Development and new labor culture in Mexico

This dissertation uses a modified theory of hegemony to examine the construction of dominant discourses and policies that regulate relations of production. I rethink Gramsci's theory of hegemony in spatial terms arguing that coercion at one scale can be used to strengthen and/or renegotiate consensus at other scales. I use critical discourse analysis and narrative policy analysis to analyze the dominant keywords currently regulating economic development and labor relations: neoliberalism and flexibility. I find that neoliberalism and flexibility discourses idealize voluntary association between autonomous individuals, but their political intent is to reinforce the authority of economic elites by reasserting their right to manage the economy in general and the production process in particular. Policy generated from neoliberalism modified the role of the State from a guarantor of welfare and equality, to a facilitator of free market exchange. Proponents of neoliberalism idealize a naturally spontaneous, voluntary, and flexible consensus between employers and workers, leading to greater efficiency and productivity that benefits everyone. However, the reality is a divided work force of a few privileged insiders and a large reserve army of flexible outsiders.; The second part of the dissertation is a study of Mexican neoliberalism. I reject the economic crisis explanation used commonly to explain the policy shift from import substitution industrialization to the export model in the mid-1980s. Instead, I argue that the shift in the development discourse was a rhetorical tool of the political elites to maintain popular consensus. The regional shift in the Mexican development model from the Federal District to the U.S.-Mexico border meant that the maquiladora industry became the new model for flexible industrialization and labor relations. Labor market flexibility became the objective of the Mexican political and economic elites, driving public sector reforms in the early 1990s. With this in mind, I examine the proposed labor law reforms, which would concretize the neoliberal vision of employer-worker relations, and remove the State from its historical role as arbiter between the two sides. I conclude that the political elites used coercion against labor in specific spaces to restructure the national consensus and the Mexican corporativist State.