Managerial Transactions and the Reconfiguration of Disciplinary Power in Brazil’s Agroindustry: From Colonato to Wage Labor

This paper develops a theoretical and empirical account on the relationship between economic organizations and the production of subjectivities in labor relations. Drawing on John R. Commons’s institutional concept of transactions and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power, it argues that managerial transactions function as disciplinary apparatuses that actively constitute productive and subordinated subjects, reframing labor contracts as technologies of subjectivation. Empirically, we examine the transformation of labor relations in Brazil’s sugarcane agroindustry between 1930 and 1990, focusing on the colonato system and its transition to wage labor (boia-fria). Through a Foucauldian-Institutionalist lens, we show how the colonato’s managerial transactions reveal how they functioned as disciplinary devices grounded in spatial dependence, debt, and paternalistic control. The shift to wage labor did not dismantle these mechanisms, but reconfigured them, displacing spatial and paternalistic subjection with individualized performance control and competitive evaluation.