Contenu du sommaire : Travail globalisé, travail singulier

Abstract The juridical and social institutions related to the composition of the salariat are and remain determinate in productive relationships in developed capitalist countries. At the same time, in these same countries, globalization is accompanied by the formation of « intermediate spaces » coming in part from the collapse of certain economic sectors and in part from more flexible policies relative to immigration. In addition, far from resulting in more rights, the expansion of capitalism favors the political domination exercised by the Communist parties in Vietnam and China. Moreover, the adoption of free-market policies in countries like the Ivory Coast has led to economic collapse leaving only a facade covering a return to a parallel, informal economy. Such diversity relativizes any attempt to generalize about this phenomenon and calls for empirical approaches. At the same time, it calls attention to different degrees of responsibility with regard to those contributing to these conditions.

Abstract Can work be understood as one, clearly relevant parameter in historical studies ? If so, it would be necessary to provide a sufficiently unambiguous definition in order to measure its role in historical processes. However, there is a decidely obscure element which enters into all uses of the word « work ». This is clearly suggested in three « significant dead ends » : the attempt to date the « birth of work » ; the search for its « impossible meaning » ; the ambiguities in the uses of the concept of the « division of labor ». These dead ends are the result of an insufficient taking into consideration of the « invisible » dimension of work that the ergonomists help us to situate. There is, consequently, an « ergonomical » approach consisting in an attempt to consistently consider the « activity of work » when using the abstract concept of work.

Abstract In the British institutional environment, which is clearly favorable to stockholder interests, the acquisition of Rover by a consortium of former wage earners owes much to the juridical work of trade unions.  The threat of damage suits and substantial settlements to be paid to workers and their representatives for absence of consultation during the crucial period discouraged investors who wished to dismantle the company.  In contrast, the project of maintaining operations allowed the company to benefit from a new source of capital. Today, however, there is a danger of the reassertion of a classic form of stockholder action in the form of business liquidation. In this context, it appears that the European model of informating and consultating salaried workers can nevertheless change the relations between stockholders and workers in British companies.

Abstract Interviews with formerly salaried workers in the Public sector who have established their own businesses reveal a great diversity of situations, whether it involves the nature of the activity (services or manufacturing), organizational forms (independant enterprise or entreprenuerial network), or even the markets concerned (local, national or international). In this phase of transition, the institutions characteristic of the market economy (previously existing work units or official unions) continue to exercise a primary influence.

Abstract In the context of a profound mutation of the forms taken by the division of labor, more and more dominated by the issues of quality and the times of innovation, knowledge is given greater priority in the definition and the preparation of the economic performance of businesses. This development can be investigated by evaluating organization levels and work processes at production sites. Particular attention should be given to the notion of « free activity » and to friction points resulting from new labor practices in light of the subordination of accompanying salary levels. In this context, the financialization of economies is seen as prefiguring changes in capitalization. On these bases, the notion of « cognitive capitalism » recapitulates the integrity of the overall system.

Abstract Has the emergence of « cognitive capitalism » solved the crisis of capitalism bedeviling economists for the past twenty years ? In the past, reflections based on foreign experiences with regard to the organization of work and production heralded the advent of a post-fordism. Have these embryonic solutions to capitalist crisis found their realization in the emegence of « cognitive capitalism » ? The historical conditions of production connected to this new productive logic centered on knowledge and information show that cognitive capitalism has its origins in economic policies aimed at avoiding the social agreements concluded in the 1950s. One of the important issues that the « cognitivists » should confront is whether capitalism has really called into question the theory of labor value and the profit motive. Equally, the fears occasioned by the emergence of cognitive capitalism concern the dehumanization of societies. Control over knowledge, science and information involves the danger of a profound separation between theory and the lived world that Edmund Husserl discussed beginning in 1936.

Abstract Ways of producing, the objects of everyday use, and the competence of workers — all these things are changing today. Everywhere, symbolic operations dominate material manipulations, and the exercise of formal technical training is taking the place of routine operations. Neither neoclassical economic theories nor regulation, it appears, can make convincing sense of these changes. The theses of cogitive capitalism, claiming that the laws governing the functioning of capitalism are also being transformed and will disappear, are based on an erroneous understanding of productive relations and a mechanical conception of economic value. The very real changes confronted by this theory are certainly one part of a complex crisis of capitalism heralding the progressive dissolution of work in different programmed collectivities rather than the resurrection of the independent worker.

Abstract Domination is often represented by « mystified » forms of power. In capitalist societies, such mystification is particularly characteristic, finding its analytical core in the realities of work itself. There is a transition between earlier images of power, based on the idea of the rationalization and control of social experience, and another type of imagery based on the idea of a universally necessary reactivity. This transition requires a critical reassessment.

Abstract Social discipline has experienced a profound crisis, that Michel Foucault has theorized. In the area of salaried work, this crisis indicates an important change in how control is achieved by modulation, reintroducing constraint and domination through « objectives and results », but it also liberates initiative. The progressive generalization of this type of control depends on the tendencies it is designed to contain. At the heart of the trend towards modulation are new developments relative to individual action that we can evoke in the expression « to work is to accomplish. » It is in a context of the social relations of service, implied by the ethic of « rendering service, that this orientation is most strongly revealed.

Abstract A feeling of obviousness, but also of malaise, is elicited by simply mentioning reproduction techniques. Analyzing the four key figures of the researcher, the doctor, the man and the woman on the basis of around a thousand medical files from the procreation assitance service of a hospital reveals how such feelings can be understood as the effect of factors such as medical power and gender domination as well as medicalization and calls to maternity. In oppositon to this structure of authority, turbulences emerge that destabilize established conceptions of parenthood and the approved limits placed on research or on procreative time-frames, and which lead to new types of questions in this field.