Academic literature on the topic 'Salariés subalternes'

Activité absente du pays au début des années 2000, la floriculture a connu en Éthiopie un essor rapide, en faisant un des premiers secteurs exportateurs du pays, employant plus de 80 000 personnes dès le début des années 2010 (Haileleul Tamiru et al., 2014). C’est aussi un des secteurs pris comme exemple par Arkebe Oqubay, dans un des premiers ouvrages sur l’économie éthiopienne (2015), pour mettre en exergue les réussites de l’État développemental éthiopien. Notre article vient en regard de la traduction en français du chapitre consacré à l’industrie floricole dans cet ouvrage. Sur la manière «d’utiliser la main d’oeuvre», l’ouvrage d’Arkebe Oqubay ne s’appesantit guère, s’inscrivant dans une littérature économique aveugle au genre (Sassen, 2003). Retracer les parcours de vie de ces salariés permet, outre de donner la parole aux travailleurs, de saisir la place de l’emploi salarié dans leur histoire individuelle et familiale comme dans la division sociale et genrée du travail. L’article se base sur une enquête ethnographique auprès d’entrepreneurs et d’associations d’entreprises dans différents secteurs dont la floriculture. Des analyses monographiques d’entreprises ont de surcroît mobilisé des entretiens auprès des salariées dont nous rendons compte ici. Les travailleurs de la floriculture appartiennent à une première génération de travailleurs du privé formel, découvrant les normes d’entreprises capitalistes interagissant sur les marchés internationaux, tout en étant dépourvue des systèmes sociaux associés au salariat en Europe. L’important turnover qui caractérise le secteur est à la fois le reflet de la nouveauté de l’engagement à durée indéterminée mais surtout de la désillusion du salaire, en particulier pour les populations rurales qui migrent en ville et doivent se loger. Le montant du salaire doit aussi être mis en regard de l’obligation de solidarité qui pèse sur les femmes : le soin aux plus âgés, le soutien aux enfants scolarisés (les leurs comme leurs frères et soeurs plus jeunes, ou d’éventuels neveux et nièces). Or la mise en oeuvre d’un système de protection sociale étatique n’a pas accompagné l’essor du travail salarié, et les femmes continuent d’assurer une aide à leur famille au sens large, d’assister les plus vulnérables de leur communauté comme de participer financièrement aux associations d’entraide locales. Les femmes sont cependant appréciées par les employeurs grâce à la «continuité du rôle et des valeurs associées aux femmes dans la sphère privée» (Bereni et al., 2008 : 131) en particulier dans un environnement paternaliste. Leur endurance comme leur souci d’autrui en fait des travailleuses «modèles». Pour autant, ces qualités ne font pas l’objet d’une reconnaissance salariale. Dès lors, le salariat dans la floriculture ne représente un marche-pied que pour les plus diplômées des travailleuses. Certaines femmes plus âgées peuvent également y trouver des postes «doux » pour une fin de carrière dans les entreprises sensibles aux demandes sociales de la communauté locale. Les plus jeunes et moins diplômées, la majorité, envisagent le salariat comme une première étape avant de migrer pour occuper des emplois domestiques et si possible ensuite monter un commerce. Les parcours des travailleuses montrent toutefois que ces projets sont rarement couronnés de succès et tendent à invisibiliser leur travail comme à les ancrer dans une place subalterne dans la division du travail.

Este artigo aborda a persistência da desigualdade de gênero no mercado de trabalho e mostra que, apesar do aumento da participação feminina na população economicamente ativa (PEA), as mulheres enfrentam desafios como salários mais baixos, dupla jornada de trabalho (remunerado e doméstico), segregação ocupacional e barreiras à ascensão profissional. A industrialização e as guerras mundiais foram momentos-chave para a inserção das mulheres no mercado de trabalho, mas essa inserção ocorreu de forma desigual, com mulheres ocupando posições de menor prestígio e remuneração. No Brasil, a Constituição de 1934 proibiu a diferença salarial por gênero, mas as mulheres ainda enfrentam disparidades significativas. A hierarquização de gênero no mercado de trabalho mantém as mulheres em posições subalternas, distantes de cargos de liderança e sujeitas a estereótipos que naturalizam sua responsabilidade pelo trabalho doméstico não remunerado. A crise econômica iniciada em 2016 exacerbou essas desigualdades, com a maior resiliência do emprego formal feminino vinculada à sua subvalorização salarial. Para superar essas desigualdades, o Artigo sugere a implementação de políticas públicas alinhadas aos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS 5), como a valorização do trabalho doméstico não remunerado, a promoção da responsabilidade compartilhada nos cuidados e a fiscalização da equidade salarial. Além disso, é necessário desconstruir estereótipos de gênero e incentivar a representatividade feminina em posições de decisão. Por fim, destaca-se que a equidade de gênero no mercado de trabalho não é apenas uma questão de justiça social, mas um imperativo para o desenvolvimento econômico sustentável e a construção de uma sociedade verdadeiramente democrática. A superação dessas desigualdades exige um compromisso coletivo de todos os setores da sociedade.

À partir d’une enquête menée dans une commune populaire de la banlieue parisienne, cet article porte sur le travail des agents intermédiaires, municipaux et associatifs, responsables des politiques locales de « santé publique ». Ni professionnels de santé, ni travailleurs sociaux, ces agents – majoritairement des femmes, « cheffes de projet » ou « chargées de mission » – se situent entre les élites administratives et les agents subalternes. Il s’agit d’étudier la façon dont elles définissent et investissent cette catégorie qu’est la santé publique, qui fait objet de luttes, dans un contexte marqué par les réformes de l’État social et la « territorialisation » de l’action publique. En analysant leurs positions et dispositions, on montre comment ces agents aux missions floues et aux compétences hybrides, sont confrontés à des conditions d’emploi et de travail précaires et instables qui jouent sur leur manière de faire de la « santé publique » à l’échelle locale. La mise en cohérence de leurs pratiques, notamment par les chiffres, permet à ces salariées à cheval entre espaces municipal et associatif de créer de l’unité et de faire face à l’incertitude des financements. Tout en les critiquant, elles s’approprient les logiques de gestion venues des sommets de l’État – celles du « nouveau » management public et de la politique de la ville – pour pouvoir maintenir leurs activités, en cohérence avec leur engagement en faveur de la « santé communautaire » et de la « participation des habitants ».

La subalterna relación de las mujeres con el trabajo se observa en las áreas segregadas del mercado laboral, como es la educación y el fenómeno de la feminización docente. Con el fin de realizar una síntesis del conocimiento científico sobre la temática, se realizó una revisión integrada en las bases de datos Scopus, WOS y SciELO, entre 1975 y 2020. Se recuperaron 43 documentos, los que fueron analizados críticamente y clasificados en estudios Históricos, Desde las ciencias sociales y Ensayos. Los resultados evidenciaron el desarrollo histórico del proceso en diversos países del globo, ligado a la formación de los sistemas educativos nacionales impulsados por los Estados, donde se resaltaron las cualidades maternales de las mujeres para el ejercicio docente y el menor salario que recibían. En el presente persiste el ideal de maestra-madre, en donde las profesoras ocupan un rol subordinado incluso en la estructura jerárquica de las escuelas, diferencias solo explicables desde el género. La evidencia internacional es concordante con lo analizado sobre el desarrollo histórico de la feminización docente en Chile, por lo que esta indagatoria perfila distintas vetas investigativas para profundizar en la temática, principalmente desde las voces de las profesoras, el principal vacío pesquisado.

Revving I’m convinced that no one actually listens to podcasts. Or maybe it’s just that no one admits it. This is partially because a podcast falls between fetish and precious. Listening to a podcast is at once intimate, someone speaking directly to you through your AirPods, and distant, since you’re likely listening by yourself. Listening to a podcast is weird enough; talking about listening to a podcast makes other people feel uncomfortable. This is why no one listens to podcasts while doing nothing else. Podcasts encourage passive listening; they compel active participation in something other than the podcast. There’s a suggested utility to listening to a podcast while doing something else—walking your cockapoo around the block, rearranging your bookshelf, prepping your meals—like you’re performing your practicality for the world. Listening to a podcast is not sufficient. When listening to a podcast, you simultaneously do something else to justify the listening. Podcasts are relatively new, as academic texts go. Yet they have been quickly taken up as technologies and artifacts of analysis (Vásquez), tools for teaching writing (Bowie), and modes of distributing scholarship (McGregor and Copeland). Podcasts are also, importantly, not simply audio versions of written essays (Detweiller), or non-visual equivalents of videos (Vásquez). Podcasts represent genres and opportunities for rhetorical choice that instructors cannot assume students already possess expected literacies for (Bourelle, Bourelle, and Jones). Paralleling much service work at institutions of higher education, women scholars and scholars of colour take on inequitable labour with podcast scholarship (Faison et al.; Shamburg). A promising new direction challenges the raced and gendered stereotypes of the genre and mode, highlighting podcasts as an anti-racist and anti-disinformation tool (Vrikki) and a way to engage reluctant students in critical race discourse (Harris). And, with so many podcasts accessible on virtually any topic imaginable, podcasts have more recently emerged as reliable secondary sources for academic research, a usage accelerated by the availability of audio versions of scholarly publications and professional academics composing podcasts to distribute and conduct their research. When we incorporate podcasts into our academic work, new connections become recognisable: connections between ourselves and other humans, ourselves and other things, and things and other things—including the connections between audio and work. Podcasts maintain their histories as a passive medium. A student can listen to a podcast for class while making dinner and keeping an eye on their family. A professional academic might more dutifully pay attention to the content of the podcast, but they’ll also attune to how the physical experience of doing research that way affects their work, their findings, and themself. When considered as academic work, as in this piece, podcasts persuade us to pay attention to methods, materiality, networks, and embodiment. Methods I listen to podcasts in the car, most often while driving to and from work. Listening to podcasts while commuting is common. Yet listening beyond content immersion or distraction, listening as part of an intentional methodology—formulating a plan, rhetorically listening, taking audio notes, annotating and building on those notes later—maybe less so. This intentional, rhetorical approach to listening while driving attunes the researcher to the embodied, physical aspects of each of these activities: research, driving, and listening. As a result, the research experience provides different kinds of opportunities for invention and reflection. My process is as follows: first, I curate a playlist based around a specific research question or agenda. This playlist will include selected episodes from podcasts that I have evaluated as reliable on a given topic. This evaluation is usually based on a combination of factors, mainly my familiarity with the podcast, the professional credentials (academic or otherwise) of the podcast hosts and guests, and recommendations from other researchers or podcasters. I also consider the structure of the podcast and the quality of the audio recording, because if I can’t hear the content, or if I must spend more time skipping ads than actively listening, then the podcast isn’t very usable for this stage of my research process. I will sometimes include single episodes of podcasts I’m less familiar with, usually because I noticed them pitched on one of my social media feeds and as a trial to see if I want to subscribe to the podcast. The playlist is arranged in what I hope will be a coherent order based on the episode descriptions. For example, sequencing episodes of Have You Heard (Berkshire and Schneider), Talking Race, Africa and People (Tiluk and Hope), and Is This Democracy (Mason and Zimmer) with the titles, "Digging Deep into the Education Wars”, “They Stole WOKE”, and “‘Cancel Culture’: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World” places these sources in conversation with each other, juxtaposes the arguments, and allows me to synthesise my own comprehensive response. Second, I listen. Ratcliffe positioned rhetorical listening as a performative “trope for interpretive invention” and a method for “facilitating cross-cultural dialogues” within composition studies (196). Listening is a thing we do in order to do something else. Under this framework, the listener/researcher approaches their task with goals of understanding and responsibility to themselves and others, which then affords opportunities to identify commonalities and differences within claims and cultural logics (204). In other words, by paying closer attention to who we are and who we’re listening to, and by listening in good faith, we can better understand what and why people are saying and doing what they are, and when we understand those better, we are better equipped for future action. Listening rhetorically can be an anchor when researching with podcasts, a modality notoriously coded and memed as white, male, and upper middle class (Locke; Morgan; “A Group of White Men Is Called a Podcast”). The technologies I use during this research afford and constrain, which leads to the third aspect: notetaking. I can’t write while driving. I tend to forget important bits. But the act of listening opens me up to things I might otherwise have missed. Sound, Detweiler shows, “affords different modes of composing, listening, thinking, and responding”. To facilitate my listening as invention, I added myself to my contacts list so that I can talk-to-text myself with questions about what I’m listening to, names and key terms that I need to look up later, and starter drafts of my own writing. While driving, I can “favourite” an episode while on the go, a marker to myself to re-listen and inspect the episode transcript. Later, at my work desk, I decipher whatever it is my phone’s text messaging app thought I said. “Anna Genesis Evolution from one species to another.” “Ben sick something at the bottom of the sea.” “Dinosaurs and dragons make each other plausible.” (Pretty sure my phone got that last one right.) There, my workflow is mediated by expected reading research technologies (word processing application, PDF viewer, boutique file organisation and annotation software), agents (desk, chair, and lighting selected by my employer to improve my productivity), and processes (coding transcripts, annotating secondary sources, writing, and revising). Materiality My methodology is an auditory variation of McNely’s visual fieldwork, which “attempts to render visible the environs, objects, sensations, and affects of inquiry” ("Lures" 216). Podcasts are expressions of physicality that bring together a confluence of networked actors, technologies, and spaces. Moreover, a podcast is itself a material artifact in the most literal sense: sound is a physical phenomenon, emitting and reverberating waves stimulating effects in our body and affecting physio-emotional responses. Inside my car, there is little impeding the sound waves emitting from the speakers and into my ears. Diffraction is minimal; the sound fills the interior of my vehicle so quickly that I can’t perceive that it is moving. I’m surrounded by the sound of the podcast, but not in the sense that is usually meant by “surround sound”. I’m also inundated by other sounds, the noises of driving that the twenty-first-century commuter has been conditioned to render ambient: the buzz of other vehicles passing me, the hum of my tyres on asphalt, the squeak of brakes and crunch of slowly turning tyres. Listening to a podcast in the car is like sitting in on a conversation that you can’t participate in. Slate magazine’s sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen” plays with this expectation, taking its name for the clichéd valediction that callers to local sports radio shows would say to indicate that they are done asking their question, signifying to the host that it’s their turn again. It’s a shibboleth through which the caller acknowledges and performs the participatory role of the listener as an actor within the network of the show. McNely writes that when he walks, “there are sounds in me, around me, passing through me. When I walk, I feel wind, mist, sleet. When I walk, I feel bass, treble, empathy. When I walk, I feel arguments, metaphors, dialogues—in my gut, in my chest” (Engaging 184). His attunement to all of these elicits physical sensations and emotional responses, and the sounds of the podcast cause similar responses for me. I jostle in my seat. I tense up, grip the steering wheel, and grind my teeth. I sigh, guffaw, roll my eyes, and yell. I pause—both my movement and the podcast app—to let a potential response roll about in my head. I’m in the car, but podcasts attempt to place me somewhere else through ambient worldbuilding: the clinking of cups and spoons to let me know the conversation is taking place in a coffee shop, the chirps of frogs and bugs to make me feel like I’m with the guest interviewee at the Amazonian research site, the clamour of a teacher calling their third-grade class to attention as a lead in for a discussion of public school funding. The arrangement and design of the podcast takes the listener to the world within the podcast, and it reminds me how the podcast, and myself, my car, and the listening are connected to everything else. Networks I am employed at an institution with a “distributed campus”, with multiple sites spread across the local region and online, without an officially designated central campus. Faculty and students attend these different places based on appointment, proximity, and preference. I teach classes in person on two of the campuses, sometimes at both simultaneously connected via videoconference. So where is the location of my class? It’s the physical campuses, certainly. It’s also the online space where the class meets, the locations where users join from (home, a dorm room, their workplace, etc.), and the Internet connecting those people and spaces. The class is transnational, as many of our students live in the neighbouring country. The class is also in between and in transit, with students using the shuttle bus Wi-Fi to complete work or join meetings. As with the research methodology detailed above, the class is moving between the static places, too, as the instructor and students alike travel to teach or attend class or book it home to join via videoconference in time. The institution’s networks enact Detweiller’s characterisation of podcasts as enacting both rhetorical distribution and circulation. Taken together, “distribution is not a strictly one-to-many phenomenon”. Yes, it’s “a conception of rhetoric that challenges but does not erase the role of human agency in rhetorical causes and effects”, but it’s also the physical networks and “supply chains” that move things. In both cases, the decentralisation draws attention away from individual nodes and to the network and the interconnections between various actors. Consider the routes the podcast takes. I start the episode as I leave my driveway. By the time I reach the highway, the podcast has made it through its preamble and first ad read. The episode travels with me in the car along my route, the sound of a single word literally takes up physical space on the highway. Ideas stretch for miles. I make the entire trip in a single episode. I then assign that episode to my students, who take the podcast with them. It moves at different speeds but also at the same speed (unless a particular listener sets their playback at a faster pace). In some ways, it’s the same sound, yet in other ways—time, space, distribution, audience—the same episode makes a different sound. Meanwhile, the podcast hosts remain in their recording booth, simultaneously locked into and moving through spacetime. Further, by analysing the various texts surrounding my listening to podcasts, we can see a multimodal genre ecology of signs, roadways, mapped and unmapped routes, turn-by-turn navigation apps, as well as other markers of location and direction, like billboards, water towers in the distance, the setting sun, and that one tree in a field that doesn’t belong there but lets me know I’ve passed the midpoint of my commute. Visual cues are perhaps more easily felt, but Rickert reminds us that “we consciously and unconsciously depend on sound to orient, situate, and wed ourselves to the places we inhabit” (152). The three-note dinging of a railroad crossing halts drivers even without visual confirmation of an oncoming train. The brutal springtime crosswind announces its presence on my passenger window, giving me a split second to steady the wheel. The lowering pitch of the pavement as I take the exit towards my house. The network of audio extends beyond the situations of the researcher and draws attention to what Barad referred to as “entangled material agencies” resulting in “networks or assemblages of humans and nonhumans” (1118, 1131). The network of my podcast listening accounts for the mobile device that we use to access content, the digital networks that I download episodes over, as well as the physical infrastructures that enable those networks, the hosting services and recording technologies and funding mechanisms used by the podcasters, the distribution of campuses, the roads I travel on, the tonnage of steel and plastic that I manipulate while researching, and that’s even before we get to everything else that impacts on my listening, like weather, traffic, the pathways all these material items took to get where they are, the head cold impacting on my hearing, my personal history of hearing different sounds, and on and on. Embodiment I listen to podcasts in the car while commuting to work. A more accurate way of putting that would be to say that commuting is work, which I mean twice over. First, a commute is likely a requisite component of your job. This is not to assign full culpability to one actor or another; the length of your commute likely owes to various factors—availability of affordable housing, proximity of worksite relative to your home, competing duties of family care, etc.—but a commute is and should be considered part of the work. Even if you’re not getting paid for it, even if the neoliberal economic system that overarches your life has convinced you that you are actively choosing to commute as part of the mutually and equally entered-into contract with your employer, you’re on the clock when commuting because you’re doing that action because of the work. If your response to this is, “then what about people who work from home? Should their personal devices and monthly Internet costs be considered work expenses? Or what about the time it takes to get up early to put makeup on or prepare lunches for their kids? Does all that count as work?” Yes. Yes, it does. The farmer’s day doesn’t start when they milk the cow, it starts as soon as they wake up. It starts before then, even. We are entangled with our work selves. Lately, I’ve begun logging these listening commutes on my weekly timesheet. It’s not an official record: salaried employees at my institution are not required to keep track of their work hours. Instead, it’s a routine and technical document I developed to help me get things done, an artifact of procedural rhetoric and the broader genre ecology of my work. Second, commuting is a physical act. It is work. We walk to bus and train stops and stand around waiting. We power our bicycles. We drive our vehicles, manoeuvring through streets and turns and other drivers. The deleterious effects of sitting down for prolonged periods for work, including while commuting, are well documented (Ding et al.). Driving itself is an act that places the human—the driver, passengers, and pedestrians—in greater physical danger than flying, or riding a train, or swimming with sharks. Research in this way presents a different kind of epistemic risk. Arriving So, the question I’m left to codify is what does this commuting audio research methodology offer for researchers that other, more traditional approaches, might not? Rickert analysed an electric car as “inherently suasive”, as it “participates in the conflicted discourses about that built environment and showcases some fundamental preconceptions rooted into our everyday ways of being together” (263). I’m alone in the car, but every sound reminds me of how I am connected to someone or something else. Of course, neither commuting nor listening to podcasts are exclusively solo endeavours: people carpool to work, and fans attend live recordings of their favourite shows. Perhaps listening while driving causes me to pay closer attention to what’s being said, the way you seem to learn the words of a song better when listening and singing along in the car. There are different kinds of distractions when driving versus sitting at one’s desk to read or listen (although it’s fair to say that the podcast itself is the distraction from what I should be paying the most attention to when driving). Anyone who has taken a long road trip alone can tell you about the opportunities it provides to sit with one’s thoughts, to spend uninterrupted time and miles turning over an idea in your mind, to reflect at length on a single topic, to rant to the noise of the road. Maybe that’s what a commuting podcast methodology affords: isolated moments surrounded by sound, away from the overtly audio, and connected to the rest of the world. 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Cette thèse examine le travail de vente dans une multinationale de la mode éphémère (fast fashion) en France et au Chili, à travers une problématique qui se déploie en deux axes. D’une part, elle interroge le processus de déqualification, comparable à celui induit par l’organisation scientifique du travail dans l’industrie, qui toucherait désormais les métiers de la vente. Le récit de la déqualification dans ces derniers est devenu presque canonique : l’art de vendre, tel qu’il était pratiqué dans les grands magasins du XIXe siècle, avec une courtoisie irréprochable et une connaissance approfondie des produits, aurait progressivement laissé place à des tâches logistiques dans des espaces en libre-service, marquées par des activités prescrites, routinières et simplifiées, où le service client se résumerait à une simple mise en relation entre la marchandise et la clientèle. Cette approche repose sur l’idée que la qualification d’un travail découle essentiellement de la connaissance et de l’autonomie du travailleur, ce qui conduit à considérer de nombreux métiers contemporains comme « non qualifiés », en oubliant que tout travail, même le plus simple et routinier, requiert certaines habiletés. D’autre part, cette thèse étudie la manière dont les contextes sociohistoriques façonnent un même type de travail et le rapport que les individus des sociétés différentes entretiennent avec celui-ci, grâce aux conditions de comparabilité qu’assure l’implantation globale d’une multinationale. S’inspirant de l’histoire croisée, elle compare le travail de vente dans une entreprise dans deux pays aux forts contrastes comme le Chili et la France. Ces contrastes tiennent notamment à la place différenciée du travail dans la manière de faire société qui s’exprime aussi bien dans les cadres institutionnels des pays que dans la manière dont les personnes conçoivent leur activité productive. Fondée sur deux enquêtes ethnographiques menées au sein de la même multinationale au Chili et en France, la thèse répond à cette double problématique en introduisant la notion de « qualités professionnelles des salariés ». Cette notion consiste en une méta-catégorie permettant à la fois de dépasser l’approche de la déqualification et d’analyser comment les attributs des travailleurs sont mis à profit par l’entreprise. À la croisée de la sociologie des parcours de vie et de l’activité, ainsi que de la Labor Process Theory, la thèse étudie d’abord la mise en marché des qualités professionnelles des salariés (première partie), pour examiner ensuite les modalités selon lesquelles celles-ci sont déployées dans le processus de travail de vente (deuxième partie), et enfin s’intéresser à leur lien avec la mobilité professionnelle et sociale des salariés (troisième partie)
This thesis examines sales work in a multinational fast fashion company in France and Chile, addressing a research question structured around two main axes.On one hand, it investigates the process of deskilling, akin to that induced by the scientific organization of industrial work, which now appears to affect sales professions. The prevailing narrative of deskilling in this field has become almost canonical: the art of selling, once exemplified in 19th-century department stores—where impeccable courtesy and in-depth product knowledge were essential—has allegedly given way to logistical tasks in self-service spaces. These tasks are characterized by prescribed, routine, and simplified activities, where customer service is reduced to little more than connecting merchandise with customers. This perspective assumes that the skill inherent in work primarily stems from workers' knowledge and autonomy, leading to the classification of many contemporary jobs as “unskilled” while overlooking the fact that even the most repetitive and standardized work requires specific competencies.On the other hand, this thesis explores how socio-historical contexts shape the same type of work and how individuals from different societies relate to it. The global presence of a multinational corporation provides the necessary comparability conditions to examine these variations. Drawing inspiration from the histoire croisée approach, this study compares sales work in a company operating in two contrasting countries—Chile and France. These contrasts arise notably from the differing roles of work in shaping societal structures, as reflected in both the institutional frameworks of these nations and individuals’ perceptions of their professional activities.Based on two ethnographic studies conducted within the same multinational corporation in Chile and France, this thesis addresses its dual research question by introducing the concept of “professional qualities of employees.” This concept serves as a meta-category that not only transcends the deskilling framework but also examines how workers’ attributes are leveraged by the company. Situated at the intersection of the sociology of life-course and work activity, as well as Labor Process Theory, the thesis first analyzes the marketing of employees’ professional qualities (Part One), then explores the ways these qualities are deployed in the sales labor process (Part Two) and finally examines their connection to employees’ professional and social mobility (Part Three)

Rendre compte de mon travail Gayatri Spivak reprenant les questions soulevées par Etienne Balibar, souligne que la subalternité n’est pas un concept généralisable sans condition, que la liberté, s’il y en a, ne peut s’exercer qu’en prenant en compte les conditions (notamment de genre et de langues) qui lui sont inhérentes. Elle prend l’exemple d’un scandale advenu dans sa famille, dont elle fait le récit. La tante de sa mère, une jeune femme de 17 ans qui militait dans un groupe armé contre le régime impérial et se suicida après un attentat manqué. Or, elle avait attendu ses menstruations pour se tuer afin de signifier que la cause de son geste n’était pas la culpabilité d’une grossesse illicite (comme c’était souvent le cas) mais un geste de résistance. Gayatri insiste sur le fait que, malgré ce signe, la subalterne ne parvint pas à faire parler son corps : deux générations plus tard, on continue à affirmer qu’il s’agissait du suicide d’une fautive et non d’une révolutionnaire. En passant du constat « Les subalternes ne peuvent pas parler » à l’interrogation « Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ? », Gayatri pointe la question fondamentale de la prise de parole. Quant au « Postcolonial », terme qu’elle emploie au sens d’une description historique, Spivak signale que là où la situation coloniale a pris fin, il y a un retour aux structures anciennes justifiant le pouvoir. En Inde, il s’agit du système de castes. En Afrique, des interférences du colonialisme. D’où l’importance d’introduire, ce qu’elle fait dans son livre A Critique of Postcolonial Reason , l’apport critique du « native informant », notion empruntée à l’anthropologie. L’importance, aussi, de recadrer ce que la Littérature Comparée nomme « l’étranger », en rappelant qu’il y a un lieu où l’étranger n’est pas un étranger, ce en quoi il fait partie de la majorité génocidaire. La tâche de la Littérature Comparée est d’enseigner à traquer la réduction de toute relation à de l’universalisable, et cela en étudiant les langues. On notera, en particulier, qu’il existe une hiérarchie entre les groupes de subalternes. Quant à l’expression « Professeur payée » par laquelle elle se présente, Gayatri Spivak s’en explique. Être salariée détermine une forme de responsabilité. Aux États-Unis, où elle est très bien payée, elle s’acquitte de ses impôts dont plus de la moitié va au budget de la défense. Sa responsabilité est différente lorsqu’elle se trouve dans les écoles de son pays, où elle s’adresse à des enfants d’une pauvreté extrême, des enfants qui un jour voteront et auxquels elle enseigne la profonde contradiction qu’il y a entre égalité et liberté, liberté et égalité. « Étant issue de la caste Hindu, je suis votre ennemie. Même si je suis bonne et si mes parents ont été bons, cette attitude sur deux générations n’efface pas des milliers d’années d’oppression. Je paie une dette ancestrale. » Enfin, elle en revient au concept de viol et de violation dont elle fait usage aussi bien comme symptomatique de l’humain que comme révélateur des violences perpétrées par la traduction des langues subalternes. Prenant l’exemple de l’Afrique, où prévaut le multilinguisme permettant l’existence concomitante d’un grand nombre de langues dialectales, langues qui échappent au modèle de codification occidental, Gayatri souligne le phénomène de créolisation qui en résulte. Il faut penser un mode nouveau de « linguisticité » ; les vieux modèles des langues impérialistes ne fonctionnent plus. L’Afrique peut offrir un modèle de traductibilité qui ne fera plus l’économie de la créolisation de toutes les langues.