Crises — Work, Employment and Income in Societies of the South – CRITERES

The financial crisis in September 2008 has put the issue of employment back in the headlines, reviving debate on the application of governmental employment policies. The 7 researchers involved in the project presented here – anthropologists, sociologists, and an economist, working in the IRD, the CNRS, and in university research – are all specialists of “the South”, observing on a variety of terrains mismatches between policy, social constraints and the aspirations of the people policy is supposed to serve. Taking such observations as our starting point, we have set ourselves the following objectives:
- analysis of the role of conceptions of work in the functioning of the labour market
- critical examination of the universal categories (labour, employment, unemployment, under-employment, proper employment, etc.) used in expert discourse on the job market.

We propose to start out with a study of the concrete situations conventionally characterised as “under-employment” and “unemployment”: migrant women working as domestics, “poor” women working in Argentina in emergency job programmes, unskilled workers left workless between jobs in India and in Algeria, work-seekers handled in Morocco by the Government and in China by private human-resource fairs.

Local interpretations of work and employment that have been revealed by field work will enable us to assess tensions and discrepancies between views of work and ways in which the relation to jobs is qualified when targets are set for employment policies, and when expertise and scientific disciplines are oriented. Particular attention will be paid to differential conceptions of the lack – more or less durable – of employment in countries where, unlike those of the North, the unemployed do not enjoy a status that is linked to social benefits and clearly crystallised in subjective awareness.

By importing into our specific fields the crucial questions raised by the sociology of work in Western economies, we hope to contribute to the development of comparative study, in a context in which the North / South division is losing its pertinence to current configurations of labour. The ongoing recession that is the context of our project is used as an instrument of analysis.

The global processes designated as a “world crisis” are pervaded by a multiplicity of logics and suffused with concrete experiences; the fact that jobs are becoming rare does not efface the plurality of imaginary representations that structure people’s relation to work.