Microempreendedorismo individual e redes de sociabilidade : uma análise da construção social do microempreendedor individual em Santa Cruz do Sul (RS).

Abstract

This Master's Dissertation is the result of a study about the social dynamics that are present in the affirmation of workers as Individual Microentrepreneurs (MEIs). Taking as an empirical reference workers who formalized their economic activities from Law n. 128, dated December 19, 2008, which instituted the figure of the Individual Microentrepreneur in Brazil, the study analyzes the conditioning of networks of sociability on the forms of meaning and (re)signification of said Law in the concrete social practices of Individual Microentrepreneurs. The Individual Microentrepreneurship Law was created in a context of discussion and implementation of public policies committed to the inclusion (social and productive) of workers who were vulnerable in the country's labor markets, aggravated in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism in the Brazil in the 1990s. In constructing the analysis, however, the positivity of the law was not considered as a given, nor as an absentee, but as something to be problematized from the possibilities created in the very social practices of workers who formalized their economic activities as Individual Microentrepreneurs. For this problematization, the study took the concept of Crowd, developed by Michel Hardt and Antônio Negri, to understand how individuals ("cooperating singularities") organize themselves into networks of sociability, in order to dynamize their possibilities of action. It was from this problematization that the study was guided by the following problem: how the networks of sociability condition the signification / appropriation dynamics of the Individual Microentrepreneurs Law among workers who took the decision to formalize their economic activities in the condition of Microentrepreneurs Individuals? To analyze this problem, based on the proposed theoretical framework, the investigation was carried out in the municipality of Santa Cruz do Sul, in Rio Grande do Sul, with workers who worked in 2016 as Individual Microentrepreneurs. From the application of research forms and semi-structured interviews with these Individual Microentrepreneurs, in addition to the systematization of secondary data on microentrepreneurship in the municipality, the analysis emphasized the conditioning of social networks in the social construction process of individual microentrepreneurship, since the moment when the workers decide to formalize their economic activities, going through the process of formalization, to the market action as individual microentrepreneurs. Based on the research carried out, the Dissertation emphasizes the importance of networks of sociability to understand the repercussions of legislation on the practices of economic agents, indicating, in the end, that the social relations that individuals establish condition the possibilities of integration and promotion of citizenship through the Individual Microentrepreneurship Law.