Drinking as affective labour: A discussion of Australian men working in hospitality and corporate workplaces.

In the public imaginary, drinking is often thought of as a behaviour separate from individuals' formal labour practices, but studies increasingly highlight the complex ways alcohol is entwined with work. Building on recent conceptual developments in the sociological fields of youth, health and work, we illustrate how drinking can be productively understood as 'affective labour', and thus itself a form of work that generates valuable embodied states and atmospheres. To do so, we draw on data from six focus groups with men coworkers from three hospitality workplaces and three corporate workplaces in Victoria. For the corporate groups, work-related drinking was tied to an unravelling of certain professional affects and facilitated harmonious and productive workplace relationships, but also introduced risks ranging from embarrassment to sexual harassment. For hospitality workers, drinking was more deeply enmeshed in workplace relationships and, for one group, drinking on-shift was positively framed as creating an affect and atmosphere that appealed to clientele, despite taking a toll on workers' wellbeing. In both settings not drinking risked limiting one's ability to get on colleagues' affective 'level'. Our data deepens current understandings of how drinking cultures may be woven through occupational settings, produce value for organisations and introduce unique potential for exclusion.

Understanding autonomy and relationality in men's lives.

Masculinities scholarship tends toward describing autonomy as bound up with hegemonic masculine ideals such as independence, atomization, and self-sufficiency, without fully delving into the concept of autonomy. This article offers a more in-depth conceptual treatment of autonomy, compared to its more simplified rendering in the literature on the dominant relational conceptualizations of masculinities. In doing so, we follow recent calls to avoid categorizing men according to typologies of masculinity, drawing instead on feminist theorizations of masculine autonomy and relationality to explore how both manifest in men's lives. We draw on a study of men's drinking practices, with our data coming from focus groups with 101 men in metropolitan and regional/rural Victoria, Australia; but the issues we attend to have relevance, and can be an impetus, for further scholarly thinking about autonomy in men's lives well beyond drinking practices, and in other similar industrialized nations. We explore how masculine autonomy remains an influential and harmful discourse, often impeding possibilities for men's greater intimacy, connection and care and reproducing gendered hierarchies. However, we simultaneously highlight how men are inescapably relationally situated, exposing masculine autonomy as a discursive ideal of valorized forms of masculinity rather than an achievable state in practice. We argue that acknowledging how men are relationally embedded and interdependent in practice offers potential avenues for further fostering men's care, intimacy and relationality, and might work toward ameliorating gendered inequalities that see care work and the work of sustaining relational networks disproportionately falling to women and marginalized men.