Factory “Homers”: Understanding a Highly Elusive, Marginal, and Illegal Practice1

A “homer” is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during workhours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds homers. Along with this evidence, interviews conducted mostly with retirees from a French aeronautics plant are used to show that this silence is not linked just to the marginal and illegal quality of these artifacts. Homers shed light on a high degree of “complicity” between employees regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Since the factory's institutional framework has little room for this complicity, the silence surrounding homers is a sign probably of an inability to talk about them rather than of their marginality or illegality.