We will have the great pleasure of welcoming Sanjana Goreeba. Sanjana is an PhD student at emlyon. She’ll be giving a talk entitled:
« Estranged in their Homeland: Industrial Patriotism, Societal Control and the “Disinherited” Workers on the Made in France Shopfloor »
Recent studies on control at work have focused on new organizations such as the platform economy, coworking, or leaderless organizations, considering something new would have yet to emerge in more traditional settings such as the shopfloor. However, over the last decades, there has been a significant trend in what remained of the industrial activities in Western countries: the praise of economic patriotism. Through an ethnography of a French Company’s shopfloor, this paper examines the control and alienation dynamic induced by corporate speeches drawing on this wave. It shows how control expands in these workshops as society at large becomes concerned with and engaged in the success of “Made in France” products. Workers, considered part of the heritage that the company puts forward, are consequently under pressure to achieve perfection while receiving no premium for either their extra efforts or the heritage (presumed French know-how) they maintain.