La emergencia de nuevos modelos productivos: La participación de los trabajadores y la fabricación del consentimiento en la producción

Abstract

Over the past few years, the main debate in the social study of work relations has centered on the possible emergence of new industrial models, new forms of organization in the workplace that encourage workers' involvement in their companies. The author, who relies on fieldwork done among machine-tool manufacturers in the Basque Country, argues that these new industrial models turn out not only goods and services, but also a new kind of worker that must behave in the way that employers define. The factory has thus become a cultural laboratory, where employees reconstruct their social identities through collective strategies of cooperation or conflict vis-á-vis the management's policies; in the process, these workers define themselves as different from, and alternative to, both engineers and executives.