Ludo Tricks and the Unserious Actor in the Trucking Business

Anthropological studies based on participant observation, with the goal of producing context-sensitive, holistic sociocultural descriptions of high-risk industries, are few and far between. This article focuses on the intentional bending and breaking of safety-related rules and regulations in the European road-based commercial goods transport sector. When accidents and other unwanted events occur in the sector, loss of life and material damage are often inevitable due to the high energies involved in truck accidents and crashes. Based on fieldwork in Norway, the article explores rule bending in day-to-day work across the transport chain, from terminal workers and truck drivers to transport company managers and owners. It highlights both the performances and the rationalizations of rule-bending behavior and provides a conceptualization of rule bending as actions that are continually deliberated in the sector and justified by the concept of “the unserious actor.” The main argument of the article is that this concept is a constructed category that both guides and restricts rule bending in the sector. This line of thinking draws on Fredrik Barth’s (2010) discussion of the continuous establishment and re-establishment of ethnic groups and boundaries – an approach that has not previously been used to understand safety and risk taking in the road-based heavy goods transport sector.