Théo Guidat is a doctoral student at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) within the Maurice Halbwachs Center. His research combines economic and social history, the sociology of work, and the sociology of employers. Begun in 2021, his dissertation examines the links between deindustrialization and outsourcing, using the case of the steel industry in Lorraine from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Project statement: “Deindustrialization and social recomposition. State, employers and immigration in the Lorraine steel industry, 1966 – 1995”.
Based on the Lorraine steel industry in the Fensch and Orne valleys, this thesis is intended as a contribution to the socio-history of deindustrialization. To analyze this process, the starting point is the rise of “outside companies” in the industrial basin, i.e. companies specialized in subcontracting and/or temporary work that gravitate around the large integrated industries and enable deindustrialization to take place. By looking at these companies, which are as specific as they are little-known, we can take an original approach that links industrial policies, the renewal of local employers and changes in work organization. It thus enables us to reconstruct the entire chain of interdependencies that make up the complex process of deindustrialization. From the top down, the genesis of restructuring is studied through the actions of the French planning state, which encouraged the use of outside firms. From below, the analysis focuses on the changes to the economic fabric and the recomposition of work that their emergence provokes. Ultimately, the thesis highlights the key role played by this new type of company, with its distinctive management and workforce, in the lasting transformation of industrial capitalism as it had developed in the West up to that point. At the crossroads of history and sociology, the thesis draws on archives, interviews and statistical material.
