Organizational daily practices studied in a working-class environment – PORQUE

Once an important center of the textile industry, Roubaix suffered the full brunt of deindustrialization in the 1970s and, more recently, the economic and financial crisis that began in 2007. Today the city and surrounding area is marked by poverty and the disappearance of standard employment relations.
The goal of this research project is to analyze the impact of these processes on working and lower classes. Focusing on practices of daily life, we seek to understand how these classes are being reconstituted – how they live, organize themselves, resist – , through an approach that draws from the field of sociology of work, sociology of family, sociology of education and urban sociology. Grounded in thorough socio-historical scholarship (archival work, documentary and statistical analysis, and a research seminar on Roubaix), this research project comprises several ethnographic studies in the areas of work, family, and education, whose complementarity should enable a general and systemic analysis.
Firmly committed to a comparative perspective, we envision an ambitious program of scientific exchanges with research teams conducting similar projects in Argentina and Spain. Our goal will be to identify themes and “variational principles” common to the disappearance of standard employment relations and the ways in which the working and lower classes confront this problem.