Browsing by Subject "Pilots"

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Breaking the cultural barrier : the evolution of professions in the United States Air Force
(2023-05) Reynolds, Rachel Lee; Suri, Jeremi; Svedin, Lina; Weaver, Catherine; Sankaran, Jaganath; Lawrence, Mark
This study tackles a paradox of professions whereby standardization and bureaucratization of tasks seemingly ought to democratize labor pool participation, but instead reify barriers to entry. Through controlled comparative case study, I examine cases in the US Air Force that have pursued different labor pool strategies in response to apparently similar exogenous pressures. In each case, a suborganization within the USAF encountered resource dilemmas that motivated them to cut labor costs and adopted technological advances that routinized tasks such that lay workers could take on tasks once only performed by experts. Despite forces that seemingly drive organizations to open their labor pools to more junior workers, not all cases saw such an outcome. Instead, I argue that endogenous organizational culture determined how each organization managed its workforce. In the cases of USAF satellite operations and weapons direction career fields, jobs once performed only by officers were opened to enlisted practitioners. In two cases following fliers of in-person piloted aircraft and remotely piloted aircraft, no such labor pool expansion took hold despite experiments that demonstrated the capability of enlisted troops to perform officers’ duties. Through interview, document analysis, and artifact analysis methodologies, I found that cultural barriers prevented labor pool expansion in the latter two cases. Romantic ideals of labor roles, elitism regarding junior worker capability, and negative attitudes like sexism and racism guided labor pool decisions more so than did dispassionate cost/benefit analysis. This work speaks to the evolution of professions broadly. It develops a paradigm missing in the literature on professions: That professionalization not only standardizes specialized work; it also attaches social benefits—prestige, authority, status—to professional experts. Experts, then, are loathe to give up those benefits even when their expertise is no longer required to perform routinized tasks. My findings suggest similar forces are at play in diverse professions whose task environments are increasingly accessible to lay workers: from medicine and journalism, to library science and fashion, to cybersecurity and space exploration. Whether those industries will pursue the most efficient labor pool strategy, I argue, is not a matter of measured decision-making, but a matter of culture.
Making the ocean : global space, sailor practice, and bureaucratic archives in the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire
(2014-12) Jones, Brian Patrick, active 21st century; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge
This dissertation is about the long-distance navigators who constructed a global marine world as agents of the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire. The hard-won pragmatic and empirical expertise on which they relied developed in an uneasy tension with the priorities of the bureaucracy centered at the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. In the Atlantic, bureaucratic standardization driven by the Casa made commercial ocean travel increasingly routine, while exploratory sailors, particularly in the Pacific, continued to apply their expertise in unknown and unpredictable waters. The quotidian and the pragmatic defined these long-distance mariners’ relationship to their environment. They organized space into networks of knowable pathways that connected places identified by names and markers that communicated the sailors’ experience to future navigators; they interpreted local conditions based on inferences from distant stimuli and ocean-scale systems; and they introduced their natural and human surroundings to metropolitan and colonial scholars and administrators. The resources and instruments developed by the Casa informed these practices, but voyages of discovery always remained outside of direct institutional control from Seville. This relationship—between the local, individual, and contingent on the one hand and the universal, bureaucratic, and synthetic on the other—not only defined the dynamics of intellectual authority governing scientific endeavors under the Spanish monarchy, but also shaped strategies for projecting imperial claims across areas of uneven and limited physical control, whether marine or terrestrial. Reevaluating the balance between marine and terrestrial territorial claims recasts the Americas as a waypoint into the Pacific and beyond for the globally-aware westward gaze of Spanish imperial ambition. More fundamentally, it highlights the multicentric and networked arrangement of power in the early modern period by refocusing our attention on those islands, whether literal or figurative, of physical Spanish presence surrounded by spaces of hypothetical control. The Spanish empire’s maritime orientation during the sixteenth century developed the intellectual, political, and institutional strategies to balance and resolve these tensions between embodied and archival knowledges, local contingencies and universal frameworks that defined the distribution of power under the Spanish monarchy.