The tensions of a contradictory labor relationship. Corporate culture, privileges and resistance in managerial work in technology-based firms in Argentina.
Diego Szlechter  1@  
1 : Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento - Conicet  (UNGS - Conicet)
J.M. Gutiérrez 1150, Los Polvorines, Provincia de Buenos Aires (1613) -  Argentina

Historically, in the field of social sciences, managerial work has been studied almost exclusively from an underlying alignment with corporate interests (Braverman, 1974). In recent research, we have inquired into the nuances in the working relationship between management personnel in large traditional companies and their employers, which included behaviors that departed from monolithic views of this population and shed light on practices that collided with corporate objectives (Szlechter, 2015). In this paper, we propose to investigate the emerging tensions in the relationship between managers of technology firms and their employers in “digital native” technology firms in which, on the one hand, since their birth, they established forms of work control and strengthening of corporate culture based on algorithms and, on the other hand, the shortage of skilled labor allowed their command staff to obtain privileges that put in tension the relationship with their companies, giving rise to particular forms of resistance. Based on the theoretical-analytical proposal of Burawoy (1979), we investigate both the forms of consent as well as the resistant practices of managers in the framework of an asymmetrical labor relationship, in the author's terms, in which behaviors aligned with capital are combined with strategies that seek to circumvent its directives. We will present the preliminary results of a research that began in 2022 and is still ongoing, based on a qualitative methodology in which we have conducted semi-structured interviews with managers and human resources personnel of technology-based firms based in Argentina. In this sense, the findings so far show that, although there is no evidence of forms of collective action of this type of employees, it is possible to observe, on the one hand, the difficulties encountered by companies to establish strategies to strengthen the so-called corporate culture and, on the other hand, the emerging responses of managers to assert their privileges and rents (Millner, 1997) in order to maintain the degrees of autonomy and independence achieved, especially since the pandemic.


Loading... Loading...