Carnets de Géographes (Dec 2023)
Le port, un « monde à part ». Enquêter sur les travailleurs et travailleuses portuaires dans un monde du travail fermé (Le Havre et Felixstowe)
Abstract
Abstract. Qualitative research on work most often focus on the scale of an occupation or a company. This paper proposes a change of scale, by retaining the conceptual category of "(a) world of work", i.e. a group of professions interacting in a specific territory. It develops the case of the world of port labour, based on two ethnography-inspired field surveys carried out in the port cities of Felixstowe and Le Havre. Straightaway, the step of the access to fieldwork helps identify empirically some common features of the world of port labour: a closed field context, partly invisible when seen from the port city. To what extent can qualitative research make workers and port work more visible? The first part of the paper returns to the delimitation of the world of port labour, in a constructivist approach based on the back-and-forth between the two port cities. Far from being limited to the dockworkers and their union, this world corresponds to an unequal system of central and peripheral occupations within the port city. Based on the difficulties faced by the author to access to the field, the second part seeks to objectify the 'closed field context', both spatially and socially. The closed field context strongly constrains ethnographic opportunities: the third part raises the question of tactical adaptations to see and collect narratives about port labour: survey by interviews, collection of first-hand documents, and observation.
