Reinventing the wheel? Convergence and divergence in the global automotive industry and its labour relations in China and Mexico

拟议的项目借鉴了中国和墨西哥对全球汽车业及其劳资关系的比较发展进行的博士研究。它位于发展研究、国际政治经济学和劳工研究学科的交叉点，涉及ESRC的两个主题优先事项：创新和包容性经济增长；以及不平等的动态。它有三个相互关联的贡献。首先，它为政策制定者、经理，特别是一家欧洲大型跨国汽车制造商在中国和墨西哥的子公司的工人的工作条件和做法提供了经验性的见解。这些见解对两国产业政策的评估和发展至关重要，因为其中很大一部分是专门为汽车行业设计的，汽车行业已被指定为“战略”或“支柱”产业。这项研究证实，汽车部门确实被广泛理解为发展中国家创新和产业升级的工具。然而，它也表明，全球南方汽车行业发展的社会影响很少得到批判性评估，更不用说工人和工会对建立车间内外管理该行业的机构的积极贡献。通过深入的案例研究，包括两个为期六个月的实地调查、定性访谈和车间观察，解开这些问题，为实现该奖学金的核心目标提供了必要的材料：从概念上影响上述学科的学术知识池，并重塑产业政策话语，以考虑非精英群体的代理。第二，在这一背景下，我的研究表明，墨西哥和中国合资企业之间，以及这两家企业与欧洲母公司相关的理想-典型的生产模式--在技术-组织流程、销售战略、雇佣关系和条件等--取决于工人中介机构在每个领域的影响力。具体地说，我认为，管理层能够建立对决策过程的单方面特权的那些领域--特别是在生产过程的技术构成问题上--显示出高度的趋同。工人能够发挥影响力的领域--无论是有意识还是无意识的、制度化的还是非制度化的--表现出更大的差异，如薪酬制度、时间制度、培训过程和生产的其他组织方面。简而言之，趋同和分歧取决于管理层、工人和政策制定者之间的关系代理过程在现实中的结果。这些见解服务于该奖学金的第二个目标，即评估和发展工会和工人影响机构建设以实现更公平和可持续工业发展的能力--这将涉及在中国和墨西哥为追求这一目标而举办的利益相关者研讨会和能力建设。第三，这是挑战关于制度趋同、分歧和变化的结构主义和制度主义解释的切入点，由于他们忽视了关系代理的过程，最终仍然无法解释他们观察到的现象。特别是，这些账户不能以一致的方式解释动态变化及其解释。最后，这为以机构为中心的体制变革理论及其方法论的发展留出了空间，使其成为包容劳动的研究议程的形式。这些发现可能会对产业政策和制度理论的辩论产生学术影响。

The proposed project draws on PhD research undertaken on the comparative development of the global automotive industry and its labour relations in China and Mexico. It is located at the intersection of the disciplines of Development Studies, International Political Economy, and Labour Studies, and engages two of the ESRC's thematic priorities: Innovation and inclusive economic growth; and Dynamics of inequalities. It makes three interrelated contributions.First, it provides empirical insights into working conditions and the practices of policy makers, managers and, in particular, workers in the subsidiaries of a large European transnational car manufacturer in China and Mexico. These insights are of critical importance to the evaluation and development of industrial policy in both countries, given that much of it is specifically designed for the automotive sector, which has been designated a 'strategic' or 'pillar' industry. The study confirms that the automotive sector is indeed widely understood as a vehicle for innovation and industrial upgrading in developing countries. However, it also demonstrates that the social impact of automotive sector development in the Global South has only rarely been critically evaluated, and even less so the active contribution of workers and trade unions to the building of institutions that govern the industry on and off the shop floor. Unravelling these issues through an in-depth case study, involving two six-months periods of fieldwork, qualitative interviews and shop floor observations, provides the necessary material to pursue a central aim of this fellowship: to conceptually influence the pool of academic knowledge in the aforementioned disciplines, and to reshape industrial policy discourse towards the consideration of the agency of non-elite groupings of people.Secondly, in this context my research demonstrates that the puzzle of convergence or divergence between the Mexican and Chinese ventures, and between these two and an ideal-typical "productive model" associated with the European parent company - in terms of techno-organisational processes, sales strategies, employment relations and conditions etc. - depends on the influence worker agency has in each respective area. Concretely, I argue that those areas where management is able to establish a unilateral prerogative over the decision making process - in particular on questions of the technological composition of the production process - show a high degree of convergence. Areas where workers have been able to exert their influence - consciously or unconsciously, institutionalised or non-institutionalised - show a higher degree of divergence, such as remuneration systems, time regimes, training processes, and other organisational aspects of production. In short, convergence and divergence hinge on how processes of relational agency between management, workers and policy makers pan out in reality. These insights serve a second aim of this fellowship, namely to evaluate and develop the capacity of trade unions and workers to affect institution building towards more equitable and sustainable industrial development - which would involve stakeholder workshops and capacity building in China and Mexico in pursuit of this goal.This, thirdly, serves as an entry point to challenge structuralist and institutionalist explanations of institutional convergence, divergence and change, which due to their neglect of processes of relational agency ultimately remain unable to explain the phenomena they observe. In particular these accounts cannot account for dynamic change - and its explanation - in a consistent fashion. This, finally, makes room for the development of elements for an agency-centric theory of institutional change; and its methodological mirror image in the form of a labourinclusive research agenda. These findings are likely to have an academic impact on debates on industrial policy and institutional theory.