A condução e a construção dos litígios trabalhistas: um estudo sociológico sobre os modos de coordenação da ação dos atores sociais que atuam em um litígio trabalhista na cidade de Pelotas/RS

Abstract

Under the scope of the Brazilian judiciary, individual conflicts arising from labor relations are submitted to Labor Court organs, whose resolutions are based on the Law they operate by. Beyond legal procedures which are necessary for judicial channel analysis - in other words, beyond their "translation" into legal language - the labor dispute consists in the dynamics of interactions between social actors that make up a dispute context in a given social setting. In this sense, from a dialog with the sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski and partners, the labor dispute is characterized as a privileged empirical object in the apprehension of the senses of (un)fair and distinct legal concepts that emerge from local contexts. By means of the participant observation technique in labor hearings in the Labor Courts of the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul State, we attempted to observe how the actors involved in a labor dispute coordinate their actions for the pupose of reaching an agreement or defending their interests and points of view in an attempt to obtain a favorable judgment. Thus, by the analysis of discursive repertoires of social actors, we tried to observe the mobilization of criticism, justifications and other accounts that characterize moral competence. From a careful dialog between the empirical universe and the theoretical perspective of the sociology of critique, the conceptual development of an analytical framework aware of (objective and subjective) constraints that evaluate these situations came into play without, however, putting the understanding of normative restraints expressed in the arguments of social actors in the back burner. Such an undertaking resulted in the development of two main categories - the "carrying out" and "developing" - which fall within the scope of the substantive theory of ways of coordination of the social actors involved in a labor dispute in the city of Pelotas.