Claire Edey Gamassou^{[1] [2]} and Arnaud Mias^[3]

An increasing number of employees in large companies are being offered managerial schemes presented as innovations that encourage their participation and contribute to their well-being. While some of these proposals, particularly when they are the subject of strong external communication, may be suspected of greatwashing (Vuattoux and Chakor, 2020) or even a form of organisational hypocrisy (Dumez, 2016), others may constitute a substantial element of the company’s strategy and be allocated substantial resources. The first three contributions in this fourth part deal with the latter type of arrangements and with the question of the democratisation of production relations, understood as the initiation of a movement to develop the employees’ capacity to discuss and act on the content of their work in an ordinary environment. The next two contributions deal with two other forms of work discussion that go beyond the boundaries of the enterprise and question the link between work and law (its production and mobilisation). The last chapter examines the effects of digital innovations on work and workers.

Alison Caillé and Christine Jeoffrion reveal the individual representations of the implementation of a so-called empowerment process, while Anca Boboc and Jean-Luc Metzger study the reactions to two experiments: a wall of ideas and innovation challenges. Cathel Kornig and Christophe Massot made experiments aimed at developing employees’ power of expression and action on the content of their work in health care institutions.

All the authors share an initial question: to what extent does the stated objective of employee participation serve the autonomous development of their activity? Knowing the importance of the joint development of skills and decision-making latitude to prevent the negative effects of work situations and promote well-being (Karasek, 1979; Deci and Ryan, 2011, p. 19), psychologists and sociologists question the scope of the measures studied in terms of the workers’ expression or action power. Without questioning the intention of the managers who initiated these approaches, the potential ambivalence of the tools developed with the manifest objectives of empowering the collaborators’ roles or commitment deserves attention, since the expectations of the latter are largely unknown. In the absence of open and free discussions on the organisation’s orientations or on the operationalisation of its strategic objectives, the procedures as well as the proposed support reveal the original limits of these innovations: conceived in a top-down manner, they encounter individual and professional barriers. For C. Kornig and C. Massot, it is a question of following a movement of democratisation of social relations at work through the collective reformulation of problems and the development of new forms of resolution, which can be applied in any organisation. The results show that the operators interviewed, at all hierarchical levels, are neither equal nor indifferent to decisions and tools aimed at empowering or encouraging them to propose projects: their resources or representations, either individual or shared, support their choice of whether or not to adhere to the proposed dynamic. As for the experiments aimed at encouraging health professionals to express themselves and act on the content of their work, they indeed seem likely to foster deliberation around a reformulation of the problems in terms of quality of work issues, but this process remains dependent on a form of hierarchical authorisation.

The possible levels of autonomy and aspiration to greater autonomy of employees are apprehended within the framework of the subordination link inherent in their status. The studies concern organisations in France, whose population is known both for the central place it attributes to work (Davoine and Méda, 2009) and for its demand to respect the rank occupied by each person (d’Iribarne, 1989). Some verbatims perfectly illustrate this attachment to the fact that the members of the organisation must assume the responsibilities specific to their hierarchical position. Consequently, the incentives for empowering workers, their participation or autonomy and even their integration in deliberation processes are in line with aspirations for the development of skills, but also with strong expectations in terms of clarity and stability of the work organisation framework.

The lack of difference between an empowering organisation and a classic organisation in terms of the effect of an empowering leadership on emotional commitment, as previously shown by A. Caillé and C. Jeoffrion (Caillé, Courtois, Galharret and Jeoffrion, 2020), and the existence of two behavioural profiles around participative procedures for producing innovations, identified by A. Boboc and J.-L. Metzger, could thus have a common explanation: when leaders engage the organisation in processes that seek the support of its members, it is the freedom that agents have to appreciate the interest of the changes in their own work that matters. The place of non-violent communication in the training accompanying the changes studied by A. Caillé and C. Jeoffrion would be counterintuitively similar to the role played by ‘facilitators’ in the systems described by A. Boboc and J.-L. Metzger, by securing the operators’ position in the organisation. Being heard when expressing one’s needs and seeing one’s proposals taken into account by experts are two strong forms of respect perception expected from the hierarchy and the organisation. Hence, as for the health workers interviewed by C. Kornig and C. Massot, their desire to continue the experiment can be read as a translation of this feeling of being taken into account. Feeling respected in one’s status as a worker, independently of an individual evaluation procedure, which too rarely takes into account the uncertainty in the results (Dehouck, Edey Gamassou and Lassagne, 2018), reinforces the recognition of the profession’s personal instance , which in its joints and disjoints with the impersonal, transpersonal, and interpersonal instances enables the construction of psychosocial resources (Miossec, 2011; Edey Gamassou and Clot, 2014) and to care for work (Miossec, Donnay, Pelletier and Zittoun, 2010).

According to Mintzberg (2019), effective organisations, regardless of their species, share a strong sense of communityship that translates into energy, commitment from people, and a collective interest in what they do: ‘They do not need to be formally empowered because they are naturally committed. They respect the organisation because it respects them. They are not afraid of being fired because a leader has not achieved the planned numerical targets^[4]’. The employees interviewed by Anca Boboc, Alison Caillé, Christine Jeoffrion, Jean-Luc Metzger, Cathel Kornig and Christophe Massot adopted various stances in relation to their employers’ decisions to invite deliberation, but they seem to share this sense of communityship.

The next two contributions deal with forms of work discussion that are not the result of managerial initiatives: the object of study of Béatrice Delay and Anne-Lise Ulmann originated in the heart of State services, while Jean-Philippe Tonneau exploited archives outside the company to try to understand the dynamics of recourse to the law by representative bodies. In the last chapter, Elodie Chevallier and Jean-Claude Coallier show through a literature review that digital innovations can modify not only working conditions but also the nature and purpose of work.

B. Delay and A.-L. Ulmann study the experimental approach that preceded the inclusion of On-the-job Training Actions (AFEST, after its initials in French) in the reform of the French vocational training system, as per the 5 September 2018 law ‘For the freedom to choose one’s professional future’. This inclusion marks a break with the dominant educational model of training courses outside the workplace and aims in particular to support training practices deemed more suitable for the world of VSEs and SMEs. Inspired by the pragmatist tradition and Dewey’s philosophy in particular, this contribution questions the democratic horizon of this form of experimentation in public action, in which the authors have taken part actively. It traces the original investigative process initiated by the State services, in a break with the dominant mode of production of public norms, which consisted in understanding the problems associated with the virtual non-existence of training modes linked to work before producing solutions. Indeed, behind the institutional changes brought about by the recognition and promotion of AFEST, the deliberation process that preceded the law raises the question of the conditions for a democratic approach to work in public action. B. Delay and A.-L. Ulmann stress the need to deal with the uncertainty and complexity of reality, the conditions for a deliberative work that does not aim to harmonise positions, and the loosening of time constraints.

The penultimate chapter, written by J.-P. Tonneau, deals with the recourse to law by staff representatives and trade unions in restructuring situations to contest redundancies. Attentive to the use of law ‘from below’, the author analyses two ‘cases’ concerning the national direction of Renault in the 1970s and 1980s. He is particularly interested in the reasons for resorting to the law and in a militant lawyer, Tiennot Grumbach, whose archives constitute the empirical material on which the analysis is based. J.-P. Tonneau shows in particular how recourse to the courts is aimed less at preventing dismissals than at ‘seeking resources’ to find solutions for the company and work situations: formulating the injustices experienced, setting a framework for collective mobilisation, establishing a ‘balance of power’, influencing the negotiations in progress, but also having the feeling of being ‘heard’, and regaining a certain ‘dignity’. Recourse to the law would then obey logics that are paradoxically not very far from those that motivate employees’ commitment to the managerial mechanisms studied in the first chapters of this part.

In the last chapter, at the end of their literature review, E. Chevallier and J.-C. Coallier show that work can be both enriched and impoverished by the increasing role of digital technology. They therefore propose that the notion of ‘meaning’ of work should be further explored in the study of the process of successful digital-based change.

Bibliography

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