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

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.