Placing a workers’ resistance movement against factory closure
Type de matériel :
42
In response to the invitation “to think spatially” raised in this special issue, we propose to think “placially.” Based on an emerging research stream linking place and organizational resistance, we want to understand, through the in-depth study of the revelatory case of the long-lasting struggle of ex-Fralib workers in France, how to think placially about a workers’ movement resisting a managerial decision to close a factory. Place is central in this case, as the studied resistance movement appears to be co-constructed with a renewed sense of the factory as a place of collective ownership. Our main aim, in this paper, is therefore to participate in the integration of place into the conceptual repertoire of scholars in management and organization studies (MOS) by inductively analyzing the place-based dimension of a phenomenon such as organizational resistance. The article reflects the empirical approach adopted. It first traces the theoretical foundations in our field on organizational resistance and its spatial dimension before defining the concept of place from the relational perspective adopted in this study. A methodological section then describes our textual materials (the entire blog posted online by resisting workers throughout the struggle) and our computer-assisted discourse analysis technique. Following the presentation of our findings (i.e., six classes of discourse), we discuss our two contributions: 1) the description of three pairs of emplaced organizational practices of resistance, namely, a) [nonreification/rebuilding], b) [singularization/securitization], and c) [staging/staying], and 2) additional insights into the main descriptive principles of place in MOS, which are uniqueness and delimitation.
Réseaux sociaux