Doing Micro-Level History: Generational Differences in how Argentine Small Business Owners Cope with Uncertainty

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Culture, Economy, and Organizations

Abstract

Two core questions that emerge out of the literature on precarity are: Do we understand our relationship to work in individual or systemic terms, and, do we blame ourselves or the system when we experience failure in the sphere of work? The extant literature argues that whether workers understand their relationship to work in individual or systemic terms either varies cross-nationally or that global shifts in the arrangement of labor are always accompanied by ideological shifts that prioritize individualism. In contrast, this paper focuses on subnational variation in how similarly situated actors conceptualize an unstable macroeconomy and make sense of their precarious employment conditions. Harnessing data from over forty in-depth interviews with small business owners in rural Argentina, I demonstrate that generational experiences of living through crisis shape the divergent conceptual and practical repertoires through which they cope with persistent inflation and monetary instability. Older respondents who lived and worked through the 2001-2003 economic collapse describe the macroeconomy in personalistic and adversarial terms and argue that years of experience has taught them to respond adeptly by engaging in embodied, affective acts of calculation based on hunches and an intuitive feel for the game. Younger workers who did not experience the 2001-2003 crisis as adults argue that their success or failure at work depends exclusively on their cultivating their intrinsic capacities and ignoring what is happening in the macroeconomy. Such generational configurations define what it means—in conceptual and practical terms—to be successful in the face of economic precarity.

Author

• Sonia Prelat, New York University