This article sheds light on how a group of workers manage to create an enduring collective resistance, in an uncongenial context of neoliberal management pushing for compliant behaviors. Research on resistance has given scant attention to the concrete conditions through which collective resisting efforts can be sustained, despite adverse contexts. We highlight the process through which everyday collective resistance produces substantial effects and becomes viewed by management and workers as an integral part of an organization’s power relations. We particularly illuminate how practices that mutually constitute belongingness and insubordination continuously reinforce collective resistance to make it the very texture of workers’ lives. We therefore analyze everyday resistance as a way of life, through which workers aim to simultaneously contest managerial authority and protect their own social boundaries in a neoliberal context. Thereby, we offer a way to reconcile recognition and post-recognition politics in a dialogue envisaging the ‘efficacy’ of resistance in a new light.
La réforme du code du travail souhaite étendre la modalité de négociation collective à l’ensemble des entreprises et à celles de petite taille en particulier. L’objectif est double : améliorer la compétitivité des entreprises dans le contexte de concurrence mondiale et favoriser le progrès social en associant les salariés à la définition des règles du travail et de l’emploi. Or, la littérature sur la négociation collective indique une articulation entre négociation et conflit qui suppose un conflit fondamental entre l’employeur et ses salariés. Cet article propose, au travers du cas d’une PME industrielle, d’étudier l’articulation entre conflit et négociation, à la fois dans la logique pragmatique de l’organisation productive et dans la logique antagoniste des rapports sociaux entre dominants et dominés.
This paper examines the tensions, struggles, and opportunities of doing ethnographies ‘at-home’. For the purpose of his PhD dissertation, the author returned to the city where he grew up, one of the biggest ports in France, with a strong maritime and industrial history. In this paper, the researcher reflexively recounts the social and personal springs of this longitudinal fieldwork among childhood friends and relatives in the working-class background from where he originates. While shedding light on the identity pressures that drove him to/through this research process, the author also addresses the profound emotional component of such investigation, as well as the difficulties of writing about it. Reflecting upon this singular experience, the paper eventually stresses how the researcher’s peculiar position influenced his methodological postures, determined the direction of his research questions and also how it ultimately provided robust original data and results, hereby asserting the strength of fieldwork conducted close to home for the production of critical and scientific social knowledge.
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