Abstract
Just as Fordisme produced the “new worker” (Gramsci), lean management transforms people. Disruptures at work between the promises (autonomy and responsibilities) and the reality (new and increasingly binding “meta-rules”) lead to dislocation of the new worker under lean management regimes. Now, workers have to learn to (re)construct him or herself as a divided entity by self-transformation (the “new worker”). Nevertheless, these transformations are not unambiguous. While employees accept them, there are compensations such as workplace “social games, the recognition in work which leads to the reconstruction of diversified professional identities. We can thus explain why certain workers accept the new conditions, others not and moreover, why some people carry stress at work (until suicide) while others adapt.
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Notes
- 1.
See the Nouvelle Revue de Travail, 3/2013, http://nrt.revues.org/.
- 2.
Despite the slowdown in many people’s career progression, most jobs today offer the possibility of an upwards professional trajectory. Unsurprisingly, the slope of progression tends to vary depending on an individual’s initial wage. Having said that, in some branches like construction, logistics, catering or industrial cleaning, unskilled jobs offer absolutely no promotion prospects at all.
- 3.
It is clearly in personal services and user hospitality functions—both characterised by high labour costs—that the most powerful meta-rules can be found, even if they are never discussed explicitly by management or among colleagues. Meta-rules tend to receive little attention but this is because they reveal the huge disconnect between how work is described and what it really entails.
- 4.
Analysis here focuses on paths towards (or perceptions of) work as confirmed in interviews or communicated in texts. This involves more than mere perceptions of the reality of work. Indeed, the scope of the construct is still growing. Beyond or against this work deterioration process, later chapters will look at other perceptions of work ranging from resistence to degradation to possibilities of satisfaction at work, even where it is monotonous and repetitive.
- 5.
Interview with Francesca Biagi, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Freudian School (8 January 2015).
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
In this section, influenced by psychoanalysis, we frequently use the concept of the subject to delineate the new worker.
- 8.
Everyone lives with their own “narcissistic flaw” but the harder it is to bridge the gaps in this flaw, i.e. the greater the abyss, the harder it is for them to cope. For subjects experiencing a minimal flaw, fighting to bring both sides of their selves together actually gives them strength and energy, including because they experience success through this mending action and want to do it again and again.
- 9.
Interview with Francesca Biagi, 18 June 2015.
- 10.
18 June 2015 interview. Enrapturing has the connotation of an illegal encapturing here. Psychoanalysts go even further by asserting that this kidnapping corresponds to an attempt by the company to appropriate the subject’s “narcissistic flaw” in three dimensions:
-
Timewise, with subjects being under the full control of just-in-time and flux tendu that prohibit any discontinuities, meaning that people have been totally appropriated by management,
-
Groupwork which remedies the flaw through a spatial organisation to win the production challenge,
-
Individual appraisals, where anyone who tries to escape is caught. Like an analyst, the company seeks to “value what remains of the subject”, i.e. those aspects that remain visible. In this way, individual appraisals tend to turn intimate objects into shared objects that are no longer singular.
-
- 11.
The verb “adjust” has been chosen intentionally because it resonates with the theme of play at work (Durand 2007; Cru, 2014) both in its playful dimension (for those who have the resources, reconstructing oneself around this divide can be a game) and in its freedom dimension (the space between two sliding parts)—without forgetting constraints like feeling disconnected or the ability to mobilise available personal resources.
- 12.
The most frequent issue is the adequacy of resources. It is also the easiest to highlight. Similar causes of frustration include vague objectives, self-assessments lacking any set objectives or, at an extreme, situations where the employee has been sidelined.
- 13.
The chapter is partially inspired from the conclusion to a collectively written book edited by Jean-Yves Causer, Jean-Pierre Durand and William Gasparini entitled Identités au travail (Octarès 2009).
- 14.
This is redolent of certain studies by Bernard Lahire (1998), especially his Portraits sociologiques (Nathan 2002). The radical difference here is that despite their good scientific intentions, findings drawn from his variant of psychological sociology emphasize individuals’ singularities to such an extent that they under-estimate social causalities.
- 15.
This leads to a critique of utilitarianism, although questions might be asked about the struggle for symbolic recognition, which is also very self-interested and fits the kind of utilitarianism that people tend to denounce (evoking the possiblity of other struggles relating, for instance, to symbolic interests).
- 16.
The aggregation concept is only used on the book’s final page in reference to Mead and Durkheim’s recognition of the division of labour’s collective finality, “leading to aggregated forces enabling all subjects to feel a sense of esteem”. Significantly, however, “Such feelings of injustice can lead to collective action with many subjects perceving it as typifying a social situation” (Honneth 2008, 197). This is redolent of methodological individualism and the approach taken by Raymond Boudon (1977) who—based on individuals’ “good reasons to act”—showed how the aggregation of their actions could be used to develop collective conduct.
- 17.
Bourdieusians interested in work-related studies will probably want to look at the ways in which work generates and disseminates symbolic capital.
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Durand, JP. (2019). The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition. In: Creating the New Worker . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_3
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