The eighth session of the seminar “(de)making industry” will be held on February 7, 2022 from 2:30 to 4:30 pm at the Bâtiment EHESS-Condorcet, Salle 25-A, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers.
Industry and Digital (4/5) – Union movement and ecological critique of digital industries in Silicon Valley, Christophe Lécuyer, (SGFI, Sorbonne University).
Seminar description:
The proliferation of technologies – especially information technologies – has often been heralded as the realizing power that would definitively tip contemporary societies into a post-industrial era: transformations of labor (end of the working class and slow death of wage labor in Western countries), centrality of innovation, rise of an economy of services and immaterial goods, individualization of needs and goods.
However, rather than an exit from an industrial paradigm, some sociologists propose to speak of hyperindustrialization to characterize the mutations of contemporary societies (Veltz 2017, Musso 2018). Starting from the observation that industry is not declining but, on the contrary, thriving and transforming, authors seek to disenclave industry as an object and category of analysis and to break the linearity implicit in post-industrial analyses (Touraine 1967, Rifkin 2000, Moulier-Boutang 2007).
This seminar proposes to study the mutations of the forms of industry, through three main questions: which territories are produced by the displacement and reconfiguration of industrial activities? How does the integration of information technologies redefine the boundaries of working-class labor? What, in these reconfigurations, resists the processes of industrialization?
Program pdf version