Under Suspicious Eyes: Work and Fieldwork in a Steel Plant in Kazakhstan

This article deals with the ambiguous role of suspicion in industrial production and anthropological knowledge production and reflects on the experience of conducting fieldwork under watchful eyes in a foreign-owned former Soviet steel plant in Kazakhstan. Furthermore, it addresses how fieldwork must adapt to and is influenced by suspicion on the shop floor. By taking one of the steel plant’s subdepartments as an example (DSF, the iron ores crushing and sorting factory) I address the peculiarities of fieldwork inside the gates of a steel plant and touch upon issues of access, ethics, politics and constraints related to the labour process. I analyse the reasons behind the suspicion of managers and workers, the ways in which it manifested itself in interactions and how I dealt with the issue in the fieldwork situation. The final part of the article is devoted more generally to how suspicion impacts on work and sociality on the shop floor, namely how it plays a role in production relations and how recent shop floor restructuring has accentuated its importance. Workers’ diffidence to each other appears to work as a flexible, indirect and disciplining device that plays into the hands of managerial control. Although effective in managerial logic, it also undermines good managerial practice, thereby eroding the capacity of the plant to address its fundamental problems.