Carnets de Géographes (Dec 2023)
Une géographie du travail en pointillé ? Quelques points de repère historiques sur les approches du travail et des travailleurs et travailleuses en France
Abstract
This contribution offers a few pointers to the work of French (if not Francophone) geographers who have focused explicitly and centrally on the question of work. It is easy to see that the geography of labour has never been seen as a clearly identified research field. That said, work has been studied from time to time by a number of researchers who have often identified themselves under the collective label of “social geographers”: from the symbolic turning point represented by Renée Rochefort's thesis (1961) to the collective affirmation of "social geography" in the early 1980s around Armand Frémont and Robert Hérin, via a number of essays by Pierre George, Claude Raffestin and Joël Pailhé. Work is analyzed as a productive activity in the broadest sense of the term, particularly in relation to nature, and as a producer of landscapes; and as a social relationship of exploitation and domination, at stake in struggles involving workers as a collective actor or even a social movement, union and political force; not forgetting work as the product of a technical and social division, that gives rise to a diversity of spatially differentiated socio-professional categories or groups at all scales.
