Abstract

SZLECHTER, Diego. Souls on Sale: Notes for a Theoretical Debate about White Collar work  in Multinacional Enterprises. Trab. soc. [online]. 2011, n.16, pp.179-207. ISSN 1514-6871.

Second World War caused the disappearing of older life styles in western world. One of the reasons of this phenomen relies on drastic changes in the occupational structure in western world, especially in the US, which result in a new middle class of managers that emerged from colleges who became big bosses in corporate America. Those salaried managers questioned the idea of a homogeneous salaried class in the Marxist way due to the expansion of players such as bureaucrats, professionals, who doesn´t deplete in a dualist or dichotomist explanation of society. Labor studies about managers are framed into the debates around the transition from fordism to posfordism or from mass production to lean production. These discussions used to relegate to a secondary roll the issue of the transformations in the identity and subjectivity at work. We stress in this article that work engage a fundamental roll in the configuration of identity. This postulation opposes to most optimistic forecasts of the so called posfordism, which regard the world outside work as one that outweighs world of labor. The intention of this article is to inquire, on one side, the way Social Sciences in general and the debates around Middle Classes, Sociology of Work and Organizational Sociology in particular, the issue of managerial work and on the other side, which contributions make bibliography in this field in order to clear up what kind of subjectivity corporations promote to their middle management and what implications carry on their everyday work. Therefore, we introduce 3 fundamental debates who have plowed the road to try to elucidate this issue: the debate about qualification and competences, the labor culture perspective and human capital theory.

Keywords : Management work; Human capital; Competences; Labor culture.

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