Work in contemporary societies has come to suffer several processes of change that in the context of the current economic and employment crisis (Veloso and Oliveira 2010), demands equating the structuring of identities that is built, destroyed and modified around work. Work continues to play an essential role both in the stability and in the appropriation of meaning in individual and social group trajectories (Veloso 2009) and in the social recognition mechanisms (Honneth 2005). Consequently, an examination of representations of work is a theme of great scientific and social importance. This research project seeks to analyse the social processes in the formation of work identities in Portugal and to recreate the resulting narratives that shape it. The project takes social representation as its theoretical-methodological basis (Moscovici 2000). Based on an analysis of a body of industrial films, which will allow us to highlight the main continuities and discontinuities of these narratives between the end of the 1920s and the 1980s, the project will follow a theoretically and methodologically innovative path. Taking work as its central focus, it will review the research already carried on social identities, work memories and identities and the relationship between technique and work(Veloso 2009; Marques 2011; Vidal 2006), to highlight the role of social memory in the construction of identities. The collective/social memory (Halbwachs 1994) is the central axis of the project, since it is this that will allow us to demonstrate, at both the individual and collective level, the social processes in the construction of work representation. While previous research has favoured the ethnographic method (Marques 2011), the intensive observation of work contexts (Veloso 2009) or archival analysis (Vidal 2006), this project proposes taking cinema as its starting point - and more particularly, industrial documentaries that were made in Portugal for both private and public bodies. ...