Neoliberal globalization and interdisciplinary perspectives on labour and collective action

ATZENI, M.

La Paz

Seminario; CHANGING WORLDS OF WORK: BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL; 2012

International Institute of Social History

The effects of the current world economic crisis on employment and working conditions have put to the fore, once again, the role of workers in resisting, coping or finding alternatives to a changed unfavourable context. In the field of industrial relations and the sociology of work, after decades in which non conflictual visions of work associated with HRM (Human Resource Management) seemed to be the dominant pattern of work relations, researchers’ attention is now shifting back to workers and labour. Studies of migrants’ workers, of exploitative working conditions in the developing world, of gender discrimination, of work relations in the growing service sector, of emotional labour, are all important recent additions to the field in which the role of workers is pivotal. While these new studies aim to spread more light on issues that have more powerfully emerged in a context dominated by Post-Fordism and Globalization, there has also been a revitalization of more traditional workplace studies concerned with issues of workers’ organization, collective action, trade unionism, the labour process and workers’ self-management. In the field of other overlapping disciplines, as with social anthropology, labour geography, social history and political economy, a focus on labour has been central to explain patterns of exploitation in the informal sector and of illegal immigrants in the global cities, to envisage strategies of resistance across space and societies, to link labour unrests to historical patterns of capitalist development, to re-open the crucial debate about gendered unpaid work and social reproduction and overall to redefine the concepts of work and of the working class. In a nutshell, what all these streams of research emphasise is a commitment to a more socially compromised research, one in which the activities of people at work, the struggles they engage in and the organisational and political strategies they produce assume a central status, accordingly to the position workers have in capitalism. In the current academic and social context, labour has thus regained centrality in explaining contemporary processes and issues, becoming a subject of study in itself. Against this background, in the first part of the paper the aim it is thus to give an overview of the structural changes imposed by the process of neo-liberal globalisation and what these have meant in terms of typology and quality of work. The second part will in turn consider how these changes have been addressed, particularly within the sociology of work literature, pointing to the limitations of the discipline in the conceptualisation of workers’ collective action.