In recent decades, the world of work has been transforming significantly, from the decline of trade unions to the emergence of platform workers. In the process, once widespread ideas about how workers can exert some control over the organization of work, and over the workplace more generally, have also changed – to the point that many such ideas seem to have been largely forgotten by workers and political scientists alike.
In this episode, Pedro Teixeira introduces us to the concept of ‘workplace democracy,’ once a powerful watchword in Europe. In discussing this concept and its history, he delves into the transformations of work and trade unions, the role of academic disciplines in shaping the “language of labour”, and, ultimately, what promises workplace democracy holds for today, not only for workers, but more generally perhaps, for democracy.
These questions were tackled for three years in a research project conducted at the CMB: "Workplace democracy: a European ideal: discourses and practices about the democratization of work after 1945 (EURO-DEM)". The project was led by Roberto Frega (CMB) and Stefan Berger (Institut für Soziale Bewegungen RUB) and supported by the ANR-DFG programme.
Pedro A. Teixeira is an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (HU Berlin) and member of the EURO-DEM team. He teaches political philosophy at the Otto-Suhr Institute (FU Berlin) since 2018, where in 2020 he concluded his PhD in political science on the sources of normativity in the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. From 2020-2021 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy in Lisbon, and in 2017 he was a visiting scholar at the Philosophy Department of Columbia University. He is the coordinator of the section “History and Philosophy of Political Economy” of the Portuguese Association of Political Economy. His current research lies at the intersection of political philosophy, political economy and the history of ideas, namely on topics such as models of democratic control of the workplace and of the economic sphere, the idea of socialism, and the roots of political normativity, and the development of scientific discourses.
He has authored a number of publications in these fields [recently: “Short-term Incentives of Research Evaluations: Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework” (with Moqi Gröen-Xu, Gregor Bös, Thomas Voigt, Bernhard Knapp), Research Policy, vol. 52 (6), 2023); “Marxismo Analítico” (“Analytical Marxism”), in Manual de Filosofia Política, João Cardoso Rosas (org.), Edições Almedina, 3rd ed., 2023, pp. 187-212;“The possibility of democratic socialism in Habermas”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 24, no. 4, Nov. 2021, pp. 601-618].
Moderation
Hugo Canihac is Associate Professor of Political Science in Strasburg, and associate researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch. His work touches on the political sociology of European integration, as well as on the social history of economic, legal and political ideas. He has published in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of International Political Theory or the German Law Journal among others.
Many thanks to Alix Winter for organising this dialogue!
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