Productive Restructuring and Labor Flexibility: A Review of the Impacts of Organizational and Technological Change on Work

Abstract

This article offers a retrospective reading of the motivations that drove our doctoral research work, in which we revealed the hidden face of the process of productive restructuring and technological modernization carried out by Telefónica de España in the late 1990s. On that occasion, we investigated the less visible impact of this restructuring process on the work organization and working conditions of the company's employees, as well as on the workers affected by the outsourcing of customer services.

Specifically, taking advantage of the perspective granted by the elapsed time, the text reconsiders some of the key issues that guided our work and that are still relevant to the field of the Sociology of Work, such as productive flexibilization and labor outsourcing. From a journey that links the findings of the doctoral thesis with subsequent research, which amplified its initial questions, we try to highlight certain lines of continuity between the trends of production flexibilization that began in the context of the productive restructuring of the 1990s and the contemporary dynamics of labor outsourcing in the context of the processes of restructuring and digitization of the contemporary economy.