The Agency of Workers at Industrial Enterprises in Siberia: A Post-Structuralist Analysis and the Construction of a Typology

Abstract

Vyacheslav Kombarov – Candidate of Sciences, Research Fellow, Department of Social Problems, Institute of Economics and Industrial Engineering of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science. Address: 17, Lavrentiev Av., Novosibirsk, 630090, Russian Federation. E-mail: vkombarov@gmail.com

This article focuses on the link between the agency of workers and organizational social structures. I argue that worker agency in modern enterprises is strongly suppressed by the presence of vertical hierarchical social structures, and that it could potentially be re-enabled through the adoption of alternative rhizome-like structures. The problem of agency is revisited using four approaches: Cartesian-type rationalism, radical postmodernism, de-constructivism and late post-modernism. By tracing the evolution of the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘agents’ I conclude that they are still highly relevant for modern social dynamics.
The empirical reference in the current research, i.e. agents who are capable of withstanding the dominating power discourse and the pressures of capital, are engineers and highly skilled technical workers in modern Russian industrial enterprises. The relevance and practical importance of such a focus is dictated by the fact that these workers constitute the core of the labour force in the most productive sectors of the Russian economy. Empirical data were collected at four Siberian enterprises of the military-industrial complex in 2009–2010.
By analysing this data a tentative typology of workers according to different strategies and the levels of agency they exercise in their organizations has been constructed: ‘sporadic rebels’, ‘conformists’ and ‘ethical rebels’.