Employment and working conditions in the technical professions of the performing arts in French-speaking Switzerland: symbolic barriers between artists and craftsmen?

Robin Casse^[1]

During an interview with Olivier (48 years old, sound designer), we discussed the working conditions of the technical professions in the performing arts in French-speaking Switzerland. Instead of talking to me about his own case, he told me about the case of the ‘technicians’: ‘There’s something very hard about the technicians, I think. The guys are really into it, but at the same time they don’t have much… Well, they earn their living and all that but […] they’re shadow workers’. With this statement, Olivier illustrates the distance that separates him, the sound designer, from the ‘technicians’ on the subject of working conditions. The reference to physical work (‘something very hard), to the investment they show (‘they are really into it’), and to the invisibility of their roles in the production of the shows (‘they are shadow workers’) are all criteria that Olivier considers unacceptable, like ‘dirty work’ (Hughes, 1996). This anecdote shows how Olivier sees the working conditions of those he considers to be ‘technicians’. At the same time, he affirms a fundamental separation between them and himself, showing how the professions associated with performance technology can in fact be opposed in their aspirations in terms of working conditions.

The numerous studies on the artistic professions have shown how much the ‘body and soul’ investment (Sorignet, 2010) to this career, which translates into permanent availability (Devetter, 2006; Sinigaglia and Sinigaglia-Amadio, 2017), makes it possible to describe the reasons for artists’ commitment to their work. Because they evince the vocational illusio (Sapiro, 2007) that comes with it (Menger, 2003; Perrenoud and Bois, 2017; Schotté, 2018) and the risks associated with such careers (Sorignet, 2004, 2016; Perrenoud, 2012), these investigations characterise the complexity of how these professions are inscribed within the social space.

However, the art worlds are not limited to artists’ careers, and some of the professions that fall under the heading of ‘supporting staff’ (Becker, 1988) have so far been left in the shadow. Among these professions, technical professions are a paradigmatic example of the situated dimension of the vocational illusio of artistic professions. The strong division of labour that structures the art worlds implies highly varied professions –and thus, of sets of tasks and roles (Hughes, 1996)– that do not necessarily rely on adherence to the total commitment and disinterestedness of artistic careers.

Owing to their diversity, the trades associated with performance technology make it possible to grasp the variety of ways in which people are involved in the worlds of art. In French-speaking Switzerland, these occupations are distinguished both by their content and by their social recruitment and give rise to a rediscovery of the opposition between artists and craftsmen (Becker, 1988). In this text, we will analyse how this opposition contributes to the divergence of two professional spaces marked by distinct nomoi and hierarchies (Bourdieu, 1997). On one side are the ‘artists of technique’, direct collaborators of the shows’ authors and signatories of part of these works. On the other hand, the ‘shadow workers’ who distance themselves from the disinterested game of artistic recognition. This distinction is not, however, impermeable: passages allow for circulations between these two spaces and the careers that make them up.

To account for the ambivalence of the distinction between these professional spaces, our analysis is based on the working and employment conditions associated with these occupations. Indeed, research on employment and working conditions has shown how these vary according to the place occupied in the professional hierarchy and, more generally, in the social space (Maruani and Reynaud, 2004; Gollac et al., 2014; Roux, 2020). This contribution aims to show how the symbolic barriers between the different professions that cooperate to create, adapt, and mount technical devices are based on these employment and working conditions.

To do so, we rely on the typology of positions that make up technical teams in contemporary performing arts: stage and company managers, directors and technical designers. For each of these cases, we analyse the employment status and working conditions associated with these positions. This double-entry approach allows us to distinguish between pluriactive and permanent positions, on the one hand, and to identify the place of each in the hierarchies of the work collective, on the other hand. We first address the non-fixed positions of technical designers and company managers, showing how they are similar to artistic professions by requiring a disposition to total commitment. At the same time, we qualify this correspondence by describing the places of each in the creative collective, particularly in terms of responsibilities and remuneration. This description allows us to characterise the distinct interests of these two positions: while some strive for the recognition of their singular ‘talent’, the others simply do not have the resources to do so. We then turn to the fixed positions, which are characterised by the distancing from selflessness and ‘artistic’ tasks. Here, too, we distinguish between responsibility and operative positions.

1. De-multiplying oneself and total commitment for unequal remuneration: freelancers at the service of companies

The field of contemporary performing arts in Switzerland is, like many other artistic professional spaces, a typical example of a ‘laboratory of flexibility’ (Menger, 2003). If pluriactivity is favoured by a national context of proportionally greater recourse to part-time work than in France, the share of part-time contracts is even more marked in the economic sector in which the art worlds are located^[2]. What about technical occupations? Although there are no overall data (yet) that would allow us to generalise, my ethnography in several theatres has allowed me to determine that two employment situations exist for technical staff members: salaried and independent. In practice, the status of independent is rarely used^[3] and it is possible to distinguish between three uses of these two situations: employment ‘on mandate’, employment ‘on call’^[4] and permanent employment.

Most workers in technical occupations are ‘freelancers’, i.e., they do not have fixed full-time contracts and are therefore examples of the ‘de-multiplication of oneself’ (Bureau et al., 2009) that is more systematically found in the artistic professions. However, in the course of the research I could verify that the position held can change the conditions of freelancing, particularly in terms of working hours.

1.1. Creators: the ‘artists’ of technology

In the division of technical labour, the position of technical designer best corresponds to the artistic role. It consists in ‘highlighting’, as Daniel (63 years old, light designer) tells me, the author’s intention at the core of the project. Ana (31 years old, lighting designer) clearly explains what it consists in:

You are in direct contact with the director, who creates a show often based on a text. And according to that… he’ll say what atmosphere he wants for his theatrical object. Either you make proposals, or he has a ready-made idea and you try to… enter his world to try and create that. If not, you propose your own.

In concrete terms, the work begins when they are hired by the author of the show and is mainly carried out during the weeks of residency, when the rehearsals take place before the premiere. In most cases, once this creation is finished a manager hired by the company reopens it to ‘take’ it on tour. This means that once the creation is finished, the technical designers have finished their work. The mandates^[5] of the technical creators imply that they must comply with the requirements of the authors who employ them. This position is not, however, devoid of prescriptive power. On the one hand, depending on their reputation, technical designers may have more or less freedom in their work. On the other hand, once the creation is finished, the stage managers must respect the designers’ indications^[6].

The working conditions of the technical designer are like those of the other members of the creative team: they work together in conceiving the piece, meeting and exchanging e-mails until the time of the creative residency. The work of the technical designers thus includes, quite often, a higher or lesser degree of individual and autonomous preparation, generally with a computer^[7]. To this solitary part of the working time is followed by collective creation. The residency hours are quite variable, depending on the project, the author, and project’s degree of completion in relation to the premiere. As an example, during an internship with Olivier, I accompanied him to the creation residency for a show by an internationally renowned director. During this workshop, he complained all the time that he had ‘too many things’: the director was constantly changing his mind about the durations of the different sequences that structured the show, which required Olivier to adapt his sound design several times a day. He had no choice but to note down the necessary changes during the rehearsal afternoons and to spend his evenings and part of his nights and mornings working on the new soundtracks. This intensity of work characteristic of residency periods is not the only cause of indistinction between professional and personal life. For these creations, designers may be required to live several days a week away from their families. This is what Andreas (48 years old, stage designer) told me about when we talked about his business trips:

During a bad month, with a lot of travelling, I try not to be away from Zürich more than three, four nights a week. […] And if there is a lot of travelling, I go away twice a week. […] During the last rehearsals before the premiere, I try not to be away more than four, five days a week.

Involvement in technical design therefore supposes a significant and very flexible time availability (Devetter, 2006).

Technical designers are hired on a ‘mandate’ basis, i.e., they are paid for the few months that the creation lasts, without a maximum weekly working time or holiday time. The individual responsibility implied by the status of freelance plays a fundamental role in the total commitment to the work. This is what Olivier explains to me:

At one point, when I separated from my wife, […] I was a bit burnt out […], I didn’t sleep any more, I had spasms, I lost some weight… But I had to keep working, I never stopped and I worked because I put pressure on myself. In the end, this demand also meant that I was always being called.

The contracting conditions are informal: technical designers are usually acquaintances, or even friends, of their employers, or people whose work the latter know and appreciate. Designers are therefore also subject to the goodwill of their employers and it is common for these workers to be replaced without even being informed, as Olivier explains to me: ‘It’s enough for two or three [employers] to go on break. When they come back, they want to work with someone else […]. So, overnight you find yourself a bit… you know?’ Similarly, salaries are not regulated and are subject to negotiation at the time of hiring. For example, Andreas (48 years old, stage designer) did not give me a precise monthly income but quite a wide range of remuneration per creation^[8], varying between 6,000 and 25,000 Swiss francs^[9], depending on the show’s budget. The possibility to negotiate employment conditions varies according to the symbolic capital accrued by the person hired. For example, Matthias (36 years old, stage and lighting designer), after having obtained a grant of 50,000^[10] Swiss francs for ‘young emerging talents’, has set his income at 6,000 Swiss francs for a one-month creation. In addition to this financial remuneration, there are symbolic remunerations that help to assimilate these creators to artists and distance them from technicians. The most obvious is the presence of their names in the credits of the works, but there are other modalities, notably awards and grants. The examples of Andreas and Matthias are particularly telling as they both received an award and a grant, respectively. Finally, and in contrast to the other positions mentioned in this text, designers can become members of the Swiss Society of Authors, which ‘is responsible for collecting and distributing copyright royalties on behalf of its members’^[11]. Beyond these forms of symbolic recognition, it is above all the lifestyle permitted by these positions that makes them desirable. Autonomy in work and meetings are recognised as particularly pleasant working conditions, as Olivier points out:

I think that, in the end, I really enjoy asking myself the question ‘What can we do?’, […] meeting new people too. […] I find that very stimulating in life. I don’t know if you can find that outside of this job. […] Earning a living like this is a luxury.

The positions of technical designers are therefore those that come closest to the working and employment conditions of artists. Total commitment to the professional activity is favoured, on the one hand, by the inevitable pluriactivity and, on the other hand, by the singularisation of the resources that enables the game of creating symbolic goods. The existence of objective distinctions, such as their presence in the credits, awards, and scholarships, identifies and remunerates technical designers by their own name, on an equal footing with other participants in creative teams. Finally, the mandates for which they are hired give them a power of prescription over the technical professions distancing them from purely technical tasks. This is precisely what differentiates these technical design positions from those of stage managers.

1.2. Company stage managers: freelance technicians between creation and technique

The role of company stage managers is adapting the technical work created by their creative counterpart (scenography, sound and light design) to the constraints and requirements of each of the venues where the show for which they are working is being performed. Their work consists of several stages. First, the creator transmits the creation to the stage manager. Then, the sound manager accompanies the piece on tour, adjusting the technical equipment to the specificities of the different venues. He goes, usually before the rest of the company, to each performance venue to carry out the set-up and especially the configuration of the control room^[12]. During set-up, he gives instructions to his counterpart, the stage manager^[13]. During the performance, (s)he manages the coordination of the technical effects with the on-stage progress of the play. Once all performances have been given in one venue, (s)he takes part in the dismantling of the sound system and travels with the creative team to the next venue.

Hence, stage managers work, on the one hand, with the artistic team, because they are hired to ensure that the technical set-up corresponds to what the author of the show expects and to the purpose of the work. On the other hand, they also collaborate with the venue’s team, who are there to ensure that the right equipment is present and that the set-up and dismantling is carried out correctly. Through this involvement in the more technical tasks, company stage managers may be affected by their associated physical risks^[14]. The mandate of stage managers, therefore, places them at the service of the artistic team and gives them a certain power over the technical team of the venue hosting the performance.

The position of stage manager is defined by a cluster of tasks that other technicians do not share: the tour. For the duration of the tour, stage managers are separated from their ‘home’ life and live at a particularly intense rhythm. This is what David (45, former company sound manager) explains to me when we talk about his past as a company sound manager:

It’s true that when you tour for ten months in a season, there are times when I remember feeling destroyed. We didn’t return home for two months, and when you visit one city after the other, you don’t even know where you are. Besides, it’s a chaotic life, you live at night, you finish the show, have something to eat, some drinks, you wake up at noon. […] I felt heavy. [He mimics a big belly with his hands.]

The commitment to professional life, then, is absolute for company stage managers when they are on tour. This can have consequences for their personal life, notably their married life, but also for their psychological and physical health, as David’s testimony shows.

As we have seen, stage managers are hired by the companies, usually on the advice of a technician from their network. Like with technical designers, wages are not fixed, but the hourly rate considered acceptable by most professionals I have worked with is 30 francs. And also like technical designers, stage managers are sometimes led to negotiate their wages according to their interest for the project and the company’s resources. Ana (31 years old, designer and lighting manager) explains:

It’s complicated because companies don’t necessarily get the grants they ask for. I always assume that if I do a lighting design + a stage management, it’s 6,500 [Swiss francs/month]. And then, if the companies can’t, we negotiate.

As we have seen, the position of stage manager stands between the artistic team of the company and the technical team of the host venues. This standing also determines the symbolic rewards associated with this position: while their name is usually in the credits, no other form of objective distinction exists for this position, unlike the technical designers. However, the integration –albeit partial– into the company and the travel opportunities afforded by touring are all motivations for joining the company’s stage management.

Freelance jobs are characterised by the responsibility they place on workers for their own careers: their remuneration depends on the number and quality of assignments accepted. We were able to note, during the survey, that such a relationship with employment very often encourages workers to ‘take on too much’ when they enter the labour market, to be sure not to ‘miss out’. This investment in work materialises, for example, in the inability to turn down offers or take holidays, for fear of missing out on important job opportunities. Such employment conditions may lead some to divorce and to episodes of burnout. Yet, as Olivier’s example, among others, illustrates, the lifestyle enabled by these jobs –the passion made work, marked by the absence of routine, travelling, social life, etc.– is in itself a reward for all sacrifices.

That said, some technicians –when they do not manage to have their ‘talent’ recognised (Schotté, 2014)– end up tiring of the demands of this disinterested game, and sometimes abandon it. It is common for these workers, after spending some time in freelance positions, to redirect their aspirations towards a more ‘stable’ and routine relationship with work that allows them to maintain the boundary between work and non-work.

2. Heteronomy and stability: fixed salary employment in technical jobs

By definition, permanent employees are at the opposite end of the spectrum from freelancers in terms of employment conditions. Just like auxiliaries, these workers are hired by the institution hosting the performance. The size –and thus the budget– of the employing institution determines the number and rate of employment of the permanent employees. If we take three Lausanne theatres, this distribution clearly reveals their local hierarchy. The Théâtre de Vidy, which is the best endowed with subsidies but also the most prestigious of the local theatres, has a budget of 17 million Swiss francs^[15] for a technical team composed of 56 permanent technicians and 14 ‘occasional collaborators’ for the 2018-2019 season. The Arsenic, which is on an intermediate level, has a budget of 2.2 million Swiss francs^[16] and employs three permanent technicians and an undetermined number of auxiliaries. Finally, the Sévelin 36 theatre, the smallest of the three, with a budget of 300,000^[17] Swiss francs, has only one stable technical director employed at 50%.

2.1. Theatre room manager: heteronomy as the price of stability

The task of the theatre room manager –or ‘babysitter’– is to ‘‘receive’ the company stage managers to carry out the set-up and dismantling of the shows. Their job involves interacting with their company counterpart and managing the theatre equipment provided as well as the auxiliaries, if any.

These are positions that exist mainly in large theatres. The contracts are stable, generally of an unspecified duration, and for the most part 80% or full time, which protects these technicians from the precariousness that affects the vast majority of their colleagues. The stability of these employment conditions is the main interest of these positions for technicians. This is the case of Christophe, who explains to me why he stopped looking for company stage manager mandates:

After a while, I got fed up with touring because touring is good when you’re 25, 26, 27, 30 or a bit less […]. In 2004 [at age 33] I started to get annoyed with touring. […] I went back to fixed things because I was tired of being in hotels.

This role is also reflected in working conditions that place them as intermediaries between various members of the work collective. On the one hand, they are responsible for the assistants^[18] and have a certain decision-making power: they decide on the equipment for the show and how to set it up. However, their role also includes technical and physical tasks for the show’s setup and dismantling that are considered menial. These tasks are often seen as ‘dirty work’ (Hughes, 1996), not least because they contribute to the physical arduousness of the job. Nevertheless, having years of experience and a permanent position in well-equipped theatres helps to limit the intensity of the work rhythm and to encourage ‘good gestures’, i.e., those which preserve the bodily capital (Crasset, 2017) on a daily basis. For example, during an internship with theatre room managers, I was involved in setting up the lighting plan for a show. I was asked to move about twenty Robert Julia^[19] 1kW profile spotlights, each weighing 13kg. Full of enthusiasm, I took two spotlights at once, and when one of the technicians saw me, he advised me to take only one at a time “so as not to hurt your back”. I asked him if that was a problem he usually had, and he laughed and told me that it was.

The heteronomy of the role of theatre room manager can also be seen in their relationship with the technical designers and the company stage managers. The designers decide on their schedules and control the resources –technical or human– used by theatre room managers the set-ups they are in charge of. This is what Aurélien (25 years old, freelance lighting manager-designer) told me: ‘You always have to ask the technical director if you have a request. […] If you want three people to do the editing tomorrow, you ask the technical director.’ The power of directors over theatre room managers can complicate the working conditions. This is what Stéphane (47 years old, tour lighting manager) tells me when he talks about his relationship with his superior: ‘Our chiefs are administrators. Even the technical director does nothing but check the schedules. […] There are people who don’t know anything about the business and who want to manage everything, and that pisses everybody off.”

Stéphane recounted this as he told me about a dispute between himself and his superior: a few weeks earlier, the latter had changed his working hours without notifying him by e-mail, and since Stéphane had not checked his professional schedule –which his superior fills in–, he thought he was on leave at the time, which earned him a warning from the technical director. This case shows how important it is for room managers the separation of professional and personal life. As we have seen, it is the stability of working times –and places– that determines the quality of this distinction between work and non-work.

Combined with these heteronomous working conditions, the remuneration of theatre room managers is stable and includes five weeks of paid holiday per year. A manager (regisseur) without seniority earns a net of 4,800 francs per month for 40-hour weeks^[20], which is equivalent to 30 francs per hour. Although, their names do not appear in the credits of the shows, they are usually involved in discussions with the company members and play a role in defining the equipment used and the setup and dismantlement. This participation makes them feel part of the team and fills the craftsman who made the show possible with ‘pride’.

2.2. Theatre technical directors: the responsibility of technical management

The mission of the technical team directors is preparing the conditions for the coming season’s shows and managing the equipment and the technical team. Technical directors are usually former stage managers who have accumulated experience in both companies and theatres and have established a large network and a reputation at the local level. Access to this position is often a promotion after several years as a stage manager in the same theatre and is part of a relatively common relationship with the work of creating shows.

Within the collective, technical directors are placed between their superiors, the theatre directors, and the stage managers and potential auxiliaries, of whom they are the superiors. The role of technical director therefore corresponds to a managerial position where the bulk of the work is no longer technical. This is what Philippe (59 years old, technical director) told me when he talked about these ‘administrative tasks’: ‘I am not on the sets anymore, or very rarely’. This role also implies a temporality of the set of tasks that is more extensive than that of the theatre room managers. Philippe speaks of ‘future prospecting […], with the directive team […], of feasibility studies”, in which he is usually involved a season or two before the premiere. Technical directors, through their technical expertise, therefore, play a role in the intermediation work carried out by the management of cultural institutions (Lizé, 2016).

However, this position implies a certain heteronomy that can have a strong impact on the quality of life at work. This is what Peter (60 years old, construction workshop manager) explains to me when he talks about the paradoxical instructions he has to face:

Often, when you are presented with something, you don’t have everything you need. […] Moreover, you have to respect not only the sets, but also all the safety standards. With loads, in suspension, this and that… fire standards, fireproof stuff, etc. So they tell you, ‘Do it like this. I want this’. But then, in fact, the material I’m going to use can’t be uses, because it’s forbidden […]. It’s flammable, it produces smoke, it drips, you cannot use it.

He has to warrant compliance with safety standards, which leads him to clash with certain stage designers or directors, but he is rarely supported by his superiors: ‘It’s the decorator, the scenographer, who actually comes on behalf of the general director and who then, is pushed by the director and then, behind , who tells the director “Well, no, we have to do as he says”’.

As for all professionals in the performing arts, the activity of technical directors varies according to the high points of the season: festivals, pre-production, etc. Periods of high activity can then weigh heavily on the quality of the work/non-work boundary. This is what Peter explains to me:

I used to work at night, in bed. I couldn’t sleep because I had a problem to solve. I didn’t know how to make it work. Or at night, I would wake up because I had come up with something. I had a pad next to the bed, so I wrote it down. That was every day. Every day. And often, I would be lying down, with my eyes closed, thinking like in the theatre. Images flashed by, I had ideas, I would pursue an idea: ‘If I do this, how should I do it?’, every solution.

These periods of work overload experienced by Peter illustrate the heteronomy that characterises directive positions: although they are directors, they must respond to the requests of their superiors. Despite being permanent employees with responsibility, their position is nevertheless subordinate to the real field gatekeepers: the directors of cultural institutions. What makes this intensity at work particularly problematic is that permanent employees with a fixed salary lack the adherence to total commitment proper to the artistic vocational illusio. When I asked Manuel (33 years old, technical director) what benefits brought him being promoted to technical director in his theatre:

I was about to turn 30, I had found a woman who suited me, I wanted to build something with her, a family […]. I became [technical director] and now I work from Monday to Friday, with a very regular schedule, a better salary, and all that. […] I don’t know if I would still be with [my wife] if I hadn’t had this stability.

During this interview, Manuel shows both a certain pride in having been chosen for this promotion (he is one of the youngest technical directors I know) but also a strong satisfaction with the benefits associated with this position: unlike the theatre room managers, he has free weekends and earns almost 2,000 francs more per month.

The working conditions of technical directors are therefore the most attractive: they have more stable schedules than managers and their salaries are higher^[21]. Recruitment procedures are not regulated: some ‘follow’ their employers throughout their career, while others are recruited following a job offer. Recruitment as a technical director is also a form of symbolic recognition of a worker’s reputation, as Manuel testifies: ‘I was not even 30 years old and I was offered to become a manager in one of the biggest institutions in Switzerland. I was like “Wow! Fuck!”’. It also offers the possibility of leading a technical team, as David explains to me: ‘You can give directions to the team, in a way that… You’re the one who chooses. I try to bring stuff in’.

Conclusion and discussion

In this paper, we have shown how employment and working conditions reveal distinct modalities of work engagement according to the positions involved in show technology in French-speaking Switzerland. Through this analysis, we have sought to define the symbolic barriers that structure the technical work collectives and distinguish the motivations that characterise these different positions.

In looking at freelance positions, we have noted that the importance of career dedication is enhanced by the ‘de-multiplication of oneself’ (Bureau et al., 2009) required by these multi-mandate positions. Individuals who make a career in these positions value the absence of routine at work, the social life, and the participation in the creation and adaptation of a show. Yet, in this world of symbolic goods production, the distinction between ‘creating’ and ‘adapting’ a show is crucial. This is why the mandates of company stage managers and technical designers require distinct knowledge and expertise –or ‘specific capitals’ (Mauger, 2006)– which seem to represent a belonging to differentiated professional spaces. We have shown that only the work of technical designers can be open to objective marks of recognition, while having a right of review over the work of company stage managers. Through awards, scholarships and the recognition of their work as a work of art, technical esign join the ‘body and soul’ commitment of the artistic professions in the race for recognition of their ‘greatness’ (Schotté, 2018). On the contrary, company stage managers, owing to their relationship with technique and the lack of instances of symbolic recognition, are closer to the ‘shadow workers’, those who are invisible to the public eye.

These invisibilised workers are permanently employed by the cultural institutions hosting the shows. We have shown that the interest in these positions stems from the search to make professional times stable and favour a strict boundary between personal and professional life. This is why the theatre room managers are generally technicians who are in the second part of their career (Bataille et al., 2019) and have already worked as company stage managers or technical designers. The evolution of professional aspirations, generally associated with building a relationship or rearing a child, tends to value a more routine relationship with work and the acceptance of less decision-making power regarding the final form of the work. However, these positions are not devoid of interest since they grant the possibility of ‘promotion’, i.e., being promoted to technical director of a theatre. The directive positions correspond to managerial mandates of the stage managers. They are therefore distinguished from the latter by a set of tasks that are no longer essentially technical –or even not at all, depending on the existence or not of intermediate levels in the hierarchy of the technical team–. They are more properly centered on the expertise to prepare a season and, hence, they have some power of decision and prescription over theatre managers. Because technical directors are ‘responsible’ for managing their technical team, they are paid more than the managers they direct and can be recognised for the quality of their team management. That said, they may also have to deal with work overloads requiring a certain adherence to work engagement, sometimes similar to what can be observed in freelance positions. This last point reveals the ambivalence of the modalities of work engagement or, in other words, the limitation of analysing jobs without considering the properties –in the form of dispositions and capital endowments– of the people who occupy them.

The typological approach chosen here does not allow us to take into account the plurality of ‘job cultures’ (Perrenoud and Sainsaulieu, 2018) that exist for the same positions or the effect of developments and struggles in the professional spaces investigated in these positions. The analysis of individuals’ trajectories is necessary to describe and understand their rotation between different positions. This longitudinal approach would make it possible to identify how the instances of primary and secondary socialisation ‘fit together’ (Darmon, 2006) by means of the modality of entry into the career and how the profession is learned through the various mandates the professional career. Such a dispositional analysis would be useful to outline the space of trajectories stances the positions associated with them (Bourdieu, 1992), providing the analytical tools to refine the results of this text. Therefore, while we have presented here the hierarchies that differentiate positions, we have not been able to show how they relate with the contexts in which they exist. These contexts can be divided into two sets. The first, more practical, corresponds to the influence of the ‘size’ –or more precisely, the position in the field– of the institution on the role and the set of tasks for each position it employs. The second, broader one, corresponds to the historically situated state of the field in which the research takes place: the technical professions of the performing arts in French-speaking Switzerland are affected by processes of digitisation and professionalisation that are transforming the professional cultures.

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