Social Disqualification and Negative Identity: The Case of the Motoboys

The French sociologist Serge Paugan developed the concept of social disqualification in the study of how socially excluded people built their identities and their references about themselves.

He concluded that these people had a very negative image of themselves and they felt unqualified in society. Disqualification as a constitutive element of the individual's identity and reproduced in all the actions undertaken socially, as frequented places, consumption patterns, language and forms of self preservation.

This research studies the social disqualification processes in a group of professionals in Brazil is known as motoboys (delivery workers who use motorcycles). In Brazilian metropolises these professionals are known for riding motorcycles at high speed risky way. In most cases the motorcycle courier is poorly paid, receiving a number of deliveries. It's a case of precarious work. The violation of traffic rules and not using safety equipment reveal a way to ride in which it seems there is no concern for the preservation of their lives, it is a high-risk profession. Each year the number of motorcycle boys victims of traffic comes to thousands of people in Brazil. There is no known other category of paid work activity that makes so many victims annually in Brazil.

Analyzing the speeches of motoboys on field research and observation of their behavior in traffic, we hypothesized that for these people, the feeling of disqualification is so intense that one of contents that guides their identity construction is the vision of himself as someone whose life has no value. The loss of value of life as well as being directly linked to social and economic vision of disqualification, is linked to the loosening of other social ties, for which contributes the characteristics of motoboy activity as work disqualified.