The Political Economy of Manufacturing Consent: Worker Training Policies Across Industrial Clusters in Turkey and Argentina
Over the past three decades, a growing number of studies found that production techniques inspired by new technologies have become the norm in automobile production, especially in the multinational companies. This paper highlights the political circumstances under which blue-collar consent for these practices comes about. Focusing on the immediate context that surrounds two different production zones of the same multinational company, I find that durable worker consent is engendered by a complex mechanism where local political entrepreneurs negotiate the power hierarchies between business and labor by relying on immaterial incentives. In doing so, the paper uses an innovative comparative technique by combining cross-regional, contextualized approach with the sub-national comparative method.