Assembling Success: Desire, Worker Mobility, and Value Creation in Finnish Ice Hockey

Abstract

Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theories, this paper offers an ethnography of work focused on a professional ice hockey team in Finland, where hockey is the leading sport in terms of popularity and economic investment. It is an analysis of the everyday investments in developing individual players’ skills and in building teams capable of high levels of cooperation under conditions of unpredictability. By looking at team formation as an emergent set of practices, materialities, discourses, and affects, we are better able to account for how corporations of this kind mitigate the deterritorializing effects of player mobility through processes of reterritorialization. As such, the analysis offers insights into modalities of value creation in a corporate model that relies not only on the constant improvement of worker performance in ways that can be easily measured but also on intangible facets of worker collaboration that manifest as collective desire.