Mexique : ouverture et limites de la sociologie du travail

Abstract

In Mexico, the sociology of work was born out of a demand for critical thinking and a desire to link economic and productive restructuring processes to the transformation of work. The institutionalisation of the discipline developed against a backdrop of globalisation. regional economic integration (North American Free Trade Agreement) and hegemonic neoliberal thinking. The end result was that the research agenda, in its early days, focused on analysis of the productive reorganisation processes typifying certain strategic sectors; the impact of market liberalisation on collective bargaining (including in state-owned enterprises); and maquiladora industry characteristics. It remains that the robustness attributed to the sociology of work in Mexico would run up against its limits in interpretations of the plurality of activities and working experiences that exist outside of the framework of salaried work. On one hand, this tests the rigidity of a dichotomous thinking where employment and work is interpreted according to a formal-informal, classic-non-classic, typical-atypical scheme. On the other, it tests the discipline’s willingness to address labour heterogeneity and all the different economies found within a national business environment. In an attempt to identify the discipline’s strengths and limits, the article reviews the main themes typifying work analyses since the 1980s, while accounting for the discipline’s geographic and thematic expansion and incorporation of new objects of research and areas of investigation. Lastly, it also speaks to the conceptual challenges that arise when dealing with the heterogeneous reality of work - something that requires, in turn, a certain openness to other disciplinary approaches.

Keywords

• Sociology of work
• Mexico
• precarity
• productive model
• neoliberalism
• flexibility