Gray zones and entrepreneurship: work and urban living conditions of platformized bicycle-riding workers

• Grant number: 23/02467-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: August 28, 2023
• End date: November 27, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Aline Suelen Pires
• Grantee: João Pedro Ferreira Perin
• Supervisor: Christian Andre Marie Azais
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Cnam), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/13376-5 - Getting by, youth and work: the bikeboys in the light of the entrepreneurial discourse, BP.MS

Abstract

In the midst of an extensive process of precariousness, flexibilization, and technological, informational, and communicational revolutions, the platformization of various activities results in new arrangements in labor relations, as in the case of delivery cyclists by app, - bikeboys - composed of young black and peripheral people. Aiming to understand how entrepreneurship is used as a survival strategy constructed and experienced by bikeboys in the municipality of São Paulo-SP, my master's research has been conducted with a group of bike delivery drivers concentrated in a point near Praça da República in downtown São Paulo, with whom a study based on the analysis of the trajectories of selected individuals is being carried out. Within this scope, this project presents a proposal for a Research Internship Grant Abroad, to be developed at Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Sociologie Économique (LISE) - CNAM, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Christian Azaïs. The main goal of this BEPE project is to advance theoretically and metologically in the analysis of how the entrepreneurial discourse is assimilated, re-signified and mobilized by bikeboys, considering the relationship between the subjects' social trajectories and their strategies built and experienced in the plataformized cycle-delivery work. In this sense, the contact with researchers and activities developed at LISE will contribute theoretically and methodologically to the development of the research undertaken in the master's program, especially with regard to the work of Christian Azaïs, who highlights the importance of the analysis of the "gray zones" in the world of work. Throughout the internship, I will engage in literature review, academic activities promoted by LISE, and exploratory research in the Saint-Denis region with the supervisor. (AU)