Effort and Collective Creation: Experience in Air Traffic Control Work

Abstract

How can work also represent a perspective of creation? We start from the hypothesis that air traffic controllers make an effort to cope with very hard work and to develop improvement processes when carrying out the activity, which can be considered creation. Our objective is to analyze the working conditions of air traffic controllers starting from the experience of the controller. There is effort, which is above all both cognitive and physical, of an activity developed with mental representations that cannot always be analyzed by simple observation. This is a reflection based on studies carried out with air traffic controllers since 1997 in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.