article, the articulation of embodied knowledge falls short. It is common to be able to express what feels wrong or right, but articulating why it feels that way is far more complicated (Klepp 2008, 2009). Research on uniforms and uniform dressing have to a large extent documented that women dressing in uniforms is problematic in practical, functional and social-symbolic terms (Joseph 1986; Craik 2005; Kidwell 1989; Barnes & Eicher 1997; Larsson 2008). For men, uniforms (like the business suit) are a part of a civil clothing practice (Pettersen 2004; Rubinstein 2001), but for women, clothing is both closer to the body and mutually different from men’s clothing (Klepp & Storm-Mathisen 2005). The complex relationship between gender, dress and work is at the core of designing work uniforms, and can be problematic when designing for occupations where authority, danger and physical strain is involved (Ewing 1975; Craik 2005). Making use of ethnographic methods and analyses can be valuable in showing how users’ experiences and practices can be studied as well as in identifying where there is poorly developed language and concepts for formulating and discussing products. Ethnographic methods may contribute substantially to translating this knowledge into a business world whose 132 focus is to innovate and develop products, services, strategies and markets. Understanding people and things in their everyday relations and achieving action-oriented results are challenges within the innovation and development processes. This article aims at answering how ethnographic studies may contribute to the development of products and services. It explores the challenges that lie in studying the use of clothing in specific work contexts as well as capturing and mediating this experience with workwear in use. This article is concerned with the ethnographic research done in a Norwegian product development project aimed at developing workwear for women in male-dominated manual occupations. It was initiated due to the fact that previously-designed workwear for women in male-dominated occupations had not been successful (it did not sell well when launched on the market). A Norwegian workwear and sports company wanted to learn why this initiative failed in order to improve future releases of workwear designed for women. This company had successful traditions for handling user-driven innovation in their sports- and leisure-wear section. Even so, they were not able to answer this question by themselves. Therefore, a project consortium was assembled and an application was sent to the Norwegian Research Council’s program for User-Driven Innovation (BIA) in order to find out if there was any unexploited potential in work uniforms for women. Together with the Norwegian Defence Logistics Organization (NDLO) 15 and two research institutions, the Norwegian National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO) and the Norwegian Work Research Institute (AFI), the project was accepted and received a three-year funding. This project started in 2009 and ended in 2013. This article’s concern is not whether the products or the development process was a success or not. It simply discusses the use of ethnographic research in the product development process and shows possible ways to employ methods, as well as interpreting and communicating results that invite and bring forth tactile, silent structures. The article will start with a description of the ethnographic research that was done in the project, after which it will answer what, how and why this research work was done. This article will point to why designing work uniforms was 15 The Norwegian Defense Logistics Organization (NDLO) is responsible for procuring, developing, maintaining, updating and eventually decommissioning all Norwegian Armed Forces materiel. In this article, the research of SIFO and the product development of the larger workwear company is in focus, which means that AFI and NDLO has been left out of the analysis. Two researchers with anthropological backgrounds carried out ethnographic research while the writer of this article was most actively involved with the development process and conducted most of the fieldwork that appears in this study. 133 challenging against the background of empirical findings in the field, how knowledge of these empirical findings was shared with product developers, and what product and service solutions came out of the work and collaboration between ethnographers and product developers. Ultimately, this article will add to the discussion about whether ethnography adds value to product development and innovation at large. 2. Ethnographic research This part will deal with the ethnographic research that was done in the study as a response to the challenge of designing work uniforms for women. From the outset, the research was designed employing methods not dependent on verbal statements, which have been dominating social research and clothing research. Thus, the study mostly focused on the actual uses and practices tied to clothing rather than the way clothes were talked about. Much of our clothing practices function as tacit knowledge as they are involved in everyday routines (Gronow & Warde 2001), which, especially in the use of workwear, are characterized by being automated and invisible even to the person who practices them (Klepp & Bjerck 2014). In selecting methods, it was important to choose methodological techniques that grasped the non-verbalized experience and practice of the work clothes in use. Collins, Green and Draper (1985: 329) identify the articulate and the tacit as crucial division in knowledge. In design processes, user needs are articulated on behalf of the user in several ways. Most often needs are articulated as user representations in which certain claims are made as to who the supposed users are and what they want. Even though innovators are constantly interested in their future users (Akrich 1995), Stewart and Williams claim that technological studies tend to “inscribe particular views of the user, user activities and priorities into the artifact” and that these views are based on an “inadequate or misleading view of the user and their requirements” (2005). In selecting methods, it was important to choose methodological techniques that grasped the non-verbalized experience and practice of the work clothes in use, by actual users of work uniforms. Grasping and communicating knowledge of experiences that are tacit in their form may be problematic to the extent that they are neglected in the innovation process. Specialists and nonspecialists, here represented by a workwear company and users of workwear, express 134 themselves in different ways. Much of the knowledge that users inhabit is incorporated in different repertoires of body techniques (Mauss 1979). Body techniques, simply put, refer to ways to use the body that may seem natural but are in fact culturally bound. It points to the fact that much of what we know, we know with our bodies and sometimes we do not even know that we know (http://hyllanderiksen.net/Natur.html). The aspects of what we know with our body, such as the ways we use work uniforms and how uniforms on the body integrate with the sociocultural work environment, cannot always be verbally accounted for. In this, the use of methods had to take into account ways to integrate with, internalize and observe the dressed body in action. This was done through fieldwork at fifteen selected locations within six male-dominated manual occupations: construction, handicraft, industrial production, petroleum production, fishing and the Navy. We gained access to and conducted fieldwork at two Navy vessels in the Norwegian Armed Forces, one land-based petroleum production site, one offshore petroleum production site, an industrial fishing vessel, three different construction sites, one roadwork site, one cellulose production site, one plastic industrial production site, one roadwork company, one electrical production and installation site, one stone production site and an auto mechanic’s garage. Due to difficulties with access to the petroleum production sector, we had to make use of alternative methods of interviewing and talking about pictures taken by the workers themselves that described different aspects of everyday work. These occupational categories were chosen on the background of the types of occupations that the workwear company was interested in. The choice of locations and work sites were made by SIFO and made on the basis of having at least one female employee. These locations were not easy to track down. When the necessary permissions were acquired, we 16 spent anywhere from a couple of hours (at the oil and gas landbased production) to up to two weeks at each site. The workwear company was not involved in the fieldwork at any time. Fieldwork was carried out by three different techniques in this study: participant observation, practice study and interviews. These were chosen in order to account for the tacit structures at the work sites and embodied experiences related to the work uniforms in use, as well as the 16 We refers here to the three researchers from SIFO who conducted fieldwork within this project: Mari Rysst (associate professor), Marit Vestvik (researcher) and the author. 135 verbal accounts and material objects observable in the field. By conducting participant observation in the field, we acted as participant observers (Bernard 1994). This specifically involved following women around in their work spheres, helping out with the work they performed, following their daily routines, taking coffee breakes with their colleagues, using workwear similar to what they wore, getting dressed in unisex wardrobes and sharing cabins with other employees. In this way, data related to the socio-cultural structures of the work spheres were internalised. Fieldwork also enabled a movement in and out of the participant role in order to observe and register behaviour and movement in relation to the clothing. This is called practice study. Here we registrered how clothes were used, how it integrated with work tasks and social relations. We also registered how men or women wore outfits differently or similarly, and how gender was communicated or under-communicated in the work spheres through the garments, bodily repertoires and accessories that were used but also in verbal communication. Being present in the different work contexts enabled experiencing working life as a female worker in a male-dominated occupation, even for just a short while. Ethnographic studies are considered immensely useful in their ability to gather a large amount of empirical data and, by that, enable comparison. In addition, the ethnographic method of fieldwork provides the opportunity to experience relations in real life, or “in vivo” as Glaser and Strauss (1967: 40) put it. Doing an ethnographic study provides the possibility for collecting as much comparable data as possible in a short amount of time on relevant issues to satisfy aims for both a commercial industry and academia. Qualitative interviews were also an important supplement to this fieldwork. These interviews facilitated a deeper understanding of the world views of male and female workers (Kvale 1997), which were tied to experiences with work, workwear and gender. Both male and female workers were interviewed in addition to those who dealt specifically with the acquisition of workwear at the work sites. A total of 67 interviews were conducted, with 36 women and 31 men, but many more contributed to the participant observation part of the study. These methods were chosen in order to allow the workwear company to benefit from including users’ experiences and user knowledge in the development process of improved workwear. In order to do that, it was crucial that the design and development team put aside silent and explicit assumptions about users’ wants and needs and integrate the experiences of real users into the 142 of the garments. Issues surrounding the findings presented above were discussed in almost every work meeting, more directly related to the type of work arena and occupation that was presented, though it was not the task of the ethnographer to come up with a concrete solution for how to transfer the ethnographic research into products. In the last summary work meeting, the top manager for the workwear company participated and was apparently upset over the presentation of the finding that concerned women’s relation to the work uniform. With regards to gender and work uniforms in particular, he wanted a direct answer to whether or not the female workers wanted to be women or not, i.e., whether they wanted to be feminine at work or not, whether they wanted their own feminine work uniforms or not. Not having participated in the other work meetings he did not have the same understanding of this ambiguity as those who had discussed this earlier. This is where expectations of clear-cut answers were most apparent. However, many of the perspectives from the fieldwork were easy to trace back to improved or new products and services launched on the market. The main question that the workwear company was interested in exploring was if they should make their own female workwear line. The ambiguity of workwear complicated the decision and made them doubt the market potential of making a workwear line especially designed for women. In addition, several of the findings that were made about women and workwear in the study also applied to men in the same occupations. This applied to size range, shape and functions, in particular, as well as uses of that same workwear. Initially, a decision was made on the basis of the findings and market potential not to make a collection of workwear dedicated to female workers. However, due to the structures of acquisition and in particular due to the public bidding, the workwear company felt obliged to offer female workers products that were directed specifically towards them. These garments were not particularly visible as feminine, neither in form or in appearance. The workwear collection was in general dominated by dark and grey colours, with a splash of orange or yellow on high visibility garments. The female workwear had seams or details hidden or discretely placed inside garments, pockets, zippers or buttons. Undergarments in wool, cotton or more technical garments were also offered in different colours inspired by the company´s sports collection and not used in the outer layers of workwear. The shape and sizes of these garments were also discreetly more female in form with a more narrow shape, but one that left 143 room for hips and breasts. The challenge here was to create a shape that was not too narrow and tight fitting as to draw attention to the female workers. Solutions were also made to improve work uniforms for both men and women. A greater variation in size range in the work uniforms was among the first solutions derived from the study of women and men’s use of workwear. This made it easier for workers of all sizes to find a size that fitted. Having a more gender-neutral sizing system meant that sizes were communicated in a way that was more comfortable for female workers. They did not, for example, have to choose “small man” when selecting a size. The shape of the different garments was also improved for both sexes and made according to feedback gathered in the fieldwork. In the work meetings, it was also discussed as to whether or not to offer variations in the length of the work pants and jumpsuits so that variations in length, placement of kneepads, pockets and other technical functions were placed correctly on the lower parts of the body. This was not done, however, due to the fact that along the way the workwear company came up with a solution to the garment design, which made the garments more flexible. This mean that, among other things, length could be solved by incorporating the ability to easily fold down or fold up the lower parts of the pants. Increasing the possibility for variation and creating flexible solutions in the workwear products became a solution to the problem of getting clothes that better fitted the body not only of women and the work that was done every day. Designing flexible garments were related to the placement of pockets and the use of zippers and buttons, but also incorporated uses of particular textiles for the different garments. Labelling of the garment to accommodate information for all users was also discussed as part of a flexible solution. Solutions included using images to quickly grab the attention of the wearer. This solution accommodated for the problems in the transfer of knowledge between those who purchase and redistribute the products and the end users. In addition to design solutions of work garments, more structural changes in marketing, information and sales were discussed. One discussed option was to offer sales channels where users of workwear and not just the representatives from different male-dominated occupations could purchase garments directly from distributors. Offering products directly to workers was a response to increasing the access of work uniforms for workers in all occupations and a way to 144 cut down on the supply chain. In this way, the ethnographic production of knowledge on user contexts was incorporated in design-based solutions to workwear and services. 6. Ethnographic research as added value The background for the study of work uniforms in male-dominated occupations offered little or no knowledge about the functional requirements and aesthetic expectations employees had towards their workwear, nor about the social and practical aspects of workwear in use. Workwear is an essential part of all workers’ physical, social and symbolic daily life, but this is seldom articulated or studied. Ethnographic research was used to overcome the challenge of translating between non-verbalized, tacit knowledge and experiences of the work clothes in use through language, and in assisting the developers and designers with guidance towards designbased solutions. At the same time, Stewart (2014: 140) has identified the application of complex and contextualized ethnographic findings as one obstacle for ethnography in management studies. In juxtaposition between the various users and the product developer, the ethnographer may find himself/herself in a tricky position between the users’ ambivalence and complex feelings towards their work and workwear, and a need for rapid, clear-cut and easily transferrable knowledge about the clothes in use. Likewise, Howard and Mortensen have identified “the handoff from ethnographers to designers and business decision makers” as “the biggest challenge to success” (2009: 17). They claim that although the use of ethnographic methods has grown in the business world, the outcomes have not grown at the same rate. In an attempt to “make the research stick and have long-term impact beyond any individual project” (Howard & Mortensen 2009: 20), they stress the fact that ethnographers have to act as guides to discovering customer insights instead of gurus who know more about people than anyone else (Howard & Mortensen 2009: 21). Along that same line of thought, it could be said that the work meetings and feedback loop that the researcher was involved in enabled the ethnographer to act as a guide to the contexts and understandings of workers’ dress practices. Acting as a guide to users and user contexts can be a challenging and daunting commitment. But, it is not a position that the ethnographer is unfamiliar with. The role of the ethnographer has always been to speak on behalf of others, and translate the understandings gained in the course 145 of fieldwork into a scientific or academic language. The difference in relating to the business world is that the transfer of knowledge from users to designers cannot be communicated in an academic language, but instead must be articulated in a way that is understandable to the business world. The ethnographic fieldwork not only provided information about the work uniform and the workers, but also studied the contexts, practices and work relations these male and female employees were involved in. Through that, ethnography became a valuable tool for improving products both in regards to the design and the structural systems that enclosed these products. Analysing the findings that are ultimately incorporated into the development of products and services (and those that are omitted) tells us something about the handoff of ethnographic research. It points to the ways in which ethnographic research can contribute in making products better and possibly also improving lives of the people involved in the fieldwork. 146 10. The work uniform’s potential for gender-segregated labour The overarching research question in this dissertation is what potential lies in the work uniform as a change agent for the gender-segregated labour market. This chapter discusses the research findings in a wider context of the gender-segregated labour market in Norway. Doing so it makes use of the four sub-questions set forth as a framework in the introduction. These four questions are: 1. What is the work uniform’s potential for including and excluding female workers? 2. How do work uniforms have the potential to challenge and reproduce work practices and gender constructions? 3. In what way do work uniforms have the potential to reveal tacit and embodied understandings of work environments? 4. In what ways does the innovation of work uniforms provide potential for change of the gender-segregated labour market? These questions make up the four sections in this concluding discussion in which I will summarize the main findings from the articles and discuss the work uniform’s potential. I will conclude the last section by answering the main research question of whether the work uniform has potential as a change agent for the gender-segregated labour market. I will also suggest the further studying of material preconditions in the workplace, and comment on why and how this is important. Inclusion and exclusion at work Through the presented articles, I have pointed out how work uniforms function in ways that could be described as social, physical and material. In Article B, I point to work as a sociocultural entity where we consider the material in terms of uniform workwear and its conditions, the physical in terms of the tactile environments that surround the workers and the social in terms of human interaction between workers. The work uniforms took part in complex routines and interactions between different owners and users, work environments, and social relations as well as material structures such as wardrobes, toilets and lunchrooms. These elements are not contrasted but empirically engrained in the understanding of what makes up everyday work for the workers. In this, work is a context-bound, social and cultural space that forms different work practices, and the work uniform functions as a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion. 147 The above-mentioned elements are closely connected and work through what I regard as an equality discourse. Women worked hard towards adapting to the male work environment in order to be considered equal to their male colleagues and thus be included in the work community. This is described in detail in Article A. Through an equality discourse it is possible to pinpoint how the work uniform functions socially, physically and materially in female workers' everyday lives. The work uniform was formed through efforts to establish equality in the workplace and to emphasize a sense of community with their male colleagues at work. Simultaneously, the work uniform functioned as an implicit connection to the male-dominated work environment that was taken for granted and not particularly challenged. My study confirms what Røthing and Aarseth (2006: 183) point to, that when someone tries to cross the gender boundaries in the labour market, which in Norway is still traditionally-based in female and male occupations, they feel neither very well or welcome. The work uniform is a contributing factor to this. Article B shows that by introducing standardized uniforms for all workers at certain companies, workers appeared as an equal unit externally. In regulating how to dress and what to dress in, the employers made choices on behalf of their employees for the workwear that would be used in everyday work. These regulations promoted the company profile, a common visual expression for the company’s external representation. They set materially grounded standards for not only decent and indecent dress, but gave direction on how to dress and be an appropriate woman and man in the work context. In this way, work uniforms function as a useful source of knowledge about dress and behaviour that is usually silent. It also points to the production of specific work practices through material objects. The effort to promote equality in the workplace was evident in the establishment of structures in the workplace that enabled a standardization of work uniforms. It was also visible in what the workers said about their use of the work uniforms and the observations made about work uniforms in use. One of the guys The standardized work uniform gave female workers a specific way to dress as “one of the guys” and an opportunity to distinguish themselves as little as possible. It provided women a useful tool for inclusion in the work community. According to Craik’s (2005) theory about the open meaning and hidden lives of uniforms, uniforms have the ability to facilitate women’s 148 integration into the work sphere while at the same time downplaying female bodily attributes. However, the work uniform also enabled the negotiation of gender constructions at work. This points to an essential ambivalence in the work uniform’s ability to empower women to be included as “one of the guys”. A good example of this can be seen in the workwear of female carpenters at one of the constructions sites in the study. This example is also reproduced in Neumann et al. (2012). This particular woman made her own version of the work uniform she dressed in every day. She had to use work pants that were one size larger than she would normally wear, because the pants were not made to accommodate her hips and the bodily shapes often associated with a woman. A consequence of this was that the kneepads fell to the lower part of her knees, thereby losing their protective functions. At the same time, due to the ill fit of the uniform, her buttocks could be seen when she bent over to grab something off the ground. As she did not want to show off this part of her body, this led to a need to incorporate other garments than what was provided for her at work. She wore a personal uniform of sorts – a pink tank top with a low-cut neckline that showed off her cleavage combined with a camouflage hoodie, a large necklace and huge sunglasses. In this way, this female carpenter had made a private uniform that both hid and revealed chosen parts of her body. This is a good example of how women in the study used work uniforms as a material base to negotiate their position in the gender-segregated work sphere between being “one of the guys” and signifying that they are still women. The female carpenter referred to above said that she was concerned with being included as an equal member of the work community, and that she did not want to show that she was a women at work. This statement was in direct conflict with the way she had made her own uniform and points to an essential ambivalence found in the apparel at work. This ambivalence could both include and exclude female workers. Female workers maintained that when at work they did not want to show themselves off as women, but wanted to be taken seriously as part of the work team. These women stated that they were not concerned with the workwear, which was reinforced in the employer´s and employees’ common understanding that appearance and body should not be of central focus in the workplace. Yet, it became evident in the course of our study that certain visual aspects of femininity acted as obstacles to being fully included in the work community – something that was important for the 149 women we studied (see also Neumann et al. 2012). As a result, what the women in this study said and what they did was not always consistent. It is reasonable to assume that the work uniform contributes to creating a workplace that is based on gender neutrality. Yet, the community that was established through the work uniform was certainly not gender-neutral. This is illustrated in the example above and through the article concerned with the Velcro strap (Article A). This article points to how many of the women who said that they did not want to stand out still styled their long hair, used jewellery, dressed in private t-shirts or sleeveless shirts and wore makeup. This can be seen as a way to feminize the uniform and their appearance. In the Norwegian Armed Forces, for example, women can have neither a ponytail nor loose braids on board mining vessels. According to uniform regulations for the Norwegian Defence (Uniformsreglement for sjøforsvaret 2007), the hair should be arranged so that it does not fall below the upper edge of the jacket or shirt collar. Discreet use of jewellery and cosmetics is permitted, however. The female workers wanted to be both within the community and outside of it by virtue of being female. The use of the uniform was a way to signal the effort to fit in while at the same time denouncing the gender stereotype often tied to women being vain. In this way, the mining vessels seek to appear as a gender-neutral workplace, but taking into consideration both what is said and what is done through clothing, it turns out that the workplace is infused by gender inequality and heteronormative expectations (Neumann et al. 2012: 248). Work uniforms as such have a strong masculine bias. This is expressed through the standardization of work uniforms that are based on male norms and an association to male/ masculine characteristics (Craik 2005). The masculine bias is connected to gendered categories where women and men are understood as fundamentally different. This understanding of gender is at the heart of what Iversen (2006: 29) calls gender inequality, which points to the understanding of gender as difference, that there are two genders, men and women, that naturally fit different occupations. This is an essential aspect of understanding the gendersegregated labour market. Another aspect that women relate to largely by dressing in work uniforms is what Iversen understand as worker equality (2006: 28). This is explained as a sense of a putative common destiny among the workers that results in a sense of security, unity, loyalty and protection, a sense of we versus them. The worker equality is what the female 150 workers are hoping to achieve by dressing in and not problematizing work uniforms, while actively denouncing stereotypes of the female gender. Together worker equality and gender inequality accommodate the ambivalence that I find working in the work uniforms and points directly to the challenges we find in the gender-segregated labour market in Norway. This thesis shows that the work uniform facilitates the inclusion of women in the workplace by functioning as a visual and physical manifestation of their equal status with men. Even so, the work uniform can also be excluding when the female body is dressed in it. This refers to the ambivalence I find working through the uniform, which I also mention in Article D. As Mühleisen and Lorentzen (2006: 280) writes, everything from dress, makeup, perfumes, accessories, greet - and communication patterns, body language, use of the room, gaze conventions, physical distance, choice of conversation topics or tone of voice and intonation orchestrate the female or male cultural manuscript - or forbear to do so. In this, it is clear that the dressing for work manifests discourses of masculinity and femininity. Women are obliged to wear the same uniforms as men, but many feminize them. Even down to small details such as the Velcro straps referred to in Article A, the work uniform has an ability to mirror gender, work and clothing discourses. These discourses are important embodiments of the work uniform in that they assign statuses as “appropriate dress” and “appropriate workers”. It is up to the male colleagues to determine whether the women fit in or not while the responsibility to fit in fall entirely on the women themselves. The ability of the work uniform to act as a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion reveals its potential as a change agent. Given the work uniform’s importance in the work sphere, and given its gendered character, it can contribute to solve the challenges of gender equality in the labour market. The clothes are worn on the body every day and can be used to change employees' everyday work. However, it appears that efforts are being made more at the political level to establish social structures and personnel policies than with establishing material and physical conditions that include women in these occupations. For the work uniform to have the potential as a change agent, it is crucial to look at the material structures at work and how the equality discourse works contextually. This applies not only to work uniforms, but, to some extent, also to other physical and material structures such as toilets, changing rooms, and cabins. For, as the next section will show, these conditions reproduce and challenge work practices and gender 151 constructions at the work spheres in a way that may be immensely important for the inclusion of women in male-dominated manual occupations. Reproduce and challenge conditions at work This dissertation considers work a socio-cultural entity and holds the material, in terms of uniform workwear, to be central in the affiliation and sense of belonging to a work sphere and occupation. The previous section showed how work, gender and clothing are crucial in terms of the inclusion and exclusion of female workers. This section will show how the work uniform both reproduces and challenges work practices and gender constructions. Both sections address specific constructions of gender. Constructions of gender in these male-dominated occupations are closely connected with Iversen’s (2006) understanding of gender inequality in which men and women are gendered through their biological sex, and that these genders fit naturally into different occupations. In this way, gender is what makes a difference at work. The reproduction of work practices and gender constructions happen through the daily uniformity and control that is exercised over employees at work. Article B shows that the standardization of apparel for work is closely connected to the implementation of work uniforms and the structural requirements for the acquisition and redistribution of work uniforms. These routines allow the employers to reproduce their control over workers' practices in their daily work related to apparel and conduct in a work context. Moreover, these conditions reproduce gender constructions through what I refer to as bottleneck in Article B and D. This recurring structural issue, that the user is not the same as the procurer or decision maker, hinders women’s influence and jurisdiction over their own clothing, which causes the reproduction of work and gender practices. Female workers do not want to explicitly announce their differentness, and are therefore unlikely to ask for different work clothes adapted to their bodies if these are not provided to them beforehand. The conditions surrounding the uniform in the work sphere lead to women under-communicate gender inequality in what they say and how they dress. This is an essential component for them in order to be included as “one of the guys”. The solution to the ambivalence between work equality and gender inequality thus seems to be gender neutrality. This is clearly expressed through what the workwear suppliers call unisex clothing. Unisex is a terminology used on uniforms intended for both genders. In reality, though, these clothes are neither particularly