Management, subjectivity and political culture: the new spirit of capitalism 20 years after the privatization of ENTEL

Abstract

The privatization process in Argentina did not only represent one of the central axes of the so-called “State Reform”, after which a society in the image and likeness of neoliberalism´s most prized postulates would start to be modeled. It also involved the imposition of a new workforce management model which will be strongly oriented towards noticeably increasing labor productivity, subordinated to individualizing criteria from which stemmed the concepts of “employability”, “competition model”, “human capital”, and “internal client”. These are the features that define the new spirit of capitalism which Boltanski and Chiapello described in a piece on its way to become a treaty of today´s social sciences. In the current article, and in light of the suggestions thereby found, we set out to delve into the existing social representations among phone company workers twenty years after the privatization occurred: particularly concerning the representation of the notion of “union”. The data we will analyze corresponds to the reading of our database per a survey of 220 Telefónica de Argentina workers conducted in 2009.