Coping with precarisation. Employees' responses to flexiblity and control in Milanese large scale retailing

Abstract

This dissertation deals with retail employees' everyday experiences of precarisation, flexibilisation and labour control. Based on labour process theory and critical psychology, it asks for how workers cope with emerging conflicts, how the construction of both work place consent and conflict capacities passes through workers' own common sense, and how they could increase their disposal over working and living conditions. Empirical analysis relies on qualitative, problem-centred interviews. It points to experiences of forced availability and management's fake participation offers as central, interlinked conflict fields. For all four coping patterns of happy integration, border drawing, personal strike and conflictive negotiation, practices of adaptation and appropriation result as closely connected and reflected in contradictory common sense constructions. Moreover, employees' conflict capacities remain limited due to lacking collective resources and capacities. Enhancing agency potentials in face of precarisation thus requires a reconstruction of collective experiences and strategies as well as a critical analysis of common sense.