Contractualization of Territorial Social Dialogue in Competitiveness Clusters: Lessons from a Institutional Experimentation in Rhônes-Alpes.

Contractualization is an emerging form of professional relationship that has known for a decade and a profusion notorious enthusiasm in the Rhône-Alpes region in France. Its most emblematic variation occurs at the level of competitiveness clusters (pôles de compétitivité), designed as the locomotives of flourishing Society baser in the Lisbon strategy, revised by the Europe 2020 vision, and its French version, of an economy based on knowledge and innovation and characterized by smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

Under these conditions, our question is: how contracting of the social territorial dialogue structure territorial industrial relations around competitiveness clusters, while allowing the capacitation of trade-union action around issues related to securing a professional career?.

The first field of investigation conducted under this article targeted the determination of the specific contract engineering to the Rhône-Alpes region to isolate the contractual supports that feed the territorial social dialogue on socioeconomic changes, and identify systematic relations between its prospective component (the prospective studies contracts), its operational component (Objectives the Jobs Training contracts) and positional component (Regional Fund for Emergency Action). Deployed as temporary expedients and renewed, the contract supports of « social territorial dialogue » in Rhône-Alpes aspire to build a strong sense of the uniqueness of each industrial sector situation, a high degree of collective sensitivity to polychromic socioeconomic changes generated by clusters and to the need of securing career paths (sécurisation des parcours professionnels).

This inventory of the Rhone-Alpine the landscape led us to our second area of investigation that involves jointly examine the theoretical foundations of the policy of clusters, inspired by the theory of clusters and industrial districts; and territorial social dialogue, reflecting the successive flows of deconcentration, decentralization and territorialization of public action. The Archimedean point of this theory examination is in this cognitive matrix  based on a neo-liberal hegemonic vision which shapes wider reforms in the field of public policy and performs the old cadres of collective bargaining.

Finally, the conduct of two research-actions with our socio-economic partners (CFDT) and political (Rhône-Alpes) in two competitiveness clusters (Techtera : textile and flexible materials cluster and Plastipolis : Plastics Division Rhône-Alpes and Franche-Comté cluster) we try to conceptualize, based on the of the work of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and the most recent developments of his capability Approch, what we called the "contractual social territorial dialogue" in the ecosystems of innovation that demonstrates the importance of participatory, epistemological and normative dimensions in the co-construction of the securing career paths.