Career Trajectories and the Composition of Identity

In the previous chapter, work relations were related to the distribution of roles engendered by the organisation of production. This perspective, however, does not cover the entire complexity of relations developed within the plant. If one is properly to understand the degree to which the assembly line partakes of the nature of a social fabric – and what kind of society is being fabricated here – social relations at work cannot be considered in the isolation of the plant, nor only in the present tense of production. They must be connected to features external to these dimensions that also find embodiment in the internal articulation of the world of work: ‘relationships do not … exhaust themselves withinthe enterprise, which appears as neither their origin nor their end, but much rather as one of the moments of their construction and one of the surfaces of their actualisation’.1 Applied to the operatives in theCarrosserie at Peugeot-Sochaux, this approach partly intersects with the work done with Christian Corouge by Michel Pialoux and Stéphane Beaud.2 Their research, however, derives its coherence from the notion of the ‘worker group’ (groupe ouvrier), while our hypothesis requires us rather to travel the networks through the plant in order to examine the diversity of social constructions developed and renewed in the very course of production.