Jean-Luc Deshayes
Fonction
Chercheur
Organisation
Laboratoire Lorrain de Sciences Sociales, Université de Lorraine, France
« Je travaille au Luxembourg », effets frontières et transformations du travail et de l’emploi dans la Grande Région.
« Je travaille au Luxembourg », effets frontières et transformations du travail et de l’emploi dans la Grande Région.
Border Region
France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Greater Region
Language(s)
Français
Main Category
Introduction
The article reviews the different theoretical and scientific approaches to studying border working in the Greater Region and elsewhere. The author identifies three different families of approaches, each highlighting phenomena specific to cross-border working. This theoretical pathway also serves as a pretext for reiterating the importance of establishing common multi-disciplinary approaches to better address the complexity of cross-border phenomena.
Content
The article covers the rapid growth in the number of cross-border workers in Luxembourg, which rose from 17,000 in 1985 to 156,000 in 2012. New cross-border jobs account for 95 per cent of jobs created in Luxembourg. The first impact of this growth at cross-border level is the positive migration balance in the regions adjacent to Luxembourg, including northern Lorraine. However, this demographic increase is accompanied by an impoverishment of local authorities where employment is falling due to cross-border competition.
These now familiar phenomena have mobilised various theoretical and scientific approaches, which the author proposes to divide into three categories: those that use the concept of the border space, those that take an interest in social boundaries in the wider sense and, finally, those that rely on pseudo-concepts.
The first family of approaches inspired by constructivism considers border areas as laboratories. These areas are understood as centres, central poles of employment which generate work in the periphery around them. These centres are regulated by a governance that is specific to them. These approaches offer a way of addressing the recent development of these territories and what is new about them. The second family of approaches looks at new borders and how they are categorised. These new borders are not directly related to the territories and are addressed via the effects that they have on the social sphere. The third group of approaches is situated between the social and political fields and draws on a very diverse range of sociological and economic theories.
The simultaneous mobilisation of these approaches allows a detailed and comprehensive understanding of cross-border working in the Greater Region.
Conclusions
In light of the wide variety of approaches that can be mobilised to study it, it is clear that cross-border working is an object that becoming better and better known and addressed in the Greater Region and elsewhere.
The disciplinary crossroads that border studies represent lacks a recognised shared theoretical basis. This has led to a situation where the objects studied are better known that the means employed to study them. The diversity of the approaches adopted can therefore result in a certain ambivalence with respect to the concept of the border, an ambivalence that risks impacting the comprehension of cross-border phenomena, including working.
These studies show that the border effect is a permanent one in social relations within the jobs market in border territories. Although the labour market claims to be more open within these spaces, paradoxically it remains very segmented, territorial borders being replaced by social and cultural boundaries instead. But it is also possible that these boundaries are also the result of changes in the contemporary world of work.
Lead
Jean-Luc Deshayes
Author of the entry
Jean-Luc
Deshayes
Contact Person(s)
Date of creation
2020
Publisher
Presses Universitaires de Nancy - Editions Universitaires de Lorraine