Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article analyzes how labor justice was delivered in the conflicts of Luz y Fuerza del Centro and Compañía Mexicana de Aviación, focusing on the performance of the Juntas de Conciliación y Arbitraje (Conciliation and Arbitration Boards), as they are the main institutions responsible for ensuring compliance with labor law in the country. Based on interviews and an exhaustive documental review, we reconstruct the behavior of those agencies in both cases, considering the way in which legal and political facts were overlapped, and how this impacted on a due enforcement of labor justice. As a result of the research, we identify tensions between legal and political practices, recognizing that the former’s autonomy leeway vis-à-vis the sphere of power varies in both cases, according to the relations of forces, the internal logic of action, and the strategies displayed by the different actors.

Among its objectives and the new institutional framework that it has provided, the Mexican energy reform (2013-2014) has addressed social challenges related to energy projects in communities and municipalities. This paper discusses the prospects, and particularly, the existing gaps in legislation to propose alternatives. It has also underlined the nature of a governance problem that lies behind the social conflicts on the rise due to the intervention of developers among the communities. This article is part of a larger research project; in consequence, interviews in-depth were carried among different stakeholders (public and private sector, communities, scholars, journalists, consultants, etc.) to support the hemerographic sources. The original features of this essay is that: a) it provides an historical overview of the new institutional framework to adjust the social impacts (when compared to the previous serious flaws) and analyses the contributions of legislative changes within human rights, indigenous rights, and corporate social responsibility in the new regulation; b) it confirms how legal certainty, which the new institutional framework is intended to provide, is, in fine, associated with the age-old governance problem that Mexico has failed to solve so far.

Since before the 2000 transition to democracy, the need for a democratic governability agreement in Mexico was considered a major challenge. The incapacity of the 12-year pan administration to fulfill their reformist agenda lead many to conclude that an institutional reform to strengthen the President was needed. In this sense, the Pacto por México was a surprise. It made innovations in the mechanisms of political agreement enabling the approval of seven constitutional reforms that had been decisively rejected during the pan administrations, even by the pri, which now headed the government. This article explores the negotiation of the Pacto and the nature of the approved reforms. It is argued that the Pacto was the result of some basic agreement among most of the political elite on what reforms were needed, and the strategy of the two main opposition parties to impose on the negotiation a part of their agenda. It is also contended that in order to maintain partisan discipline, which allowed to approve the reforms in a very short time, some sort of “legalized” corruption was needed –such as payments to legislators. Finally, we conclude that despite  the reformist optimism with which Peña Nieto’s administration began, the reforms have failed to promote economic growth as expected, both because of the collapse in the price of the crude oil , and the lack of experience and extensive corruption of the administration.

This work seeks to highlight Zygmunt Bauman’s criticism of sociology based on two of his works published in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Modernity and the Holocaust (1990) and Thinking Sociologically (1990). The article establishes that there is a strong link between both texts, and readers should approach them as related works. In those books, Bauman maintains that the positivist theory of progress distinguishes sociological perspective and explains the mistakes that led to address the Holocaust and other genocides as an exception and not as a consequence of modernity. Based on this criticism, Bauman approaches sociology’s negligence in its treatment of these phenomena. As a counterpoint, he highlights the importance of integrating  exclusion as a category and the antagonism between “us” and “them” as major starting points in the sociological analysis to explain discrimination within social networks and the resulting behaviors, ranging from simple estrangement to the gravest xenophobic expressions.

This interview was actually conducted at two different occasions: the first one on the 10th of May 2015 and the second one the 10th of December of that same year. The final written interview respects the chronology of the questions asked in May and December. Both took place at Zygmunt Bauman's house in the suburbs of Leeds. In these conversations with Simon Tabet, Bauman narrates important parts of his biographical and intellectual itineraries, from his formative years at the University of Warsaw, his Polish exile and final settlement in England, and how this influenced his sociological vision, as an “outsider”. Bauman considers some central concepts of his thought, his main sources of critical inspiration, and his position on such contemporary phenomena as the rise of populism and terrorism in Europe and the consequent relationship between politics and insecurity.

Bauman was an exceptional figure, a generalist, to whom nothing human was alien to him; both ethical-existential and political-intellectual. Indeed, Bauman's long intellectual life has left virtually no social and human issues untouched: from socialism, modernity and postmodernity, to poverty, globalization, love, work, education, the intellectuals, social classes, community, politics, the Holocaust, consumption, fear, and art. In Bauman stands out by his determination to introduce himself, always incisively, in the most pressing themes and problems of every moment, sometimes stimulating the discussion within the intellectual communities and, in other cases, encouraging a much wider public debate. For Bauman, sociology could only be understood as an activity of political and cultural criticism, and as a faithful and acute personal mentor at the service of human emancipation. One can see both in the man and the social scientist a genuine and determined critical and public involvement vocation.

The author asserts that both corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainability in its social dimension were nourished by the concepts of Bauman, of which collateral damage, responsibility, social equality, and solidarity are pointed out. For Bauman to reject awards and recognitions for having supposedly made a contribution to society is also considered a responsible act, especially when not enough merits were actually made to obtain those honors; this is regarded as a moral act. Likewise, many companies have presented “worthy and decent jobs” as social responsibility actions. However, from Bauman's perspective fair treatment, decent distribution of benefits and equity are components of social equality. Resentment prevailed amongst the Colombian media, instead of doing pedagogy on the Peace Agreement, as was its social responsibility. Bauman's reading of this fact would be no other than to continue to see ex-combatants as an enemy group, which of course is contrary to social equality.

In December 2016, Zygmunt Bauman’s self-described “recent heart failure” did not deter him from providing the author with “three pieces I have scribbled” to use in revising Bauman’s chapter for the second edition of the Handbook of Cultural Sociology. The author draws from this experience working with Bauman at the end of his life to reflect on the man as a person, a scholar, and a public intellectual. He argues that Bauman had a broad methodological strategy that derived from his 1978 book, Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences. Reconciling himself to the historicist relativity of Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle, Bauman proposed that the hermeneutic self-understanding of society “is the way in which history itself moves” (Bauman, 1978: 46). The author connects this hermeneutic project to Bauman’s conceptualization of “liquid modernity” as the condition of contemporary society, and he draws on Bauman’s three “scribbled” pieces to show how Bauman connected recent “liquid” developments –especially shifts in the character of migration– to recent political events (Brexit and the us election of Donald Trump as President). For Bauman, the goal of cosmopolitan tolerance in a global society is undercut by a lag between new worldly conditions and “outdated consciousness.”

Artículo editorial del número 230.

Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology has known very divers receptions, depending on the intellectual contexts and periods of writing. Through a study of the proliferous work of the author, this article aims at describing the different steps of this path, in order to grasp the process leading to such disparities. This analysis will try to explain the feeble reception of the thinker within the French intellectual sphere, as well as the several polemics engendered by his work in the English-speaking academic world. Lastly, this article would like to partially define the form and status of what the author has called “liquid sociology” in recent years.