IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

A troubled legacy. Changing strategies of social transmission and
patterns of identity production among industrial workers
Bruno Monteiro 1
1 Sociologist. MA student (Sociology) in the Faculty of Humanities.
This paper`s aim to explore how the conjugation between structural economic and social
transformations and the rearrangement of power relations in the shopfloor conducted to
mutations in the strategies of identity production and transmission among different
generations of working class agents.
The author draws on a 4-months-long period working as a disqualified worker in a
furniture factory and several long interviews to illustrate how this becomes an afflicted
process and how new modalities to express the shopfloor everyday experience emerge.
Worker`s collective memory is strongly supported in processes of oral and kinetic
production, actualization and transmission that operates in the full spectre of working class
social structuration places (like the shopfloor). Today, these institution rites happen to be
alongside with alternative influences issued from school and mass culture. The youth
avatars, as the consumerism and the urbanified references, are replacing the traditional
workshop and virile culture, the dominant ethical behaviour (like austerity or oral-based
mutual confidence) and the patterns of social relations with enterprise owners. The
continuity of certain traits goes along with a different array of resistance tactics and
personal expression in work and new arrangements of practices and representations about
what must be work involvement. Notwithstanding being symbolically refused, worker`s
social condition persists objectively re(as)sumed by the youth. Moreover, apparently
emancipating acquisitions have bring, together with the maintenance of established
patterns of mobilization to work (like bulimic behaviour in work searching for extra rent,
resignation in the face of authoritarian hierarchies, perpetuation of informal economy),
new dependencies and stronger subjections (like the progressive endebtement).
Employment market transformations, along with new trends in hiring practices (expressing
a bigger instability in contracts and in the economic market, which reflects also in higher
unemployment rates), brings changes in the specific configurations of the household
economy and, especially, in the familiar strategies of social reproduction.
Particularly, the progressive technical depreciation of the older segments of the working
force means also the refusal of the cultural definitions and interpretations that they carry
with. The paulatine usury of workers minds and bodies, the obsolescence of that artisanal
knowledge made of embodied schemes of doing and seeing the work and, finally, the
disappearance of autonomy in work procedures, are gradually giving form to feelings of
detachment among industrial worker. Thus promoting a sense of minority, this contributes
to fossilize this category of social agents and induces the indignity (or impossibility) of
social reproduction.
In short, all this shape new trends in the collective and individual strategies activated to
face a changing socio-economic environment and contributes to the complexification of
the objective and symbolic transmission of the working class condition and identity.
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