ABSTRACT
The problem of the agency of workers is almost as old as academic sociology. In the social thought of Marx, blue collar workers were considered the privileged agents of revolutionary social change. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this grand narrative can only veil the actual diversity of workers’ actions. In Western capitalist countries, blue-collar workers were largely included into the political order. In Eastern Europe, the narrative of working-class agency first became a smokescreen for attempts to subordinate workers to communist parties, and then the foundation for anti-communist movements. The failure of the state-socialist project and the triumph of liberal capitalism coincided with the expansion of ideas that identified the notion of ‘agency’ with the construction of social identities unconstrained by the structural locations of social agents (Beck 1992; Giddens 1995). Yet, does this discourse really fit into the experiences of the socially disadvantaged members of ‘new’ capitalist societies?
