| Abstract: | We have argued that differences in success in Icelandic fishing are statistically explained more by technical and ecological factors than by personal qualities of skippers, the "skipper effect." Research by other scholars has reopened the discussion of the skipper effect. We assess some of the statistical arguments, pointing out that while there may be a strong skipper effect in some societies, in other societies it is weak or negligible. We suggest that it is important to distinguish between the statistical reality of the skipper effect and its sociology and that the concept of skipper effect is of limited utility in comparative studies, since different researchers using it have not always been talking about the same phenomena and fishing success is conceived differently in different societies. The discussion of the skipper effect echoes debates on resource management and the authenticity of folk models, as well as larger debates in social theory on the relationship between the symbolic and the real and the role of history and agency. Folk theories of production, we argue, are best regarded as cultural accounts constructed in social discourse, in the context of production systems. |
