ILPC 2026

From the 50s onwards, the production of shoes in Bogota, Colombia has been strongly linked to diverse types of productive units. There are individual artisans, family units, small and medium companies that “feed” many production chains. These chains also comprise few national and multinational companies that distribute and export the manufactures produced. The formal and informal sectors are mixed along the production chains in a way that one supports the other. At the same time, the artisan and industrial ways of organizing work facilitate the flexible working conditions and very changeable organizations. Affective relationships dominate the administration of the work force, instead of impersonal bureaucratic structures. In this scenery, based on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in 7 production units, this paper examines different ways in which the constitution of workers as subjects take place in a network of emotional relationships. It is described how the international and national prescriptions about work are appropriated in the chain of production to compose different kinds of workers and very different forms of precarious lives. At the same time, it is consider how the formal and informal ways of organizing work open spaces to subjectivities and precarious ways of living that are not related to the typical individual or a collective subject, but a mixture between the extremely discipline industrial worker and the post-employment entrepreneurial self that have to behave as free subject.