On 8 December 2016 Claudie Fioroni defended her PhD dissertation in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, entitled “Perplexed Employees and Powerless Managers: Neoliberal Effects in the Phosphate Kingdom of Jordan”, at the Graduate Institute. Professor Shalini Randeria presided the defence committee, which included Professor Riccardo Bocco, Thesis Director, and Mr Eberhard Kienle, Director of the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) in Beirut, Lebanon. Ms Fioroni explores the way in which neoliberal reforms have reorganised collective life in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
How did you come to study the effects of neoliberalism on Jordanian miners and more broadly on the Jordanian population?
Identifying my research topic was not an easy task. I initially wanted to study the resilience of the Syrian Baath regime. However, by the time I enrolled into the PhD programme in September 2011, the situation in Syria and in the Arab region had tremendously changed. Autocrats who had ruled for decades were now falling under the pressure of popular protests. There was a major debate at the time to identify the drivers of these uprisings. Many commentators pointed at the gradual impairment of the authoritarian “social contract”, that is, a social contract by which people preserve some degree of political loyalty to the regime in exchange of state provision of a minimum of subsidies, social welfare and full employment. The political upheavals, they argued, occurred in countries where the state was no longer able to guarantee a minimum economic safety net. Interestingly, this argument could not explain the situation in Jordan. Considering its economic, political and social situation, Jordan did not radically differ from Arab countries that experienced a revolution in 2011. Yet, the Hashemite monarchy was not seriously threatened by the uprisings, despite thousands of protests going on in the country between 2011 and 2012. While most analyses of Jordanian politics relied on macro and state-centred approach, there was a lack of understanding of the everyday politics. What does this so-called “social pact” exactly mean for ordinary citizens? Why exactly did Jordanians take to the street in 2011? To what changes do they aspire?
With these questions in mind, I travelled to Jordan in April 2012. My attention was immediately drawn to the on-going labour protests. I met the employees of the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) who had initiated strikes and established an independent labour union in their company. I found their story particularly intriguing because it did not fit conventional accounts of liberal economic reforms. JPMC, which is the backbone of the Jordanian mining industry and one of the largest companies in Jordan, had been privatised and subjected to internal restructuring in the early 2000s. However, for its employees, privatisation was not synonymous of work casualisation, the dismantling of social benefits or a decline in real wages. The privatisation had not altered their working conditions and, yet, they were demonstrating against it. My interlocutors did not initiate the protests because they felt that their rights were violated. Rather, they wanted to overhaul the long-established management system that, according to them, was responsible for the unequal treatment of employees in JPMC.
In short, my PhD research is an attempt at making sense of this situation, a situation that did not fit into conventional theories. More specifically, the dissertation explores the transformations of the Jordanian phosphate industry induced by the privatisation at two different levels. In the first part, I situate the moment of the privatisation in the broader historical trajectory of the Jordanian phosphate industry. I show how the political, economic and social significance of JPMC was redefined over time, and I discuss whether the privatisation marked a rupture or continuity with previous assemblage. To understand protesters’ grievances and claims, however, it is also necessary to apprehend the consequences of the privatisation from the employees’ standpoint, as lived human experience. Therefore, in the second part of the dissertation, I analyse how JPMC employees and the population living in the mining areas experienced these transformations in their everyday lives and how they construe these transformations. This provides the background upon which I finally analyse the protests and claims that emerged in 2011.
So, what findings did you make?
Inquiring into the transformations of the phosphate-mining industry made me revisit many common assumptions about the politics of neoliberal reforms in Jordan. One major finding is probably a renewed perspective on contemporary Jordanian politics. In Jordan, like in many other countries, the adoption of neoliberal reforms did not result in the triumph of freemarket as the key organising principle of society. These “failures” of the neoliberal project are usually explained by the fact that neoliberal policies are not implemented in terra nullius, but in social spaces that are already structured by contradictory social logics. In the Jordanian context, more specifically, the common view is that neoliberal reforms failed to dismantle the long-lasting patrimonial state. This common view stresses continuity.
In contrast, I place emphasis on ruptures. I demonstrate that the measures implemented under the privatisation policy – recruitment freeze, early retirement scheme, outsourcing and ownership transfer –did not merely reproduce the old logics of the patrimonial state. Even though the changes at stake are not consistent with the neoliberal project, the implementation of neoliberal policies did affect the organisation of collective life in meaningful ways. The redefinition of the employer-employee relationship was central to this process. The recruitment freeze resulted in the exclusion of the new comers to the job market – the reservoir of the “working class” – from the labour process. Inside JPMC, the early retirement scheme and outsourcing altered the organisation of work. This had the paradoxical effect of exacerbating disparities in the workload allocation, raising many frustrations among JPMC employees. On a larger scale, outsourcing also led to work casualisation since work is now undertaken by the employees of contracting companies with poor working conditions. The reorganisation of production also means a reorganisation of JPMC’s distributive policy. Cuts in labour costs and outsourcing mean that the profits that used to be distributed in the form of wages are now reallocated towards JPMC shareholders and contracting companies. The overall effect is a narrowing-down of the channels of wealth distribution and increased inequalities.
These observations resonate well beyond Jordan. In fact, the neoliberal effects observed in the Jordanian phosphate-mining industry – namely, the exclusion of the working class from the opportunity of wage labour, the corollary reshaping of distributive politics, and the emergence of a new regime of justification and a new normative order – are not specific to Jordan but compare to phenomena observed elsewhere. My point is that even though the actual effects of neoliberal policies differ from their initial intentions, this reality should not be discarded from the history of neoliberalism. In this way, my work is an invitation to write the history of neoliberalism from the standpoint of its actual effects rather than as the more or less successful realisation of the neoliberal project.
Your research is then not intended to be policy-relevant.
No it isn’t. Nevertheless, some of its aspects offer interesting insights from a policymaking perspective. One example is the analysis of the decision-making process. I show that the decision to privatise JPMC was based on a partial assessment of JPMC that overemphasised human resources deficiencies and undermined other factors – such as technical problems, market contractions and regional political crises – which deeply affected JPMC results in the 1990s. As a consequence, the measures that were implemented only addressed human resources issues. Moreover, they were implemented in ways that further disorganised the labour process instead of rationalising it. My Jordanian informants usually blamed lazy employees and corrupted managers for the dysfunctioning of their company. My research suggests that some dysfunctioning is, in fact, unintentional. This allows for identifying potential avenues to act upon the situation. More generally, the case of JPMC provides interesting insights for any company restructuring.
How will you remember your doctoral experience?
I will certainly remember it as a truly enriching and extremely diverse, though stressful, experience. My PhD took me to many different places. In Jordan, first, where I conducted intense fieldwork for nearly twelve months and where I learnt about myself as much as I learnt about others. Then, after my fieldwork, I had the chance to stay in New York for a year and, subsequently, in Vienna where I completed my PhD manuscript. These journeys were all unique opportunities to interact with fascinating people, from JPMC employees to inspiring scholars. In the future, I hope to be able to carry out a career as rich as my years as a PhD candidate!
Full citation of the PhD thesis: Fioroni, Claudie. “Perplexed Employees and Powerless Managers: Neoliberal Effects in the Phosphate Kingdom of Jordan”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2016.
Illustration: Entrance of the Hasa Company Town, Jordan, 4 July 2013. Photo by Claudie Fioroni.