Self-management in the re-invention of norms: practices and subjectivity at work

Abstract

The factory floor of metallurgy is not a tailor-made environment nor it standardizes gestures and labor procedures. It is made by workers whose daily performance consists, simultaneously, in the self-management. Although the factory has official strict operational norms for safety and quality, workers manage all these elements according to their psychological and physical needs, and choices of value. The approach presented in this article views workers as subjects, because it does not restrict individuals to task-makers, but rather as people that can interfere with guidelines, adjusting them to their needs. This attitude of workers, who may follow orders in a slightly different way, has significant results in their subjectivity since they try to conciliate their personal and cultural choices with the demands and production orders. The present analysis is based on the ergological perspective and on empirical findings taken from interviews conducted with workers from five metallurgies in the city of São Paulo. Both, the theoretical and empiric side, commune efforts to show the activities of shop floor on a perspective that is distant from that of pure performance by operators with operations standardized exogenously. These activities are, in fact, re-formulated, sometimes they are even reinvented, and, consequently, they are used by workers/subjects who re-normalize their environment and, whenever possible, they make their work actions singular according to their own corporal, subjective, appreciated and symbolic uses.