Jean-Pierre Durand

CREATING
THE NEW
WORKER
Work, Consumption
and Subordination
Creating the New Worker
 Jean-Pierre Durand

Creating the New

Worker
Work, Consumption
and Subordination
Jean-Pierre Durand
University of Évry Paris-Saclay
Évry, France

ISBN 978-3-319-93259-0 ISBN 978-3-319-93260-6 (eBook)

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 No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine
things that can be done. I don’t like work - no man does - but I like what is
in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself not
for others - what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere
show, and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899.
 Foreword

Jean-Pierre Durand is one of France’s leading labour sociologists and

was amongst the first to introduce the Anglo Saxon labour process
debate, including the work of Michael Burawoy, to a Francophone audi-
ence. In this very refreshing new work, he offers a timely response to
the somewhat tired nature of the debate on management and employee
responses and social forms of labour control in the UK and the USA.
In this highly original work, Durand develops Gramsci’s notion of
the New Worker beyond the Fordian principle of the mass society and
the mass worker. The book’s focus then shifts to the fate of the new
worker in Late Capitalism. A Gramscian critique of contemporary pat-
terns of capitalist labour control and Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to
explore the development of new forms of social subordination as well as
the context for social emancipation. This departure offers an intriguing
background from which to proceed to an updating of Gramsci’s con-
cept for the contemporary world, which, depending on how we look
at it, is certainly a neoliberal one. Durand highlights the ways in which
management and the lighter literature fails to—or does not attempt—
situate the idea of the New Worker in the historical context of neolib-
eral reconstruction. The argument begins with the idea that the New

vii
viii   Foreword

Worker is an ambivalent construct which, though undermined by var-

iant patterns of subordination (reflected, inter alia, by workplace indi-
vidual dissent and suicide and extra workplace individual pathologies),
is nevertheless able to contest various neoliberal tropes. While these
tropes are challenged from within contemporary social and economic
cultures, at the same time they shroud worker—management engage-
ments defined, as they always are, by relations of conflict and consensus.
Thus, by accounting for variant patterns of sublimation Durand makes
concrete the changes in the relationships between the evolving nature of
capitalism and the creation of the new woman and the new man.
These changes embrace work and consumption and specifically in terms
of their influence on the ‘subject’. One of Durand’s concerns is to make
sense of the ways in which contemporary models of capitalism and the
‘subject’ have changed over the last three decades. Specifically, what might
be the links between production and consumption in this transformation?
How might we understand the consumption of (in)tangible goods against
the background neoliberal subordination within and beyond work?
In contrast to Boltanski and Chiapello, for example, who see the
1970s as time in which Fordism was reduced and replaced by network
organisations that offered a form of pseudo space for free action, or
actor-centred action, Durand argues quite the contrary. Rather, he sit-
uates subordination not in discursive management agenda trumpeting
a refashioning of (supposedly) oppositional discourses, but rather in
socio-economic, cultural and psychological traps which limit the scope
for oppositional action. These limits result directly from the instantia-
tion of material-organisational structures which act in particular ways
to constrain, by configuring, everyone’s behaviour. Even if one might
argue that the discourses of Fordist rigidity were giving way to flatter
hierarchies, or no hierarchies, the reality is that hierarchy, exclusion,
worker control and social subordination were, and are, being extended:
Fordism, in the sense of dominant class hierarchies, never went away.
This argument, centred on the reconstitution of class subordination,
is the leitmotif of the book. Thus, the notion of the social patterning
of contemporary subordinations is developed through an engagement
in highly pertinent debates on the evolution of management think-
ing, management practices and employee responses with compelling
 Foreword   ix

empirical examples drawn from a range of sectors including aerospace,

automotives, office work, job centres, rail transport (the SNCF) and
advertising. It is through an exploration of the fate of labour in these
sectors that Durand is able to interpret the increased incidence of work-
place stress in France and elsewhere together with the shocking rise in
work-related suicides. The latter in particular he attributes to new pro-
duction regimes. In the Anglo Saxon literature, the latter are described
typically, and at times uncritically, as forms of lean production. Durand
picks up on the idea he developed in a previous work on patterns of
labour subordination in capitalism using the concept of flux tendu.
What does he mean by flux tendu and in what ways does it vary from
the Japanese concept of just-in-time? Why does the concept of lean pro-
duction appear at the beginning of 1990s and how does it seemingly
resolve a number of problems associated with the crises of Taylorism
and Fordism? What are its main principles? The book addresses these
concepts in order to consider how work organisations and labour pro-
cesses have changed over several decades and the new ways in which
blue and white collar workers are mobilised. In this new organisation,
middle management and supervisors are—like other employees—
committed to other working modalities. They sometimes doubt their
new functions: they live rather insecurely in their new circumstances,
and it is by explaining the social and psychological nature of these inse-
curities that Durand grapples with the trauma of workplace exclusion
with all its social and psychological consequences.
The book concludes by offering us two scenarios: one is the continua-
tion of the current situation with the disasters of ecological destruction,
forced migration and inequality (with a return to urban violence) which
are entirely predictable; the second scenario suggests an enchanted future
when all these questions are resolved by social innovation and the super-
session of capitalism. The question of plausibility is central to his answer.

Edinburgh, Scotland Prof. Paul Stewart

Senior Research Professor,
Sociology of Employment,
Grenoble School of Management
(GEM)—Université Grenoble Alpes
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Gramsci and the New Worker 3
The New Worker Today 7
References 11

2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution 13

Historical Reasons for Lean Production’s Emergence
and Diffusion 14
Systemic Efficiency and Lean Production 16
Managing Within an Enclave 34
References 42

3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied

Recognition 45
Lean Management’s Production of the New Worker 46
The Process of Constructing Identity at Work 69
Recognition at Work 77
References 99

xi
xii   Contents

4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work 103

Logistics as an Example of Industrial Workers Operating
in a Service Activity 104
The Taylorisation of Industrial Design-Related
Intellectual Work 120
The Normalisation of Research and Development 140
References 156

5 The New Worker in Service Activities 159

Revisiting Theoretical Approaches to the Service Sector 161
The Possibility of Non-quality Work in the Service Sector 179
The Hidden Functions of Indicateurs and Personal Appraisals 205
References 228

6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities 231

Factors Preventing the Rationalisation of Service Activities 233
When Work Is Done by Users and Customers 244
Inventing Piece-Workers in the Service Sector 264
Service Quality’s Inevitable Deterioration 291
References 307

7 Two Scenarios for the Future 311

The Dark Scenario of Social Regression 312
The Bright Scenario of a Rosy Future 353
References 370

8 Conclusion: What Comes After Work 373

References 377

Bibliography 379

Index 395
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Identity and recognising at work 75

Fig. 3.2 Dynamics of identity at work 91
Fig. 5.1 Defining a service activity (Source J. Gadrey, op. cit, p. 19) 166
Fig. 5.2 Systemic representation of service activities
(Source J. Gadrey, op. cit and J.-P. Durand) 176
Fig. 5.3 A deeply embedded service relationship 182

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 5.1 New classification of services 163

Table 6.1 Creation of extra surplus-value 261

xv
 1
Introduction

The global world has entered into a cycle of a systemic depression cycle
characterised by extremely weak growth, environmental degradation (for
which they bear enormous responsibility), the massive destruction of
skilled employment and a crisis of work. Acts of terrorism committed by
a few thousand religious fundamentalists and accelerating cross-border
migration have strengthened populist and demagogic right-wing voices.
Nonsensical ideas are being bandied about by all social classes.
Work, as the activity that structures capitalism both socially and psycho-
logically, is also being undermined, affecting first and foremost the young-
est and the oldest jobseekers but also many people who have been forced
in mid-career to seek refuge in atypical activities such as self-employment.
Questions raised by these developments include to what extent does
a clear perception exists of the radical transformations that humankind
faces at present. To what extent does the current situation correspond
to the advent of a new type of worker in Gramsci’s sense of the term.
More broadly, what kinds of specificities are associated with the new
type of worker today. One recurring theme is humankind’s adaptation
to whatever conditions of production and consumption prevail at a par-
ticular moment. That being the case—and given the portentous Fordian

© The Author(s) 2019 1

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_1
2   J.-P. Durand

transformations that Gramsci saw as shaping a “new kind of worker

and human being”—what remains to be determined are the condi-
tions shaping twenty-first century humankind, construed here as a force
capable of creating its own destiny. Above and beyond mere technical
innovation, it would also be useful to take a closer look at the anthropo-
logical transformations underpinning the dual phenomenon of globali-
sation and the neoliberal financialisation of the economy. This should
provide insight into what kinds of human beings are emerging in and
through modern work, or on its margins, where they are unemployed,
as embodied in (and transmitted through) the consumption of not only
industrial goods but of services as well.
The book starts by highlighting the primacy of human beings’ phys-
ical, moral and intellectual adaptation to the demands of work, against
a background defined by the ongoing search for greater productive effi-
ciency. This adaptation does not only materialise in people’s place of
work or in centres of education and training but also through a mul-
titude of channels active in the private and public spheres of consump-
tion. Understanding this anthropological transformation requires as
detailed an analysis as possible of the demands associated with the work
and production processes involved in making industrial goods and ser-
vices. This is because these demands themselves depend on the way new
types of workers are being modeled. The present book therefore analy-
ses, on the one hand, the changing needs of work in light of the qual-
ities and competencies that these adaptive employees are supposed to
possess, and on the other hand in light of the enthusiasm (or recalci-
trance) that men and women manifest when transforming into a new
kind of worker who has become a figurehead for a new century.
The book’s introduction returns to Gramsci’s writings, and specifically
to when he began scrutinising this topic during the decades following
the advent of Fordism. This will be complemented by more recent think-
ing formulated during the 1970s at a time when Fordism was undergo-
ing major crisis. This will explain also why the book’s reference to the
new type of worker excludes developments associated with totalitarian
real socialist or fascist regimes (Germany, Italy) that disappeared even as
American-style liberal democracies have continued to develop the capital-
ist order that Gramsci was already talking about nearly a century ago.
 1 Introduction    
3

Gramsci and the New Worker

Thrown into prison by Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci nevertheless kept
himself informed of political and social developments, building up in
this way the kind of overview that is a prerequisite for all philosophi-
cal thinking. In an article entitled “Americanism and Fordism” (1934),
he showed how the US automotive industry needed a workforce char-
acterised by its regularity, stability and discipline in order to satisfy
the assembly needs of the Rouge River automobile factory in Detroit.
Trying to reduce staff turnover that had reached nearly 300% per
annum, Henry Ford suggested a doubling of wages. This had an imme-
diate effect, with staff turnover plummeting to just a few percentage
points. Having said that (and as noted by Benjamin Coriat), not all
workers enjoyed the highly publicised new wage of $5 a day. Excluded
categories were comprised of:

– Workers with fewer than six months of service;

– Workers under the age of 21;
– Women, because Ford wanted them to get married.

Ford also required ‘good morals’, meaning key qualities such as clean-
liness and reserve, as well as abstention from tobacco and alcohol. In
addition, “gambling was forbidden as was going to bars, especially
gentlemen’s clubs” (Coriat 1979, 96). To ensure workers’ quality out-
put and discipline, Ford recruited university experts (sociologists, psy-
chologists, psycho-technicians) and created a sociology department1
replete with inspectors whose main mission was to “check on workers
by going into their homes and other places where they spent time to
monitor their general behaviour and more particularly how they spent
their wages” (Coriat 1979, 96).

1According to H. Beynon as quoted in B. Coriat. c.f. H. Beynon, Working for Ford, Penguin,
1973, it is worth reflecting upon the use of sociology and other human sciences (such as ethnol-
ogy) in English and French colonies. Note that when this discipline is used, it tends to happen
very ex post facto.
4   J.-P. Durand

Whereas in the early twenty-first century United States, “Assembly

line work required factory discipline superior to that characteris-
ing the mass of unskilled workers at the time” (Bleitrach and Chenu
1979, 50)—particularly immigrants coming from poor rural European
regions—Ford also advocated discipline in the spaces where his work-
force reproduced. The ‘high wages’ of $5 a day became

a state instrument used to both select a workforce adapted to the pro-

duction and labour systems, and also to maintain its stability. In actual
fact, high wages became a double edge sword. Workers were supposed to
spend then ‘rationally’ to maintain, renew and where possible increase
their physical and nervous effectiveness (and not destroy or undermine
this). All of which explains Ford’s fight against alcohol, which he viewed
as the factor most likely to destroy his workforce. He made this battle
into an affair of state. (Gramsci 1979, 700)

In addition to alcohol and its legal prohibition, Gramsci was also ques-
tioning here the treatment of sexuality, portrayed as the second enemy
of the nervous energy needed for good factory work.

Chasing after women took up too much leisure time. The reason is that
these new kinds of industrial workers were repeating, in another form,
what peasants were doing back in their villages. The relative stability of
peasants’ sexual unions was closely related to the kind of labour system
found in the countryside. Peasants would go home after a long tiring day
at work, seeking ‘love that was easy and always available’ in the words of
Horace, meaning that men had no desire to court any women met by
chance. Instead they would love their wife because it was certain that
she would be present and not disappear, i.e. not put on any airs and go
through the whole show of pretending to have to be seduced (but actu-
ally violated) in order for him to possess her. This was tantamount to a
mechanisation of the sexual function, although in reality it embodied
a new form of sexual union lacking the ‘brilliant colours’ and romantic
trappings associated with middle-class (and even ‘lazy Bohemian’) love.
Clearly the new industrialism preferred monogamy so workers would no
longer waste nervous energy in a disorderly but exciting search for occa-
sional sexual satisfaction. After all, anyone going to work after a night
 1 Introduction    
5

of ‘debauchery’ was unable to perform well. Passion came to be seen as

incompatible with the timed productive gestures that perfectly oiled sys-
tems needed to succeed.2 (Gramsci 1979, 701)

This new type of worker was largely being (re-)constructed in his

private lives under the watchful eye of employers surveilling their
morality. The discipline required for the workplace was merged with
workers’ domestic lives. Indeed, the family space is where this was
supposed to happen. Gramsci took the vision even further, with his
premonition that, “Psycho-physical balance is not only external and
mechanical but also internalised, with workers suggesting this them-
selves instead of having it imposed on them from the outside and por-
trayed as a new form of society characterised by specific and original
methods” (ibid., 699). With this early vision of the consumer soci-
ety (and of uni-dimensional human beings), Gramsci was question-
ing the harmony and balance between the space of production versus
the space of consumption, not in economic terms as the School of
Regulation would do four decades later (Aglietta 1977) but from a
moral and disciplinary perspective. What he then established was an
intrinsic relationship between the demands of production and work,
on one hand, and workers’ preparation for such demands through
their daily lives, on the other. Clearly this was very different from the
idea that workers were being shaped or socially moulded in such a way
as to respond to the needs of industry. This is especially so because
it was always possible for some individuals to escape the ‘system’ by
refusing to take part in it or by abandoning it (albeit at great opportu-
nity cost given the high wages that Ford paid).
At the same time, Gramscian analysis featured a modicum of func-
tionalism with its assertion that to in order further bolster its own devel-
opment prospects, capitalism produces rules governing workers’ lives.

2Readers might refer to Jacques Frémontier’s book (1980) on the culture or morality of retention
in the French working class; “The strength of desire and even greater strength of the repression of
desire produce a discourse and behaviour sublimination that might be construed as the very foun-
dation of ‘working class culture’” (p. 16).
6   J.-P. Durand

The idea here was that the invisible hand of free competition (or indeed
a great Organiser) plan the ideological and moral production of capi-
talist society in such a way as to sustain efficient, smooth and seamless
production for as long as possible.
The reality is a succession of trial and error adjustments tanta-
mount to a kind of self-poïesis or self-organisation (Varela 1988, 61).
Recurring critical antinomical resolutions have failed to address fun-
damental contradictions, explaining in turn a slew of more or less seri-
ous crises that the present book will use to contextualise the world of
work. In other words, despite the imperfections of the functionalist
interpretation, it is still worth analysing to what extent the new type of
worker employed by Ford and his successors were being prepared for
production activities through their private lifestyles, including as afore-
mentioned through the prohibition of alcohol, a sexuality more or less
regulated by marriage, regular working schedules and controlled sleep
schedules.
Gramsci’s merit is to have already perceived nearly a century ago
the existence of a close relationship between one type of industry
(mass industry) and controls placed on workers’ morality and psyches.
Another excerpt from his aforementioned text highlighted, for instance,
Taylor’s brutal cynicism in trying to discount workers’ professional and
distinctively human qualities (the active engagement of their intelli-
gence, imagination and initiative) by reducing production operations
to their physical and machine-related aspects alone. Gramsci’s emphasis
here was on the close link between production conditions and domestic
and neighborhood routines that used a stringent supervisory structure
to get workers to adopt a certain behaviour, to wit, stability. The refer-
ence was to Fordian habitats, a term used to characterise the sometimes
very accelerated construction of dispositions needed to keep people in
a state where they could keep their jobs. Much later but under similar
conditions, D. Bleitrach and A. Chenu (1979, 45) showed that stability
is what makes it possible to capitalise on peoples’ experience or acquire
the dexterity needed to achieve expected outcomes. In this sense,
Fordian workers became the “trained gorillas” that Taylor had dreamt
about a few years before Ford created the conditions where this might
happen. Gramsci wrote that, “Hegemony is born in the factory”, with
 1 Introduction    
7

the advent of stable, sober, monogamous and disciplined workers soon

becoming a ‘fact of civilisation’. The relevant approach here is therefore
anthropological, involving different preparations that while varying
depending on the historical era all serve to adapt humans to different
modes of production and consumption, thereby transforming them
over time.

The New Worker Today

Almost all contemporary research into the sociological, economic or
psychological aspects of work highlights the increasing responsibili-
ties that employees are expected to assume as well as their expanding
areas of autonomy. These conclusions tend to be applied to all sectors
of activity but mainly refer to the qualifications and different func-
tions carried out on factory floors or in offices or warehouses, etc.
The vision here is that above and beyond certain very strict rules (that
still exist for safety and quality reasons), employees tend to prioritise
objectives rather than procedures. Certainly this is the main transfor-
mation that the author of the present book conceptualised more than
20 years ago as a “new productive model” or “new productive sys-
tem” (Boyer and Durand 1997). Clearly a more appropriate descrip-
tion can and should be found, if only because the transformations in
question cannot remain new forever. Talking about post-Fordism does
not work either, because despite the crisis of a Fordian type of mac-
roeconomic regulation, there is no doubt that productive flow prin-
ciples have not only spread throughout industry but also permeate
the production of goods and services in the form of flux tendu (tight
flow) concept that the book’s later chapters will interpret from a social
perspective. Nor does the term of post-Taylorism apply here. A few
observers may have mistakenly declared that Taylorism is dead but
the fact remains that most commentators and analysts (and manag-
ers) accept that the principle of a division of labour pitting organis-
ers vs. operatives will survive as an integral part of capitalist logic. At
best, “flexible Taylorism” might include feedback mechanisms mak-
ing it easier to respond to volatile demand. Yet Toyotism is also an
8   J.-P. Durand

insufficient concept, in particular because it is too closely tied to a

mobilisation regime that is very specific in both geographical (Japan)
and historical (post-World War II) terms, and relates to one particular
industry, namely the automobile. In short, there is at this level a kind
of taxonomical vacuum affecting understanding of an object that is
itself relatively well-defined, at least in production and work organi-
sation terms, and in terms of the employee mobilisation regime that
is so closely associated with it. This explains why the present book
intends to rely on the construct of a new productive model (or sys-
tem). In the absence of anything better, it might be referred to, albeit
imperfectly, as a neo-Fordian construct.
Returning to the debate about employees’ increased responsibili-
ties or extended autonomy, it is important to point out that this tends
nowadays to relate to the scope of the autonomy in question and to
the responsibilities that workers are being given. Most findings from
work in this field focus on the control and management of autonomy.
Questions at this level include what means managers use to ensure
work’s quantitative and qualitative outcomes using the reporting or
evaluation tools at their disposal; the secondary or unexpected effects of
these tools; and whether greater responsibility and autonomy are neces-
sary for production into a new mobilisation regime (or both at once).
The present book will seek to transcend these debates or formulate them
differently, mobilising the approach that Gramsci initiated and focusing
on the creation of the new types of workers required for a particular
production system (Fordian, in his studies). This starts with work situ-
ations in companies but also public authorities.3 The goal is to discover
which demands are associated with which productive systems (under-
stood here as ensembles comprised of physical and intellectual resources
and management paradigms) and their effects on employees. The idea
here is that employees:

3These are privately or state-owned sectors along with central and local public authorities. All

have more or less adopted the same efficiency principles. Some do this to satisfy shareholders,
others to cut operating costs—a priority for all governements seeking to reduce public deficits (an
example in France being the RGPP Révision générale of politiques publiques [“General revision of
public policy”] package and its effects on budgets and working conditions in the public sector).
 1 Introduction    
9

– Must be capable of showing initiative and assuming responsibility,

meaning coping with unforeseen events, usually with resources that
are insufficient for what the situation requires, i.e., they will work
through whatever happens. This vision is encompassed in the notion
of capabilities signifying aptitudes and skill sets but also people’s
desire to deal with events and their commitment to do so;
– Must also accept the limitations or frameworks that have been
imposed upon them and impede them doing their work. Such frame-
works are necessary to ensure a quality production of goods or ser-
vices. They are also specified in the nature of the capitalist production
relationship determining an activity’s objectives—without forgetting
the organisation of production and the work itself (including experts
and hierarchy), all of which serves to shape potential intervention
spaces.

To satisfy these contradictory demands, the wage-labour nexus (or more

concretely the company or administration) has invented the new worker
who is supposed to combine a desire to act and do things with a sense
of initiative adding to his own sense of enthusiasm—even as he is being
constantly impeded by an organisation or hierarchy that handcuffs
them yet to which he is supposed to remain entirely devoted. Hence
the first premise of the book, being that the new worker is constituted
through work (and by the way some work is organised today), some-
thing that moulds him in turn so that he can accommodate all the con-
tradictory requirements that he has to deal with when carrying out his
work. The new type of worker is divided individual, torn on one hand
between self-expression and a sense of fulfillment and, on the other,
by the way in which his activities is framed by a heteronomous organ-
isation he probably views as being less rigid than it really is. Given the
necessities of modern neo-Fordian productive organisation, this divided
person is also being invented through the very productive organisation
in which she finds herself. This constitutes the focus of the book’s first
section.
The second premise is congruent with Gramsci’s intuition that the
new worker is also being prepared in consumption spaces (or what
Marx described as spaces of the reproduction of labour), being the loci
10   J.-P. Durand

where value is realised. The idea here is not to construe this phenom-
enon as an example of subjects being tamed through consumption,
advertising or media—all conclusions found in a number of other stud-
ies. Instead, it is to see in what way the dislocation of the new worker
might also be produced in the way in which he use services more than
in his consumption of industrial goods. Subjects are being asked to real-
ise themselves (e.g. in cultural industries, through gaming, by going
online, etc.) yet all these promises remain unsatisfied. A similar struc-
ture appears in work activities and certain service activities, with calls
for self-realisation falling short for a number of reasons, starting with a
deterioration in service quality—something that clearly requires expla-
nation. Expressed differently, learning about the divisions afflicting the
new type of productive worker can be developed by analysing the dis-
connection between the promises that have been made to people when
consuming a service and the reality. In companies and public authorities
alike, actors are dealing with impersonal responses. They sense that they
must accept this as a fate, as embodied in the unfulfilled promise that
a service makes and in the limited (and sometimes closed) framework
shaping a given work activity.
The third premise relates to citizens, workers and consumers’ dif-
ferent reactions and behaviour when dealing with these situations.
What requires explanation at this level is why some individuals mud-
dle through whereas others fail when faced with the kind of disloca-
tion required for today’s work organisations. There is also the question
of how survivors experience this dislocation and how they cope with it.
Without rehearsing all the recent literature in these areas which empha-
size the malaise of work with respect to psychosocial risks (including
workplace suicides), the book looks at the close relationship between
the divides (dislocations) found amongst this new kind of worker
and these pathologies born out of work. The desire to do well and the
impossibility of achieving this certainly play a role in the personal crises
suffered by workers.
The book’s first chapters characterise working conditions ever since
the advent of lean production, imported from Japan around the last
decade of the twentieth century. The goal is to ascertain any revolution-
ary characteristics that break with a traditional “scientific organisation
 1 Introduction    
11

of work” and use these attributes to explain how the new worker is pro-
duced. Ensuing chapters offer a detailed analysis of how professional
identities have been destroyed without any conditions emerging to
renew their recognition. This has led to the new type of worker being
deeply dispossessed of their work due to unprecedented rationalisation
trajectories. Nowadays, designers and other intellectual workers suffer
the same fate as operatives, industrial workers or office employees. In
a society where service activities have more or less replaced the factory
floor, rationalisation has devalued many if not most jobs. Of course, this
unhappy outcome is totally at odds with the optimism that had first
greeted the dawn of the information revolution. In those cases where
rationalisation has encountered resistance because certain functions
have preserved a modicum of intuitive creativity, profitability impera-
tives have spawned the invention of new forms of work similar to the
piece-work that was so ubiquitous in the last ago. Paving alternative
paths revealing the possibilities that technology and human inventive-
ness allow for, the book concludes with two scenarios; grey social regres-
sion; vs. a bright hopeful future. The question then becomes which of
these two outcomes is more likely.

References
Aglietta, M. (1977). Régulation et crises du capitalisme. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
Bleitrach, D., & Chenu, A. (1979). L’usine et la vie. Luttes régionales: Marseille
et Fos. Paris: Editions François Maspéro.
Boyer, R., & Durand, J.-P. (1997). After Fordism. Basingstoke: MacMillan.
Coriat, B. (1979). L’atelier et le chronomètre. Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur.
Frémontier, J. (1980). La vie en bleu. Voyage en culture ouvrière. Paris: Editions
Fayard.
Gramsci, A. (1979 [1934]). Américanisme et fordisme. In Antonio Gramsci
dans le texte. Paris: Editions sociales.
Varela, F. J. (1988). Connaître les sciences cognitives. Tendances et perspectives.
Paris: Le Seuil.
 2
Lean Management:
The Invisible Revolution

Since the early 1990s, Western companies (followed later by public

authorities) have undergone a veritable organisational revolution, one
whose incrementalism has often prevented observers from noticing
how radically things have actually changed. The first part of this chap-
ter shows why lean production, later transformed into lean manage-
ment, was imported from Japan to the West at a particular moment in
the history of the production of goods and services. The timing is key
in terms of the questions to which lean production responds, as well
as the problems it seeks to address. The chapter’s second section then
uses this historical and organisational interpretation to devise an analyt-
ical grid accounting for these significant changes in work and of work,
something particularly useful when explaining technologically advanced
countries’ huge loss of jobs, mainly in the industrial sector. The analyti-
cal grid developed here will also help to clarify how productive workers
have changed and why this has become a revolution that cannot say its
name (because it does not accord with the interests of the vast majority
of either employed or ‘independent’ workers). Lastly, the chapter’s final
section shows how managers have also been affected by the perpetua-
tion of a command system whose ultimate purpose is being questioned

© The Author(s) 2019 13

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_2
14   J.-P. Durand

by more and more people, causing a sort of workplace malaise that is

increasingly convergent with workers’ experience. All of these analytical
possibilities pave the way for the next chapter’s discussions about the
invention of the new worker.

Historical Reasons for Lean Production’s

Emergence and Diffusion
Without exploring the history of lean production in detail (see Durand
2007), it is important to explain the global success of a university
text that had extraordinary resonance. Published in 1990 by Womack
et al. and written by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), the book tried to understand the Japanese produc-
tion model’s competitive advantages in comparison with the Fordist
system that characterised Western economies at the time. Japanese
automakers were making money by manufacturing in small series, an
approach that is very much at odds with Fordian principles based on
mass production and large series manufacturing. Between 1950 and
1960, nine Japanese automakers covered the full spectrum of vehicle
models, operating inside a very narrow domestic market that had been
damaged by the recent war. They needed to learn how to produce small
series of models profitably. The principles they developed as a result
emphasized resource savings, less waste and quality production the first
time around—all of which culminated in a concept that the Americans
would call lean production, replete with certain overtones of frugality.
When the MIT book came out in 1990, the crisis of capital accu-
mulation that had started in the West during the 1970s was in full flow
and wreaking havoc on the virtuous Fordian circles that were supposed
to accompany mass production and consumption (Aglietta 1977; Boyer
and Saillard 1995; Boyer and Durand 1997). To cope with diminishing
opportunities in their home markets, leading European and American
industrialists began diversifying their product offers. This kind of diver-
sification was very expensive, however, and could sometimes under-
mine quality. It is against this backdrop that the “Japanese model”, as
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
15

re-constructed and systematized by MIT, was seen by many as a remedy,

ostensibly because it was the solution that Japanese industry had found
for its own problems. Hence the model’s rapid adoption by the Western
automotive industry, with European and American interests undertak-
ing a number of missions to Japan to learn how to produce variety with
top quality and at low cost. These production principles soon general-
ised throughout Western industry and even started reaching the service
sector. This happened all the more quickly because above and beyond
economies of scope considerations, the model also had the advantage of
cutting production costs at the very time that Europe and the United
States were suffering from a crisis of capital accumulation.
The decision to adopt lean production would soon be reconfirmed
through two other accelerating trends: financialisation; and eco-
nomic globalisation. In the period from 1990 to 2000, financialisation
­(encapsulated in the heavy pressures that shareholders began exerting
on the real economy) spread throughout goods and service-producing
companies, forcing them to achieve double-figure annual productiv-
ity gains in order to accelerate the rise in shareholder value. The aim
here was to align industrial or service firms’ financial performances
with those achieved by hot capital speculators. Alongside of this, eco-
nomic globalisation—driven by a similar logic of short-term profit
maximisation—led to social and fiscal dumping that undercut wages
and social protections in Europe and the US. This happened despite
these economies’ much higher productivity than their emerging coun-
terparts. The dual (and de facto coordinated) trends of financialisa-
tion and globalisation culminated in corporate executives demanding
ever lower production costs, in part because they never experimented
with other competitiveness strategies such innovation, top-of-the-range
production or high quality. Lean production was mainly used here to
produce cheap varieties, before spreading to other kinds of productive
activities. In a sense, events came full circle, with managers falling in
love with the most radical form of lean production, to wit, i.e. ruthless
cost-cutting.
The gradual shift of vocabulary from lean production to lean man-
agement, after interim stages when it was described as re-engineering,
a term that did not survive—all served to highlight the universalisation
16   J.-P. Durand

of certain basic principles. Not only did lean production move beyond
the industrial sector to reach mass services (and indeed the public sec-
tor, which is studied below) but it also spread to all corporate functions,
including goods and service design, and then management itself. In
turn, this forced managers to implement the principles of lean produc-
tion even as they used it as an inspiration to justify cutting their own
management costs. Hence today’s almost ubiquitous use of the term
lean management. To understand the core of this concept, however, it is
worth revisiting how it started.

Systemic Efficiency and Lean Production

Lean production is based theorically on the perfectly coherent com-
bination of three main elements: just-in-time flow converted into flux
tendu1; organised work; and a specific mode for mobilising/controlling
employees based on personal appraisals.

Generalisation of Flux Tendu

Flux tendu is the direct consequence of the just-in-time systems that

Japanese automakers began practicing in the late 1950s (Ohno 1989).
The idea here was to eliminate buffers between workstations, workshops
and even subcontractors. The just-in-time policy not only improved
capital turnover but had other non-economic benefits, including the
immediate visibility and hence elimination of defects; rapid produc-
tion line switches capable of tracking (downstream-driven) demand

1Flux tendu (tight flow) removes buffers between job stations, workshops and so on. This method

transforms profoundly the conditions of production and work (see below) so as to reduce costs
in a number of ways. In this book we use flux tendu which could be narrowly interpreted as a
synonym for tight flow since both terms could be seen as referring to the same process. However
flux tendu is a much broader conception than the idea of ‘tight flow’. It both embraces, yet goes
beyond the anglo-saxon meaning of the term lean production in so far as the latter refers almost
excusively to production processes with organisational changes while flux tendu accounts for
wider social changes including changes to production.
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
17

instantaneously without incurring additional component management

costs. More generally, this also sought to ensure an immediately more
transparent material and human organisation of production, something
that management could then use to eliminate waste in raw materials
and above all in employee time. A scenario devised by T. Ohno in 1989
offered a perfect illustration of this process by demonstrating that two
workers occupied full-time were much better than three workers work-
ing two-thirds of full-time. “Kaizen” (or permanent improvement) was
also there to eliminate waste by minimising any porosity in employees’
working time.
With all these qualities, the just-in-time principle spread rapidly
across all industries everywhere within a few short decades, turning
logistics into one of the world’s fastest growing sectors. The end result
was that motorways became so congested with product deliveries in
certain countries that they had to be regulated, including by limiting
just-in-time principles to the manufacturing of just a few products. This
generalisation of a zero stock approach was accompanied by a transfor-
mation in vocabulary, leading to the conceptualisation of flux tendu as a
principle capable of being applied to all areas of activity, including the
service sector and public administration. One example from the bank-
ing and insurance industries was the disappearance of piles of files, with
customer demands being almost always processed now in real-time, an
evolution largely facilitated by the rise of ICT. Modern insurance com-
panies are expected to process healthcare claims in less than a week.
Loan requests are given in even less time, even where more than one
office is involved. Flux tendu also become the rule in hospitals, with the
expectation now that minimal time elapses between a patient’s test and
diagnosis. Airport employees managing flights concentrated over a few
short hours that are of greatest interest to commercial customers2 use

2To be profitable, flights must have an occupancy of more than 85% (98% for low-cost carri-
ers). To reach these levels, companies use small planes to carry passengers from small and medi-
um-sized towns to their hubs, where travellers are packed into much bigger long-haul planes.
Most short or long-haul flights are therefore almost always full. Complex statistical and commer-
cial techniques are used to fill planes by maximising the price that each customer pays. This is
called yield management. All these requirements mean that companies organise plane transfers to
make them as quick as possible, especially during evening and morning rush hours.
18   J.-P. Durand

just-in-time principles to ensure that the arriving aircraft is cleaned and

refuelled, meals brought on board, security checks made and luggage
and passenger flows managed. Much less the management of stocks,
they do not even have the option here of creating any!
Supermarkets are one well-known example of this. Stocks are increas-
ingly minimised and often a mere reflection of the size of the lorries
transporting fresh items directly to the major retail outlets from slaugh-
terhouses, factories or fields. Fast food epitomises this lean production
flow with stocks of hamburgers or fries being reduced to just a few units
that only last a few minutes or even seconds on the shelves between the
kitchen and sales counter. In a manner similar to supermarkets, these
are environments where observers might focus on flux tendu of con-
sumables but just as easily draw attention to the highly effective way
in which customer queues are managed using an optimised calculation
of the minimal necessary workforce, which depends on the hour of the
day, the day of the week but also the weather. This means that custom-
ers are always pushing employees to intensify their work rate. Unlike
pulled production (often described as Japanese methods) flux tendu in
industry or merchandise in supermarkets, customer queues are a way
of organising a pressed3 flux tendu (Tiffon 2013) that largely defines
the working conditions affecting checkout staff in large retail outlets
or sales counter staff in fast food restaurants. It is the same concept of
pressed flux tendu that characterises work in mass call centers (different
from approaches emphasizing technical value added activity). Because
customers should not have to wait too long on the phone, employees
(whose output is calculated precisely as above) must respond as quickly
as possible. The goal is not to allow a stock of customers to build up
since delays make them unhappy. At the same time, X number of peo-
ple must be in the queue to keep pressure on employees and ensure that
no one sits there with nothing to do.

3By pressed flux tendu, Tiffon is seekitng to highlight the context in which customers in super-

market checkouts press those in front of them to move speedily to complete their various transac-
tions. Broadly, what is occuring is that the customer becomes part of the management process of
intensification of working in the supermarket ‘asssembly line’.
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
19

The present book will demonstrate how the principle of flux tendu
also characterises design work in both the physical goods and service
sector. This is work carried out by engineers, technicians and managers
arranged into vast work groups organised into projects. Here, everyone
must produce the fruits of their labour within a defined period of time
to avoid handicapping colleagues working further downstream. Specific
groupware applications are used by these white-collar workers to man-
age flux tendus and deliverable schedules. For the system to be gener-
ally effective, all these material flows (in the industrial sector or retail
or miscellaneous service sectors)—along with any technical informa-
tion specific to certain professions (engineering calculations or designs,
medical data, monetary values, etc.)—must circulate permanently or be
accessible at all times and in all places across a globalised territory. This
explains why ICT has become a precondition for the generalisation of
flux tendu operations. Having said that, ICT requires for its own pur-
poses the same conditions that it offers other sectors. The end result is
that all (globalised) production, archiving and information processing
systems require a flux tendu organisation, understood here as a flow that
cannot be interrupted (since by definition there is no stock in real-time
information systems) without endangering the whole production and
exchange structure.

Flux Tendu ’s Hidden Meaning

Irrespective of the field or sector where this flux tendu principle is

applied, its immediate effect is to mobilise employees (and manag-
ers) who feel responsible for the continuity of production flows. Any
interruption in flow will have an effect both upstream (congestion) and
downstream (under-occupied employees). This is reminiscent of the
functional framework characterising Fordism. In flux tendu principle,
however, there is a fundamental innovation consisting of the elimina-
tion of buffers—a variant that willingly increases the fragility of goods
or service production processes. The absence of buffers means that any
breakdowns or quality defects can cause serious damage to the system
20   J.-P. Durand

both upstream and downstream. Hence the focus on the system’s fra-
gility. When associated with the fact that senior management is simul-
taneously reducing staff numbers (to lower production costs), this
constitutes the basic foundation of a transformed work organisation.
In turn, this becomes a constraint that is an intrinsic part of a produc-
tive principle based on fragile flows due to the absence of buffers. These
flows are reduced by minimised staff numbers (calculated to the leanest
possible degree4). This new construct might be called flux tendu with a
smaller workforce. In this expression, every word is significant.
The crux of this new principle is that no employee engaged in pro-
duction of this nature is exempt from having to ensure the continuity
of fragilised flows. If, temporarily they want to opt out of the process,
they quickly become overwhelmed due to the problems this causes,
culminating in the flow being interrupted and affecting operations
both upstream and downstream. The principle is revolutionary inso-
far as the norm it conveys relates to the mobilisation of work. In other
words, it forces employees to mobilise, work quickly and deal urgently
with sometimes unprecedented problems so as to maintain continuous
production. Hence the concept of “constrained involvement” when
characterising this productive model. The emphasis here is on the con-
straints imposed upon employees to get them to assume certain respon-
sibilities inherent to fragile workflows (for a smaller workforce). At the
same time, the oxymoron also accounts for the type of mobilisation this
involves, being a mechanism that tries to get people to do a good job
while maintaining fragile productive flows. Involvement of this sort is
at the heart of the present book, although it must be noted that it can
only arise in a context where it has become more or less mandatory.
This explains other authors’ reliance on similar but different constructs
such as forced cooperation (Slaughter 1990; Parker and Slaughter 1992;
Coutrot 1998), where the cooperation results directly from work-related
shareholder returns.

4An obvious pun here is just-in time which could mean just before breakdown, referring both to

timing (there are no buffers hence a risk of production shutting down) and the capacities of a
constantly decreasing number of employees, some of whom are close to burn out.
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
21

This flux tendu-related constraint is not a value judgment about the

acceleration of work rates (particularly in tertiary sectors). Senior cor-
porate management teams have often been quick to decide that they
no longer need mid-level managers given operational employees’ ability
to work by themselves once subjected to the principle of a flux tendu-
based constrained involvement (the reference here being to certain
widely publicised managerial reforms that have culminated in the elim-
ination of this hierarchical level). It might even be said that «le flic est
dans le flux»5 meaning “the cop is in the flow”, so that if the new goal
to achieve continuous flow, new conditions premised fragility in the
flow, themselves associated with reduced staff. This creates in turn a
new productive standard, one whose effect is to compact the constraints
that people face as well as their involvement (with the idea now being
that they should be able to meet their objectives in a broader and more
interesting work environment). Note that this same compacting pro-
cess has transformed the nature of constraints by objectifying them. It
is no longer people who lead but a mechanical system enforcing certain
working patterns and obligations. This is almost a case of constraints
being naturalised in the sense that human and social dimensions have
seemingly disappeared and are being replaced by a systemic force that is
impersonal hence difficult to identify and attack.
The next question is whether constrained involvement causes
employees to experience the sources of this involvement to the same
extent as they perceive the constraints that are associated with it. The
intended inbuilt fragility of production processes has necessarily pre-
cluded the continuation of Fordian traditions that had led, for instance,
to the manufacture of poor quality parts that had to be eliminated, or
else which accepted extremely lengthy assembly line changes. After all,
no one was particularly concerned with what would happen down-
stream seeing as production was always sold. To be economically via-
ble, this fragilisation of flows quickly translated into the new idea that
breakdowns are inacceptable, that poor quality necessarily hampers

5“The cop is the flow” is an allusion to the very popular slogan of 1968 “the cops are on televi-
sion” of the General de Gaulle.
22   J.-P. Durand

downstream productive activities and that engineers should always have

to invent rapid retooling processes—with, for instance, the automotive
industry automating pressing tool battery changes so that they would
henceforth only require ten minutes, compared to the six to eight hours
needed when this was done manually. Lastly, improving the productive
system (along reliability, quality and cost-cutting lines) was supposed to
become a permanent focus, even a bona fide management system.
To satisfy all these new requirements, Japanese engineers (first inspir-
ing Western engineers, followed by managers) developed an increas-
ingly high-performance battery of tools whose main functions included
TPM or Total Productive Maintenance (sometimes referred to as Total
Productive Management) as a way of preventing breakdowns; Total
Quality Management; Single Minute Exchange Die (SMED) enabling
rapid retooling and manufacturing series changes; and kaïzen or perma-
nent improvements in productive systems (targeting both machines and
people). All of these new processes were supposed to optimise produc-
tion too. They were often implemented against the will of supervisors
and mid-level managers. Not only did they introduce new social rela-
tionships in the workplace but above all they generated a new percep-
tion of work and its aims. Indeed, all these improvement tools conveyed
the sense of operational employees’ (industrial workers, office employ-
ees, even technicians) need for greater participation in problem-solv-
ing. This was usually presented as a technical issue but often included
organisational and human dimensions as well. The advent of quality cir-
cles, progress groups, 5S meetings6 and suggestion boxes gave birth to a
veritable participative fever worth exploring in greater detail. For many
commentators, these meetings attested to a sense of the need to tran-
scend the traditional Fordist-Taylorian system, with the radical nature
of this change being witnessed in the concentration of new efforts
aimed at preventing breakdowns (henceforth designated as key events:
Zarifian 1995). This also included the new ambition of responding to

65S is a Japanese concept calling for an end to waste, the idea being that things should be

arranged neatly. It also emphasizes the boons of order, cleanliness and rigour. The method pre-
pares employees for the new rules that management will be applying in much more flexible forms
than the orders they used to issue.
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
23

customer demand as far upstream as possible in the manufacturing pro-

cess (Veltz and Zarifian 1993). A final option was the notion of joint
regulation as a means for resolving problems and giving meaning to
work (de Terssac 1992).
Other interpretations (Parker and Slaughter 1992; Rinehart et al.
1998; Bouquin 2008; Stewart et al. 2009; Durand 2007; Linhart 2015;
Flocco 2015) have shown that participation added a number of other
factors to the equation, starting with employees’ social integration and
the willingness to publish otherwise hidden knowledge. The nature of
work, people’s gestures at work and the content of work would generally
involve similar things (aside from technological change). What might,
however, differ when operatives met was how they perceived work.
Increasing the number of meetings—making them mandatory sessions
that industrial workers and office employees would attend in body
even if not in soul—became a way of thinking to change people’s atti-
tudes towards their position at work and the work environment itself,
while continuing to ignore deeper issues such as the intensification of
work in a flux tendu regime characterised by a smaller workforce (not
to mention forms or levels of remuneration). It may hard to criticise
the meetings’ ostensible purposes (to talk about quality, kaïzen, break-
downs, cost-cutting, process times, etc.) but it is worth looking at their
subliminal aspiration of achieving greater convergence between partici-
pants’ varying concerns and interests. Even when talking about purely
technical issues or core processes involved in the production of goods or
services, operatives also began sharing with engineers, mid-level man-
agers and even senior managers objectives that clearly corresponded to
what company executives wanted. These practices were not necessarily
Machiavellian but nevertheless the real purpose of the ‘we’re all in it
together’ narratives was to drive a flux tendu system featuring a smaller
workforce. The sessions’ technical nature prevented any questioning of
the precepts underlying the new productive principle. The meetings
embodied a very strong ideology of social integration with the intention
of ensuring that employees accepted objectives that they had not helped
to formulate themselves.
This participative policy of management had another function
that has often been ignored, namely the sharing of knowledge both
24   J.-P. Durand

among operational employees and also between them and technicians

(and even some managers). Historically, industrial workers or office
employees’ autonomy has been rooted in their private knowledge, com-
prised of the clever professional tricks that people use in the workplace
to save energy even as they continue to meet their goals (Durand and
Stewart 1998). With production automation and computerisation,
these tricks have started to disappear, although they do persist, for
instance, in mass retail product assembly functions that are still man-
ual in nature. They have also been reproduced in the ways that some
machines are being operated or in a few small segments of different
automated production systems. More generally, the publicity given to
hidden knowledge during these quality circle or production improve-
ment meetings (increasingly referred to as Sigma 6 inter alia) refers to
the causes of sudden stops in production, few stock, the absence of
specialised tools, defects caused by upstream mistakes that complicate
downstream work, etc. In the service sector, examples might include
files that have been incorrectly filled in, forms that are poorly adapted to
a particular situation, the absence of crucial information as well as ways
of overcoming these problems. The objective here is twofold. On one
hand, by getting people to publicise what they are doing, they are being
encouraged to socialise their private knowledge. This then becomes a
means for arranging employees’ interchangeability. On the other hand,
discussing activities openly in front of senior management weakens
work groups and reduces their hierarchical autonomy.
In short, changes that might be referred to as social-technical tools
to improve quality and production efficiency have been a key part of
the way in which management attempt to counter problems with
implementation of lean including the fragilisation, itself a driver of
employees’ social integration. For the first time in more than a century
of mass production in the industrial or tertiary sectors, employees are
being consulted and participating (at least partially) in the organisation
of their working lives, transitioning from Fordo-Taylorian disciplinary
sanctions to willful adherence (de Gaulejac 2011, 35). Some reject
the new approach and view it as a subterfuge. However, many partic-
ipate in this mobilisation of their subjectivity. Work may be more dif-
ficult because of cuts in human resources but it has also become more
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
25

interesting, with everyone being asked nowadays to talk about the work
they do. This sharing of information helps in a number of situations
and gives meaning to people’s daily activities.

From Flux Tendu to “Group Work”: Rebuilding

Work Groups

With the automation of industrial production and generalised comput-

erisation of the factory floor and office, workstations are becoming less
and less individualised and largely interdependent. Reliance on auto-
mated systems has fragilised productive processes and reinforced the
need for collective work. The relationship here is no longer between
a human being and machine or between a file and an employee but
between a segment of production or series of files and a group of men
and women committed to maintaining production. It is the kind of
teamwork that was initiated Japan in the 1960s and which then spread
following the advent of flux tendu, with the emphasis here being placed
on group work as opposed to the kind of teamwork characterising the
Fordian system.
Recent decades have seen increasing recognition of the collective
nature of work. At the same time, management has tended to con-
centrate on the risks accompanying the constitution of highly cohe-
sive work groups capable of resisting flux tendu prescriptions as well
as senior managers’ increasingly stringent demands. This explains why
management has started to organise collective work in the smallest
detail, building work groups that managers themselves designate—
an approach that is very different from the friendly worker collec-
tives found throughout Fordian era. The idea now is to create artificial
employee groups whose only common point is that people sit along-
side one another without possessing any emotional, intellectual or
trade union affinities. Paradoxically, this does not prevent these work
groups from being collectively responsible for the production of goods
or services, specifically with regards to their quality and quantity. One
example is where groups of industrial workers have bonuses removed if
quality threshold are not met. The effect is to stimulate criticisms by
26   J.-P. Durand

group members of whichever colleague has caused the defect that is

being sanctioned. Irrespective of the taxonomy, this constitutes a key
aspect of group work in those instances where it is construed as a sys-
tem in which peers can be asked to pressure their own peers, with group
self-discipline becoming an iron principle (Parker and Slaughter 1992;
Garrahan and Stewart 1992; Milkman 1991). There are no longer any
‘little bosses’ making negative comments about someone’s performance.
Instead, criticisms of this kind are made by the group itself, or at least
by whichever individual pretends to speak on its behalf. Such criticisms
are not rooted in hierarchical relationships as they once were but based
instead today on a bureaucratic command rationality where the individ-
ual being targeted loses self-esteem—something more injurious than a
small rebuke from a boss whose very job is to criticise.
This is one of the reasons for rising the malaise at work, with many
employees talking about a poor atmosphere resulting largely from the
deterioration in horizontal social relationships within work groups that
are no longer collectively-minded (i.e. focused on mutual aid) but com-
prised instead of juxtaposed individuals who tend to be de-personalised
due to the incessant competition involved in achieving objectives that
are increasingly impossible to attain given diminishing resources. At the
same time, and counterbalancing the efforts they make, employees tend
nowadays to occupy a wider variety of positions, meaning that their
work is more diversified and sometimes indeed enriched and improved.
The end result is that despite the pressures weighing on work groups
today, many employees also feel some satisfaction with their work. Of
course, the scope of the initiatives or responsibilities that they take is
shaped by the division of labour, but even so, there is no doubt that
this broadening of tasks drives mobilisation and involvement. A num-
ber of labour analysts and union activists have tried to deny the con-
tributions of self-organised work groups, raising questions about why
so many modern employees accept the new working conditions they
face in a flux tendu system featuring a smaller workforce. It remains
that this broadening of the scope of tasks—sometimes subdivided into
polyvalent, multivalent or poly-activities—means that employees have
become increasingly interchangeable. In the past, absentees would have
to be replaced but this is no longer necessary since the rest of the group
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
27

picks up the slack. In addition, horizontal mobility from one group to

another (or from one office or factory to another) is no longer a con-
sideration in promotion but something very normal, to the extent that
geographical mobility is now part of the ‘human resource’ management
tool box that is increasingly being used, especially in Japan, to move
employees across the globe for very long periods of time.
Group work has led to a further management innovation, one with
spectacular effects (albeit rarely conceptualised as such). This is the cre-
ation of team leaders, also referred to as monitors, coordinators, group
heads, etc. Coordinators are responsible for the proper functioning of
operations. They also manage staff members’ attendance and working
time, organise training and adaptation programmes, and replace absent
workers in emergency situations etc. They are colleagues like every-
one else and have no hierarchical power even though they assume the
same supervisory role as the old mid-level managers used to do. The
disappearance of this latter function has sharply reduced costs, some-
thing that might be analysed as translating the kind of coercive work
that is part of the flux tendu principle. Lacking any hierarchical func-
tion, coordinators cannot impose any decisions or practices and must
convince people that they are in the right. This displaces certain man-
agement tensions since any disagreements are shunted into relation-
ships between peers, keeping senior managers out of the equation. All
in all, a coordinator’s function is full of ambivalence and therefore dif-
ficult to carry out given the personal costs that people pay when fulfill-
ing the role. The reason for accepting this poisoned chalice is because
coordinators have been freed from some of the constraints that relate
directly to flux tendu and which so often have an enslaving effect nowa-
days. In addition, those chosen to become coordinators usually empha-
size qualities that might lead to other promotions including a career in
management. From a labour relations perspective, the real innovation
is the ambiguity of the team leader or coordinator’s position. Fulfilling
an ambiguous role where the person is a peer like any other employee
yet has already been identified by senior management as a potential
future manager changes operatives’ perception of managers in general.
Commands and orders no longer come from executives directly but
from peers who must also obey and therefore use the art of persuasion
28   J.-P. Durand

(together with their emotional labour) to get everyone else on board.

Horizontal communications between peers that were once very difficult
when combined with vertical directives (due to the absence of a ‘nexus’
of exchanges between relatively heterogeneous types of information)
have been facilitated by the invention of coordinators who undertake
the necessary translations to ensure that both vertical and horizontal
information flows are successfully communicated. In sum, the transition
from a Fordian team led by a prescriptive boss controlling people’s tasks
towards group work that is more or less self-organised according to flux
tendu principles (and exemplified by having peers who coordinate more
than they command) has not changed the nature of work as much as it
has changed people’s perceptions and representations of it. Yet in terms
of getting people to accept things, perceptions and representations are
at least as important as reality. Nevertheless, to ensure that as many
employees as possible cooperate and maintain production continuity,
several new systems have had to be invented.

From a Competency Model to the Ubiquity

of Appraisals

Once again and unsurprisingly since they are the people who invented
lean production, it is the Japanese who inspired yet another category of
innovations first seen in the 1990s—namely the systematic evaluation
of all work done by employees, whether industrial workers or office
staff. Previous evaluations had been more superficial and were typified,
for instance since the early 1970s, by systems such as Management by
Objectives (which CEGOS imported from the United States to France,
c.f. Gélinier 1968). This involved assessing managers, notably commer-
cial ones, in terms of their revenue progression targets. The advent of
‘Provisional Management of Jobs and Competencies’ during the 1980s
got human resource departments to assess employees’ aptitude to occupy
positions with profiles and descriptions defined by senior manage-
ment or specialist job advisers and projected over three, five and even
ten years. In 1991 a agreement reached in France between the State and
the employers’ and employees’ unions based on a competencies balance
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
29

sheet also involved appraising the aptitudes and competences of those

employees who accepted this kind of reporting (sometimes at the self-­
interested behest of managers seeking to ‘slim down’ their company).
Appraisals have clearly been closely linked to competencies since the
early 1980s. In France, the notion of qualifications has progressively dis-
appeared to be replaced by the idea of competence. Qualifications can
be defined as the association of a recognised academic degree with a
professional experience comprised of kinds of know-how that might be
more or a less difficult to formalise. On top of this, competency adds a
sense of how employees carry out their tasks and functions, i.e., serve
employers. Trade unions have long demanded that this dimension of
work be recognised, something that started to be referred to as ‘how
to behave’7 in the 1990s. For frontline union activists, debating these
relationships in their own workplaces was tantamount to objectifying
a certain number of employee qualities, thereby making it harder for
arbitrary promotions to take place. The French employers union CPNF
(now MEDEF) took advantage of this aspiration to shift the focus away
from qualifications—basically embodied in a degree quantification—
and towards competence, which has two subjective interpretations, one
based on the assessor’s judgement of the assessee’s know-how and the
other on how the assessee can best be served through the process. This
is the subtext to the definition of competence that CNPF offered in
1998: “Professional competence is a combination of knowledge, know-
how, experience and behaviour, all exercised within a specific context. It
can be observed when implemented in the professional situation within
which it is going to be validated. In other words, it is up to compa-
nies to identify, evaluate, validate and develop competence” (CNPF
1998, 5).
There are two ideas behind this proposal: the formal exclusion of
degree work from the definition of competence (with the word not
even featuring in the definition); and the introduction of behaviour as
a key component of professional competence. Moreover, by eliminating

7The french word is ‘savoir-être’ to refer to ‘savoir-faire’ (know how), however ‘how to behave’ is a
better term to describe management expectations regarding what it thinks constitutes the ‘correct’
workplace behaviour.
30   J.-P. Durand

the role of the state in accrediting degree work, the CNPF was also
advancing the idea that companies are the only parties in a position
to recognise competence. It is worth noting that the verb ‘recognis-
ing’ competence was also excluded from the new definition, the reason
being that in the vocabulary applied to industrial relations, ‘recogni-
tion’ also refers obliquely to considerations of the level of remuneration
deemed appropriate for whatever level of competence is being recog-
nised, whereas the verb ‘help’ does not possess this connotation. At best,
validating competence qualifies someone to occupy a certain position or
function or request a transfer. Eliminating references to school or uni-
versity level, itself a shared platform that the whole of a branch can use
to rank competencies, severely limits the ‘portability’ of people’s educa-
tional and training backgrounds and restricts inter-firm mobility. When
asked about this, the CNPF replied that it was up to companies to
develop employees’ competences. The problem, of course, is the selec-
tive nature of the right to training.
The issues at stake in this definition of professional competence
revolved around two concepts that were at odds with the history of
qualifications in France. One was behaviour and the other appraisals,
meaning the evaluation of behaviour. In-depth analyses of employee
evaluation grids have been conducted with most featuring two objects
of evaluation: work and behaviour. The first group of evaluation grids
tend to try to measure work outputs in terms of production volumes
and other more qualitative aspects, asking whether outputs correspond
to objectives. The second batch focuses on employee behaviour, with
the parties promoting this category of evaluation becoming quite defen-
sive whenever they are criticised for violating subjects’ personality or
privacy. One example is the kinds of questions asked by a large motor-
cycle manufacturer working out of Japan, with the items comprising
the evaluation grid—filled out by a manager one level up from workers
being evaluated (and to whom the results were not communicated)—
being quite frank:

– “Cooperation: control of oneself and one’s emotions, respect for dis-

cipline at work, collaboration with colleagues and lack of attachment
to one’s own opinions and interests,
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
31

– Sense of initiative: desire for personal development, attitude towards

kaïzen, willingness to accept challenges above and beyond the work
requested,
– Responsibility: facing up to one’s responsibilities; reliability/
trustworthiness”.

It was surprising to find an automotive subcontractor working in cen-

tral France using a worker assessment grid that borrowed this very same
vocabulary almost word-for-word, despite being written by totally dif-
ferent authors:

– “Initiatives: participation in the life of the company or factory floor

or in the actual work itself. ‘Very good’ employees motivate them-
selves to find solutions to any problems, even those superseding their
job description. ‘Mediocre’ employees, on the other hand, await
orders passively,
– Availability: being responsive to management’s service demands
including where this involves changing workstations, schedule move-
ments, overtime, etc. ‘Very good’ employees offer these services
without being asked. ‘Mediocre’ employees refuse systematically any
services being requested,
– Sociability: behaviour within the work environment (towards one’s
hierarchical superiors, colleagues, central service administrators).
‘Very good’ employee never say anything negative about their supe-
riors and behave perfectly correctly (indeed, very nicely) towards
everyone. ‘Mediocre’ employees are irascible with their hierarchical
superiors, colleagues and administrative staff”.

In reality, this type of behavioural evaluation relates much more to

employees’ subjectivity than to their work. It is an attempt to measure
their attachment or even loyalty to the company (and more specifi-
cally, to the company’s senior management). Other subtler powers exist
to assess devotion to a company. By enquiring how employees perceive
their future in the company, what they are actually being asked about
is their entirely subjective representations of the company or factory
floor where they operate. To prepare an annual appraisal interview, for
32   J.-P. Durand

instance, n + 1 might distribute a two-sided A3 piece of paper with

no more than four or five questions—meaning the paper is virtually
empty—while asking office employees or industrial workers to answer
by the following week what they consider their “strengths and weak-
nesses” in terms of the company’s needs. This approach is so stressful to
some that they develop sleep problems, with others seeking help from
peers or even their children where the latter have received more edu-
cation than the workers themselves. Most of the time the goal is to get
people to fill in as many blanks as possible. Responses tend to satisfy
the expectations of n + 1 and top management, with assessees express-
ing what they think their bosses want to hear. In other words, appraisals
have been transformed into projective tests where employees write and
say what they think they are supposed to as per their representation of
their place in their office or factory floor. By so doing, they are con-
forming to their hierarchical superiors’ expectations and developing a
personality subjugated by the company’s expectations.
Personal appraisals have become systems aimed at getting employees
to internalise certain behavioural standards, including loyalty, devotion
and availability. Implicit in these standards is a distancing from union
activism as well as a refusal to engage in any work slowdowns or oppose
directives or goals set by senior management. In short, evaluations of
this sort are unlimited commitments to one’s employer8 and could be
assimilated with powerful normative tools driven by employees’ imagi-
nation. The intention is to induce them to think and conceive of them-
selves as conduits for the company and for their bosses’ expectations.
This one example with the almost blank A3 piece of paper being filled
in by operatives shows the extent to which the process involves new
attitudes and even new rules of conduct that are even more constrain-
ing than the ones practiced by the company itself.9 It is a normative

8Some companies like Amazon (Malet 2013) have gone even further and got employees (includ-

ing temporary staff) to sign a commitment not to communicate information relating to corporate
operations (including working conditions) with the press or any other external body.
9This might include how, through a similar process, a 360° evaluation—i.e. where individuals are

assessed by upstream and downstream peers; by managers; and even by subordinates—has caused
a constant reinvention of norms and behaviour to satisfy the imagined expectations of colleagues
or senior management. The same could be said about self-appraisal, which at least is not quite as
ferocious.
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
33

apparatus transformed into an unlimited auto-suggestive apparatus that

within a general loyalty framework explicitly advises employees to con-
struct their own rules of behaviour. In this way, individual appraisals
transform actors’ subjectivity by getting them to internalise norms that
have progressively been objectified within their deeper personalities.
This then is the deception of personal appraisals today. Contrary
to appearances and to what managers tend to say, their first function
is not to communicate to employees senior management’s positive or
negative responses to their efforts but to get them to incorporate val-
ues like subordination and submission. The evidence is that there are
few if any institutional or organised links between an appraisal process
and individuals receiving a promotion or bonus. In the case of n + 1,
for instance, the suggested distribution of bonuses or points occurred
under such severe budgetary and regulatory constraints that the real
goal was clearly to avoid any animosity arising between managers and
subordinates. It was also significant that bonus distributions and per-
sonal appraisal happened at very different times of the year. Ultimately,
with bonuses of no more than a few hundred euros on offer, there was
no real need for as heavy handed personal appraisals. This is especially
so with promotions being based on criteria that only partially referred
to behaviour (i.e. technical ability), with more attention being paid to
an individual’s aptitude for motivating or managing a team.
In reality, this whole apparatus was the other side of the coin from
constrained involvement. The first dimension largely derived from a sys-
tem based on flux tendu with a smaller workforce, with the objectifica-
tion of people’s mobilisation obligation ensuring that productive flows
remained uninterrupted to avoid penalising downstream employees. The
second dimension related to employees’ subjectivity. Through individual
evaluation of their behaviour, employees were inevitably being persuaded
to internalise managerial objectives as if these had been their own ideas.
Sociologists talk about the mobilisation (or even rationalisation) of indi-
viduals’ subjectivity when this happens not because but despite them,
and where resistance has been difficult to organise given the efforts made
to blur people’s awareness. All these transformations would have been
impossible without actions being organised by senior managers seeking
first and foremost to change the face they were showing to the world.
34   J.-P. Durand

Managing Within an Enclave

Even considering that a not insignificant part of management—in par-
ticular, the giving of direct orders to people—has been objectified today
as a result of flux tendu, this still does not mean that management has
faded away entirely nor should it cause any under-estimation of the role
that it continues to play. A better description is that management has
become enclaved, a notion incorporating the double constraint facing
most managers, especially those operating towards the bottom of the
hierarchy. On one hand, they continue to be subjected to lean con-
straints for which they themselves are responsible. This is not because
their interventions are determined by the actual flows but because
they are blamed sooner or later for any interruptions. Objectified flow
obligations therefore concern and affect them, something that has
the potential for creating a nervous bottom-up tension that is in fact
a reflection of how the flow’s “mechanical” requirements translate into
psychic energy. On the other hand, managers are pressured by their own
managers so that in addition to any quality, delay or scope imperatives,
they (often meaning the least well-placed or the most fragile one) are
constantly being asked to cut costs. This is like the challenge described
in the myth of Sisyphus, since once their objectives are achieved they
get new ones encumbering their production of services and goods to an
even greater extent than before.

The Proliferation of Management Levels

Seeing how lean principles have fragilised production—and given qual-

ity requirements that are increasingly stringent (which is paradoxical
in a system focused on cost-cutting)—there have been surprisingly few
studies of the ways that this transformation has expanded the number
of managers and technical agents responsible for monitoring and analys-
ing productive processes. The lowest management level may have largely
disappeared but other functions are constantly beefing up, with manag-
ers creating all kinds of scorecards to fine-tune their allocations of mate-
rial and human resources. Provisional organisations and production
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
35

plans are also increasingly detailed nowadays. This is because this accel-
erates responses to market change, a difficult maneuvre to succeed
in situations characterised by the quasi-disappearance of commercial
stocks. Production controls (and the more or less direct control of peo-
ple through production processes) have become increasingly fastidious
due to new standards of precision and the demand for real-time execu-
tion. Balanced scorecards have flourished in all sectors of activity (both
service and industrial). In schools as in hospitals, everybody is wonder-
ing whether these very tight controls are harbingers of what some refer
to as New Public Management or, instead, a return to bureaucracy. Of
course, there is always a chance that the two processes are converging.
One example from a section in a Toulouse (France) department store
specialising in a particular brand saw the Parisian managers of the brand
in question intervening so meticulously that they would send sales staff
specific instructions about how they lay the clothing and accessories out
on tables and window shelves (using a 20-page report to describe a few
square feet of floor space).
What all these observations also demonstrate is that senior man-
agement has largely distanced itself from operatives and is increasingly
taken up nowadays by administrative tasks. It is as if there is a tend
towards administration, IT and other media replacing direct contacts
with one’s subordinates. This distancing is not supposed to undermine
management’s forecasting (and above, all control) functions, however,
meaning that even if management has changed in form, its substance
remains more or less constant. Alongside this, the rising number of
managers in the wider sense of this term—a trend closely related to the
complication in the production of goods and services—also signifies
a normalisation or ‘commonalisation’ of these functions, except at the
very highest echelons of firms or the state. This ‘banalisation’ of func-
tions has been covered already in a number of studies (Bouffartigue
2001; Bouffartigue et al. 2011; Amossé and Delteil 2004; Cousin 2008;
Flocco 2015; Dujarier 2015) scrutinising changes in managers’ social
categorisation. The emphasis here is often on negotiations, discussions
and transactions, with the purpose being to “undertake (often in real-
time) minor or even major arbitrages between different arguments, all
of which are legitimate. Hence the need to invent and often negotiate
36   J.-P. Durand

compromise arrangements that seem unavoidable for each situation. To

succeed here, managers must do more than call upon “rational problem-
solving or decision-making methods” (Bergère and Chassard 2013,
194). At the very top of corporate and public administration hierar-
chies, M.-A. Dujarier (2013) has analysed the extent to which what she
calls “system makers” have been subjected to certain constraints: “They
must, because of the mandate they have received and the way they rep-
resent themselves, optimise outcomes, meaning the economic value of
the organisation. (…) The orders they receive creates a situation that
‘contradicts’ their own autonomy. They have no leeway where their
mandates are concerned. (…) Their work has been rationalised, hence
Taylorised. Within these senior management teams, many executives
can be found carrying out fragmented and repetitive tasks under severe
time constraints. In this case, they really do not feel that they are pro-
ducing management systems for other people but instead a piece of a
greater management puzzle that they do not have a full view of ”.10
It is at the level of managers’ daily work that it is worth analysing to
what extent this has become diversified and above all the pluralistic per-
ceptions that interested parties have developed thereof. This will lead to
a discussion of how the managerial function—which consists today of
getting people to do things—is being carried out at the heart of a sys-
tem defined by lean production and its ancillary requirements.

The Conversion of Management

Staff reductions have become the golden rule for many executive teams
and especially shareholders. What almost all managers have in common
is the fact that they are required to execute this policy. In some com-
panies, the CEO is responsible for authoritarian acts of this nature. In
others, it is the entire senior management team. One classic example
during mid 2000s was France Télécom, whose staff reduction efforts
were found to have caused a number of pathologies and suicides within

10“Le Management à distance: nouvelle forme of domination?”, AFS conference (Dujarier 2013).
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
37

a few short years. Nor were things very different during this era at other
French companies, including car makers, the Post Office, without for-
getting public sector employers like Pôle Emploi (French job centers).
Management faced a series of constraints at all levels. Operational
employees have also been affected. One starting point is the brutal way
that production and work have been re-organised, without any expla-
nation given and a very short period of time for getting the thing done.
What often ensues are contradictory orders, such as the idea that more
people will produce better quality products even if they have fewer
human or material resources at their disposal. One example, again from
France Télécom, were the problems caused by under-investment in (or
suboptimal spending on) ICT, with applications having to be constantly
rebooted or causing system failures that wasted enormous amounts of
time, lengthening working hours and keeping people in a permanent
state of fear about whether they would meet deadlines.
More generally, managers’ professional mobility norms (or the idea
that each individual should only spend two or three years in a given
position) has also diminished their effective productivity since they find
themselves constantly having to learn and re-learn the cultural and oper-
ational logic of the different departments in which they are being hosted.
This is done with the knowledge that they will soon have to find a new
home since they themselves are responsible for their own horizontal
mobility in most companies or public authorities. The end result is that
their involvement in different office departments or shop floors is not
nearly as protracted as if it would be since they do not expect to stay for
a long time. Most of the time, they have little if any knowledge of the
profession in question or indeed the relevant production process, put-
ting them at loggerheads with the employees they are supposed to lead
and creating the temptation for authoritarian management because there
is too little space for healthy debate and negotiation. This breakdown
between managers and operatives also has the effect of destabilising work
groups. When change is permanent, it makes people anxious. Note that
these kinds of professional dissensions also undermine recognition of
productive employees’ technical knowledge and effectiveness, leading
to other areas of misunderstanding and further de-motivating opera-
tives. More generally, parachuting in managers also means squeezing out
38   J.-P. Durand

promotion possibilities for the better industrial workers, technicians,

office employees or even other managers with a lesser educational back-
ground. In turn and not unexpectedly, this leads to discontent and com-
plaints about newcomers, and beyond this about the whole executive
team who sanctioned the new managers’ short-term mobility practices.
The term “execution management” could be used to define the func-
tions of a category that has been rapidly expanding but which does not
involve any true command tasks despite controlling a growing mass of
information rising upwards from (and downwards to) these activities.
What has been witnessed in all institutions is an allocation of factor
inputs (investments and personnel) aimed at maintaining and above all
expanding activity levels. Such allocations have been based on projects
justifying and quantifying certain needs. One frequent requirement is
that a variety of partners (financial, functional, peers, etc.) and differ-
ent hierarchical echelons be convinced of something. Hence the need
to prepare notes, reports and PowerPoint presentations to persuade as
many ‘targets’ as possible. For the people driving the projects but also
for their managers, this translates into extra work ensuring the success
of the project. This then becomes a source of personal satisfaction and
conceivably promotions—leading, in France, at least to situations where
this category of managers does more and more overtime (generally
unpaid) and often takes work home in the evening or at weekends.
The same operational managers are also having to assume responsi-
bility for monitoring outcomes on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly
and annual basis. At the same time, senior managers in companies and
public authorities are becoming more and more fond of scorecards (that
they rarely look at). In turn, these have become increasingly precise and
frequent, and have to be completed in real-time. The big picture here is
that flux tendu have their own imperatives, including the fact that they
must never be interrupted or—where this occurs—have the causes of
the interruption discovered and communicated immediately. More
generally, reporting on staff management (attendance, working hours,
training) and on the time allocated to some project or the other—as
well as the actual production scorecards—tends to be drafted, filled in
and validated by a chain of employees who spend a not insignificant
part of their time on this work. In this way, remote monitoring often
 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
39

replaces human relationships, something that does not necessarily con-

tribute to the kind of trust-based relationships of which the advocates of
participative management are so fond.
One iconoclastic question at this level is whether there are any man-
agement controllers who ever had the idea, during their professional
lives, of looking into the ex ante and ex post cost of all these new con-
trols (and more generally, the cost of monitoring other people’s work).
This growing army of controllers must be extremely expensive compared
to the savings achieved during the actual stages where the goods and ser-
vices are produced—despite these stages being generally construed by a
company’s owners as the main loci for value creation. In turn, this raises
questions about the purpose of having managers—something evoked
in a text published by the Observatoire des cadres (Bergère and Chassard
2013) and written with an objective other than the one associated with
the present book. Beyond the social control of operatives and in a sys-
tem that has been increasingly fragilised due to the general absence of
production work in-progress, it is not clear how these questions should
be answered. One element of response here, predicated on inventories
being feasible, highlights the need to ascertain the capacity of repro-
duction or self-production of a professional category serving company’s
senior management as a “critical mass” and enabling the peaceful pres-
ervation of society’s capitalist social order. Coming out of the middle
classes, it would be difficult for these managers to ally themselves—for
the next few decades, at least—with the working class, comprised of
professional categories whose places have been weakened in contempo-
rary productive system (as reflected by the proliferation of atypical jobs,
low wages and high unemployment rates). In a sense, frontline opera-
tives’ immediate managers, fulfilling what a number of statisticians
have called intermediate professions, have also become a critical mass
for both the hyper-liberal and the social-liberal state. Clearly, this the-
sis is unsatisfactory to a great many authors who want to tie all corpo-
rate decisions to a single utility function, specifically a return on capital.
What they neglect, however, is the need to make room for other kinds
of social and social-political thinking, paradigms that do not priori-
tise profit rate maximisation, emphasizing instead the need for broader
social and political foundations capable of maintaining social order.
40   J.-P. Durand

Managers with Certainties and Doubts

Managers are generally experiencing increased working hours. Their

careers are also shortening. What this means is that perceptions of
their situation largely depend on the precise moment when the ques-
tions about their professional trajectory are being asked (Pichon 2008).
Attitudes can vary from the limitless optimism of an “heir”11 at the
beginning of a career to doubt and even disappointment among inter-
viewees speaking at the end of careers where they were unable to fulfill
their dreams. What most authors recognise is how the variety of func-
tions that managers exercise, along with differences in their levels of
studies and family trajectories, translate into a multitude of perceptions
and behaviours. The consensus is that today’s “trusting wage-earners”
(Bouffartigue 2001) are somewhat mistrustful of senior management.
Returning to the topic of how management functions are carried out
day in day out, there is little doubt that increasing people’s autonomy
and responsibility at work has raised levels of satisfaction. The present
book has no cause to revisit this topic, which has already been thor-
oughly analysed in other managerial studies. Having said that, inter-
views with managers working in private or public sector companies have
revealed growing pressure from senior levels on lower echelons, increas-
ing the latter’s workload, sometimes (i.e. in strategy, organisation or
advertising consulting firms) with few or no limits. In other situations,
managers are discovering the divide between what their status suppos-
edly promised them and corporate reality. For instance, some lower-level
managers are having to compete with monitors or coordinators who, as
aforementioned, have no hierarchical status but can create alliances with
industrial workers or office employees (because they are peers spending
every day together), creating a situation where managers lose all author-
ity. One example from France Télécom (Technologia 2010) saw the rise
of an organisational change “movement for a movement” culminat-
ing in bosses disorganising their own departments. A more centralised

11In English this is sometimes refered to as those, especially from a middle-class background who

display a sense of entitlement.

 2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution    
41

control of work translated into a loss of autonomy for frontline staff

members, in particular mid-level managers, who ultimately became
incapable of dealing with customer’s problems. The old technician and
engineer networks imbued with a sense of public service were replaced
by commercially-minded staff members whose main objective was to
accelerate internal change. The ensuing cultural conflicts were followed
by contradictory orders that further destabilised operatives, with man-
agers who had lost any sense of their real function walking around the
office without anything to do.12 This functional ambivalence—along
with the tensions arising between managers’ objectives—can be rec-
ognised in the decision to use the term “intermediate” when referring
to certain managers or professions (Cadet and Guitton 2013). It is an
ambiguous vocabulary that asks useful questions but due to the wide
variety of situations involved offers no overall answers.
Otherwise, some managers’ malaise might be caused by the way in
which they are forced to implement decisions whose orientations or
foundations they do not believe in. This can mean that on occasion
they actually disapprove of the strategy the executive has developed, and
indeed of the demands made by their shareholders (if only because they
feel the effects will be bad for the company). The end result is that they
are sometimes forced to act against their own conscience, something
that can cause significant psychological problems. This ambivalence in
managerial behaviour, caused by the diversity of situations they face and
their trajectories of experience, creates a kind of conflictual participa-
tion, which is itself a particular way of defining this new category of
employees torn between their status and (sometimes) enviable level of
income. These factors mean that, more than some of their colleagues,
they find themselves subordinated to senior management. The problem,
of course, is that being dominated in this way by their hierarchy and
daily activities does not always ensure a harmonious position.

12Technologia’s final report (2010) detailed situations of managerial and employee malaise, offer-
ing a subtle analysis of the different ways in which France Télécom employees suffered. This was
a first-hand document that is still open to various interpretations. For a conceptual debate about
suffering, malaise and psycho-social risk, all of which was covered in texts written around the year
2010, it is worth looking at Vincent de Gaulejac’s (2011) book (pp. 66–71).
42   J.-P. Durand

In this situation of “highly dominated dominants” (Flocco 2015),

many managers are getting an inkling that they themselves are in an
intermediate position. Having said that, other managers seems to be
unaware of their plight. Most continue to fulfill their management
functions and do what is asked of them. Far from agreeing with the
extreme vision put by Alain Bihr (1990), what seems clear is that many
managers, accepting what La Boétie (2015) has called voluntary servi-
tude, cope with this far better than the operatives they supervise. These
recomposed forms of management evidenced by companies or public
authorities’ transition from an era of management to an era of business
administration. This also combined with the organisational revolution
caused by the generalisation of lean production that might well be inter-
preted as the advent of a new “productive model”, one whose systemic
coherence makes it highly effective (Durand 2007). It does not really
matter that the appropriate taxonomy does not exist for this evolution.
More important is the radicality of the transformations taking place in
the production of goods and services, something that has been happen-
ing over the past 20 years without attracting much attention and with-
out any clear vision having been developed about how this affects men
and women at work. The following chapter will therefore highlight how
these phenomena pave the way today in the early twenty-first century
for the emergence of new types of workers.

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 3
The New Worker: Fractured Identities
and Denied Recognition

Lean production is a new way of rationalising both production and

work itself, one where similar inputs are expected to produce greater
outputs. Where this is combined with a policy of lowering the produc-
tive system’s labour costs (embodied in the number of employees), it is
easy to see how the structure might be portrayed as a highly efficient
tool aimed at satisfying company owners’ financial ambitions (Lordon
2014; Bachet 2007).1 In this new rationalisation of work—one that is
clearly much more efficient than Ford or Taylor’s models—new types of
workers find themselves in a double bind of having to manifest auton-
omy and responsibility within the extremely narrow framework that
senior management has designed.
The present chapter uses Gramsci’s conceptualisations to understand
how lean production has helped to create new types of workers capa-
ble of responding to the contradictory orders that come with this sys-
tem (greater autonomy and responsibility associated with a new type
of rigorous management characterised by unprecedented procedures).
A further question is why some men and women facing these internal

1See the Nouvelle Revue de Travail, 3/2013, http://nrt.revues.org/.

© The Author(s) 2019 45

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_3
46   J.-P. Durand

conflicts succeed better than others. Lastly, it is worth ascertaining the

transformation of people’s identity at work while revisiting (and deter-
mining the viability) of concepts relating to modes of recognition at
work.

Lean Management’s Production of the New

Worker
According to Gramsci, in the early twentieth century Fordism and
Americanism moulded “new types of workers” in line with the new pro-
duction imperatives. Henceforth, workers were supposed to be strong,
healthy (teetotaler and sexually restrained) and disciplined. The ideal-
type would be individuals who both left their subjectivity at home and
possessed professional tricks allowing them to supplement workplace
requirements. Since these early analyses, specialists in ergonomics and
the sociology of work have demonstrated, particularly using the 1950s
as an example, that to ensure their productive function these new types
of workers were being asked to bring other kinds of know-how to the
table.
Given how the crisis of simple work fits the Fordo-Taylorian organ-
isation of work—and above all given the generalisation of lean pro-
duction as an alternative—the question now becomes whether recent
history has witnessed the emergence of a different kind of new “type of
worker”, one matching the requirements of a productive system that has
become much more efficient.

The New Worker Today

Today’s new worker is much more qualified than previously. At the

very least, they possess a high school certificate (GCSE in England)
and quite often a full high school diploma (A-level in England), with
many having also studied a few years at university. This can be clearly
explained by the widespread utilisation of information technology
but above all by the complexification of manufacturing procedures,
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
47

including on production sites where tasks remain simple but the imme-
diate environment has been computerised. Those young persons who
left the education system too early to be able to access these levels of
knowledge (mastery of written language and basic calculations) can
expect to be almost permanently excluded from jobs offering long-term
career development.2 This is something that all training and employ-
ment specialists write about and agree upon.
Today’s new types of workers are capable of autonomy at work,
meaning that within a defined space they know how to use techni-
cal resources and build social arrangements with their peers or neigh-
bouring departments in such a way as to attain their goals. Autonomy
can be defined here as an array of personal professional resources (see
Conservation of Resources (COR) theory; Safy-Godineau 2013). These
are often technical in nature, although it is also worth mentioning the
ability to negotiate and to ‘how to behave’, all of which is useful for
fostering inter-individual relationships that in turn become resources
themselves.
Lean production also requires a second category of new type
of worker qualities, namely the aptitude to assume responsibility
(Ehrenberg 2000, 234; Zarifian 1996) within an uncertain and fra-
gilised productive organisation. Managers are constantly highlighting
this quality because it is crucial to their meeting their own objectives.
More than anything else, it involves a significant ability to think
abstractly so as to understand those mechanisms that are never really
made explicit in prescribed procedures, if only because the topics
and general situations involved here tend to be difficult to formalise.
Assuming responsibility also means the ability to carry out diagnostics
and anticipate things, neither of which is ever really taught, for similar
reasons. As much as anything else, the issue here is the kind of logical
reasoning that better trained candidates possess and which allow them

2Despite the slowdown in many people’s career progression, most jobs today offer the possibil-
ity 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.
48   J.-P. Durand

to cope with the unpredictable. This greater responsibility enhances

employees’ involvement in tasks and helps the company “to capture
each individual’s ego ideal” (de Gaulejac 2011, 35).
Under the new production conditions, these two essential aptitudes
(capacity for autonomy and assuming responsibility), capable in turn
of generating many other desirable predispositions such as the ability
to communicate, are constantly praised by advocates of a new produc-
tive order that breaks once and for all with Taylorian principles (Veltz
and Zarifian 1993). The idea here is that autonomy and employees’
increased assumption of responsibility define the work characteristics
based on which employees, including frontline operatives, imbue their
own work with meaning; fulfill and realise themselves; and achieve
self-esteem. Expressed otherwise, these are supposed to be ways for
employees to get the meaning of their wage-earning activities to mesh
with their personal value systems.
It is not clear, however, that things actually work this way. Analyses
conducted by the author of this book and based on observations and
interviews featured in later chapters show that the reality of lean pro-
duction is quite different given that it is not nearly as unequivocal (in
terms of employee fulfillment) as its advocates pretend. This is because
within the narrow framework that management designs, employees
are constantly struggling to achieve autonomy or assume a given level
of responsibility. More specifically and irrespective of their nature, out-
put objectives tend to be accompanied by what might be called meta-
rules. Note that these are quite distinct from the narrow prescriptions
witnessed during the Fordo-Taylorian years. This new construct has
been borrowed from business administration and altered en route. In
the project management sphere, for instance, “Meta-rules are generic
rules writing the rules of a project. They require self-organisation (…)
and encompass constructs such as responsibility/control of resources /
management (self-control)” (Jolivet 1998, 28). Having said that, there
is some justification for a critique by L. Goussard (2012, 25), who said
that, “Meta-rules establish a space constraint within which employees
are ‘free’ to self-organise to reach their objectives”. This reformulation
of the perspective of a business administration concept is actually quite
heuristic. Something that can create a space of freedom is also capable
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
49

of organising a system of constraints that is more pernicious insofar as it

is less immediate and above all less visible.
Most of the time, meta-rules are unwritten and left implicit, mean-
ing that they are integrated or incorporated by employees without any
real debate or reflection. This constitutes, however, one of the reasons
why they are so powerful and effective. Any objective contains with and
through itself the conditions of its own realisation (i.e., lower costs, spe-
cific deadlines and defined quality). Given the technical and organisa-
tional processes involved in any production activity, these conditions
can be seen as a cause of constraint and obligation. They also tend to be
accompanied by unspoken directives that are tantamount to prescrip-
tions (spending more time to do a job well, calling on colleagues who
are already too busy, redoing an operation that ended poorly) and some-
what shameful behaviours such as requiring extra material resources to
complete operations more quickly or simply to do them better.3
In short, employees are now encountering heteronomous limitations
determined by the requirements of a productive system whose prin-
ciples and objectives are totally beyond their control. It might always
be assumed that this is a fundamental condition of social life but the
nature of such heteronomy should still be analysed. This means scru-
tinising the practice of wage-earning itself, which by its very nature
involves the wage-earner’s subordination to an employer. The incom-
pleteness of a wage contract, something that other specialists have
discussed widely, justifies rules including meta-rules relating to how
employers use labour. These intemporal analyses of wage-earning do
not, however, explain the recent advent of lean management. Hence
the present book’s focus on the split or divide between the possibilities
enabled by the conditions within which flux tendu have been imple-
mented (autonomy, assumption of greater responsibility, initiative,
etc.)—something often celebrated by managers themselves—and the

3It 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.
50   J.-P. Durand

limitations thereof, being the reality of “prevented work” (Clot 2010),

a framework defined by stringent management of these possibilities and
restrictions on employees’ professional expression. In a documentary
looking at the lives of railway workers (Joulé and Jousse 2011), one of
the maintenance staff interviewees said that he was,

Working for company but also for a public service. Going to work I
would almost always be in a good mood, looking forward to seeing col-
leagues, etc. But that’s not the case now that they treat us like merchan-
dise. I sense that nobody listens to what I say anymore. Everything is spelt
out and all you are supposed to do is follow instructions. No one asks you
to suggest any improvements anymore. My gut feeling is that there is no
room for me and they don’t really want me here anyway (…). I have an
impression of hitting a wall in my professional life.

The feeling today of being up against the wall at work has become a
theme that sociologists are increasingly scrutinising, particularly given
the discourse by certain managers and academics raving over the upside
potential of this new organisation of work. What shocks many employ-
ees is the divide between management promises and the daily reality of
work4 in a lean management regime.

Like the neurosis experienced by conflicted individuals torn between

what is allowed and what isn’t, one risk for people who have on the sur-
face been emancipated from restrictions is depression since they are
clearly troubled by the gap between what is impossible and what isn’t.
Whereas neurosis is a drama of guilt, depression is a tragedy of deficiency.
It is the familiar shadow of unguided persons tired of having to undertake
things without any hope of becoming something more than themselves -
and trying to hold on until they are devoured by the compulsion

4Analysis 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 possibil-
ities of satisfaction at work, even where it is monotonous and repetitive.
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
51

to acquire certain products or engage in certain kinds of behaviour.

(Ehrenberg 2000, 19)

Another way of expressing this starts with the kinds of manage-

ment demands being made of employees in the name of autonomy
and greater responsibility. Under lean management, subjects undergo
demands from other parties (flux tendu, team leaders, peers, hierarchical
system). These demands are made without any law (in the psychoanalyt-
ical sense of the term5) or limitation. They imply “intensive psycholog-
ical mobilisation, demanding in turn a massive narcissistic investment,
with each employee seeking to realise themselves by completely depend-
ing on the judgments they encounter and on a desire for recognition
that is infinite and can therefore never be satisfied” (de Gaulejac 2012,
191). This is a capricious, sporadic but also never-ending demand to
which the ego must respond immediately.

The demand is tantamount to being trampled by an elephant who may or

may not crush the victim. It is an unknown, hence totally different from
desire, which is characterised by the mediation that occurs through dis-
cussion. Demands have a crushing effect.6

From an organisational or sociological perspective, the main characteris-

tic of these demands is that they are infinite, immoderate and expressed
unclearly by management. This is specifically so that employees will
respond by engaging their subjectivity (construed as attesting to their
autonomy and assumption of responsibility). All of which is com-
pletely destabilising (see self-appraisals) given the evanescent nature of
an action framework in which everything seems possible. Even as sub-
jects realise through their experiences what kinds of constraints they
will be facing within this framework, for senior management the game
consists of using self-evaluation (and self-determined objectives) to get

5Interview with Francesca Biagi, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Freudian School (8 January
2015).
6Ibid.
52   J.-P. Durand

individuals to fix objectives superseding those they were given by man-

agement. The extravagance of the demand exposes subjects to demands
formulated by others. It therefore becomes an integral part of a “compe-
tency model” embodied in personal appraisals (c.f. Chapter 4) that are
so upsetting to so many subjects (Ehrenberg 2000, 157). Paradoxically,
it is the infinite nature of the possibilities enabled by vague demands
that make subjects even more fragile, conceivably making it impossible
for them to act at all.
Despite not being rooted in the same foundations as subjectivity, the
wall that individuals run into when they are surrounded by meta-rules
and infinite demands leads to the same situation. It becomes difficult
(or even impossible) for them to be themselves and develop the condi-
tions they need to build up self-esteem through work. Against this back-
drop, depression is always a possible outcome (Ehrenberg 2000).

Disruptures at Work and Dislocations of the New

Worker Under Lean Management Regimes

What seems new with the generalisation of lean production and advent
of lean management—including in the public sector as New Public
Management—is how employees are torn between intentionally fra-
gilised goods and services processes, on one hand, and staff cuts, on the
other. The contradiction here is that fragilisation generally intimates
a need for greater numbers. In turn, this widens the gap between the
activities that managers demand, the actions that each employee is sup-
posed to carry out and the capacities at their disposal:

– Management demands mainly involve the need for uninterrupted

lean material flows (on factory floors, in logistics warehouses, airport
hubs, catering services, mass retail outlets, etc.) or lean informational
flows (IT, banks, insurance companies, engineering and design activ-
ities, etc.). Employees usually carry out production tasks without any
direct contact with materials (except in those ‘industrial’ activities
where, once again, mediation via machines has become increasingly
widespread). Things are different in other sectors such as banking,
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
53

insurance or engineering. Here, employees intervene in the process

itself since it is mainly informational in nature (meaning, metaphor-
ically, the information with which people work might be considered
their “material”, as exemplified by virtual files for customers, users,
beneficiaries, etc.). Lastly, in all other work situations, employees are
increasingly overseeing, maintaining and/or ensuring the proper run-
ning of the processes for which they are responsible. For each of these
employees, management demands signify production objectives (vol-
umes and quality) that tend to increase even as human and material
resources tend to decline. It is to this extent that demand can be con-
sidered limitless and indeed lawless, since there is no reason for these
divergent trends to slow down. Moreover, it is generally the most
deserving workers who, because they always consider themselves defi-
cient in terms of handling demands, they face work more. Above and
beyond wage remuneration, rewards consist of satisfaction with work
(self-esteem) and recognition by management and peers. All of which
is likely to translate one day into inter-personal advancement or even
promotion;
– From the employee perspective, all subjects have a possibility of
action based on their commitment to work (constrained involve-
ment) and qualifications or personal competencies. This can be tech-
nical and/or social in nature (i.e. the ability to find someone with
the resources that are missing at a particular moment in time). Such
resources can only be mobilised effectively if available human and
material resources match the company or public authority’s produc-
tion needs. The problem is that by its very nature, lean production
constantly limits these resources, making it increasingly difficult to
achieve one’s objectives (Chapter 4). In turn, this hits subjects in
their self-esteem, and beyond this, in their expectations or hopes for
personal advancement or promotion. It is a bona fide case of ‘crush-
ing the subject’.

Dislocations within working situations (Généreux 2006), a topic that

lean management generally sublimates, translate the gap between, on
one hand, the demand for activities (which is always rising in a pro-
ductive model based on lean production with a smaller workforce), and
54   J.-P. Durand

on the other hand, subjects’7 difficulty in (and in some extreme cases,

impossibility of ) taking action given their limited personal and external
resources.

Differentiated Individual Responses to the Dislocations

Caused by Lean Management

The extent to which employees control or dominate these work-­related

dislocations can vary. Some individuals possess personal technical
resources and/or are able to mobilise ancillary collective resources help-
ing them to face up to this challenge. They are also able to temporar-
ily create the illusion that their immediate manager will cover for them.
Others struggle because of their inability to reach their objectives, i.e. to
fill the gap between the demands placed on them and the results they
can achieve.
In short, different individuals offer different responses that can pri-
marily be categorised in two ways: subjects can accept or accommodate
the tensions and dislocations that exist between demands and outcomes
or else they can use personal resources (and anything else available to
them) to remedy the situation. Despite the harm to their self-esteem,
they will tend to react here by investing in the company in a different
way, or by doing things outside of the workplace to the extent that they
possess the psychic and symbolic tools enabling them to put a healthy
distance between themselves and the company. Others will fail attempt-
ing this, however, whereupon they start sooner or later to doubt their
own aptitudes, falling victim to the contradiction between self-esteem
and dispossession. This then kickstarts a cycle of negative reactions
that further decrease individuals’ chances for coping with the situation,
undermining their ego and causing problems like insomnia, irritability
with their family, substance abuse, absenteeism, etc.
The ensuing question, one that recent discussions about social-
psychic disorders has transformed into a scientific and political priority,

7In this section, influenced by psychoanalysis, we frequently use the concept of the subject to

delineate the new worker.

 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
55

is why some subjects fall apart in work situations that others endure
and where a few even blossom. Expressed differently, it remains unclear
why some individuals cope with the dislocations they experience in the
workplace whereas others cannot.
The starting point here must be to ascertain the foundations of per-
sonality differences that used to go unnoticed but are today consid-
ered essential to any modern understanding or analysis of work. One
way of doing this is to develop singular constructions for each subject.
Psychoanalysts consider that when subjects come into the world, they
are spoken about, wanted and desired, i.e. people are talked about
before being born, meaning they are constructed through the words
greeting them in their environment. What then happens is that they
receive special attention from their mother and father (words, signs
of affection, recognition by another person), all of which constitutes
the basis for a future construction of personality and ego. It is on the
basis of this narcissism that people constitute their self-image. Subjects
who possess narcissism established on this basis have fathers who, by
their presence or function, help the subject to exist by getting them to
respond positively to the enigma of fatherhood and transmission of life.
This means that they learn to take responsibility like their fathers did,
meaning responsibility for the world, for belonging to the world, and
for leaving a similar yet different mark on it across the generations.
In cases where mothers or fathers reject a child or pay him/her insuf-
ficient attention—a nasty and often hidden form of abandonment—
subjects might not feel (or perceive themselves later) as being worthy
of love. In this case, they will not love themselves. It is this deficient
self-image that psychoanalysts describe as a defect or “narcissistic flaw”.8
Subjects who have not received sufficient attention at birth will be una-
ble to ponder upon the enigma of fatherhood or even of life itself—
given the absence of the signifier that is the father—and this emptiness

8Everyone 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 min-
imal 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.
56   J.-P. Durand

will initially limit them from constructing themselves. Subsequently

they will have to construct their own set of self-signified references,
requiring in turn a modicum of self-confidence. However, because they
lack the connection that consists of being able to imagine themselves
in someone else’s place, this aspect of their self-construction will be
relatively weak. To remedy the weakness, subjects will seek recourse in
authority or, more relevant to the present topic, in their business life
and status as wage-earners. In the short run, these elements (especially
authority) can seem very reassuring to many people who view them as
a way of offsetting the other deficiencies they suffer. At that point, the
company becomes their reason to live, portraying itself as the response
to their search for the meaning of life or more exactly as a way of filling
the hole they feel (lack of response to the enigma of fatherhood), i.e.
the company seems like a force of creation where self-construction is
possible. But when it (or more precisely senior management or central
authority) criticises the wage-earner for not bridging the gap between
production requirements and available resources, meaning the inabil-
ity to use their autonomy and the increased responsibility that man-
agement gave them to ensure uninterrupted production flows, subjects
rediscover their narcissistic flaw which re-opens like a wound. What
happens then is that their entire professional environment falls apart
and takes away whatever self-esteem they had been able to retake, to
reconstruct when they had viewed the company as a form of protection
(Ehrenberg 2000, 212).
Being rejected by the company in which a person invests heavily is
tantamount to failing the company in terms of the creativity that it
had hoped to find in its employees. This becomes virtually impossi-
ble for the subject to accept, explaining ensuing mental pathologies
that become worse and worse. The certainties and patterns associ-
ated with earlier organisations of work created a strong support sys-
tem that—when they disappeared—turned into a modern threat and,
in the worst case scenario, the point of an emotional breakdown. It
used to be possible to bring two sides of the narcissistic flaw together
in Fordo-Taylorian companies that offered subjects support and made
them feel more or less strong. This is impossible in lean production.
Psychoanalysts like to talk about subjects as if they were oak trees, solid
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
57

in the face of adversity and creation, devoted to a company because

it has been such an important factor in their construction and crea-
tion, based on the idea that subjects might feel part of something that
works well. But like oak trees in fairytales, kings of the forest, subjects
are often too rigid to survive storms and other misfortunes. Moreover,
in lean organisations, the point is precisely the opposite to that of
Fordo-Taylorism. In lean organisations since the objective is to obtain
total process control, the most efficient organisation can only thrive
by locating weak spots. This process is termed by Parker and Slaughter
(1992) as Management-by-Stress. Stewart et al. (2009), echoing Ralph
Miliband, also describe this as “class struggle from above”.
Oak trees are the first to ‘enter’ a company, meaning to adhere to
its ostensible values. By so doing, they become ‘personalities’. Their
ego will be strong as long as this lasts but the obverse of this strength
is great sensitivity to what others say and to the paradoxical demands
that are being made in the name of the company (and which can be
almost impossible to satisfy). Above all, it is the things that cannot be
postponed that cause the most grief. Subjects will be very sensitive to
words that can be as violent as they are all-encompassing. Indeed, it
is those subjects who take words to the limit that believe what other
people say counts tremendously.9 These are subjects capable of giving
everything. On the other hand, when they encounter an obstacle (run
up against the wall) like an unfulfilled promise, they tend to fall apart.
This is because of their inability to maintain their self-esteem while cop-
ing with their fatigue with (or the impossibility of ) being themselves.
The other category of subjects, so-called reeds, have a personality con-
structed on a foundation of narcissism. This is reinforced by a whole
range of solid family traits, including the personal resources that indi-
viduals inherit from their family, specifically the kinds of self-esteem
and self-love they derive from the attention their parents gave them.
In the past, this kind of interaction tended to be viewed as something
that people were either lacking or else had been unable to appropriate.

9Interview with Francesca Biagi, 18 June 2015.

58   J.-P. Durand

Subjects were said to have no need of creating or belonging to rigor-

ous management structures in order to feel that they existed. The com-
pany was something that came on top of everything else they possessed.
Where management distressed these individuals by highlighting certain
defeats and failures, they successfully ignored this, first and foremost
because they were not over-invested subjectively. In other words, “reeds ”
were supposed to be strong subjects who bent but did not break in the
fact of adversity, of which lean production was deemed to become noth-
ing more than the latest variant. They would cope with the disrupture
(gap) between the promises and realities of work in today’s productive
model because they had learnt from their own trajectories to dominate
and even mobilise the disconnect in such a way as to adopt a variety of
positions reflecting either the company’s situation at the time or else the
people with whom they were interacting.
The reality is that the growing gap between management demands
(and the promises associated with this) and the realities of people’s sit-
uation at work (available resources and constraining meta-rules) has
destabilised certain subjects who have lost their compass in the profes-
sional world. From there to total confusion is but a short step. Even if
the reality of work was never exactly what it was supposed to be under-
stood following Taylorian or Fordian principles (with actual work being
quite different from what these earlier models prescribed), the truth for
these subjects is that any expression of sentiment or reflectivity is pro-
hibited at work. Taylor’s industrial ox-worker or Ford’s industrial mass
worker were first and foremost humans (mainly men) asked to leave
their subjectivity outside so they could concentrate all of their (mainly
physical) efforts on the task that management had defined for them.
On the other hand, with lean management, the new worker is being
asked to bring his subjectivity into the workplace alongside his phys-
ical strength, which has de facto become less and less important. His
desire to fulfill himself or to be recognised by others in order to have a
sense of existing has been incorporated into the very heart of the new
productive model, ensuring employees’ mobilisation around a compa-
ny’s objectives. According to Francesca Biagi-Chai, “Management is no
longer asking subjects to obey but instead to take charge of and appro-
priate the company’s ideal. The idea here is to enrapture each subject’s
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
59

personal psyche”.10 What companies expect from workers nowadays is

total transparency. In turn, this has meant the end of hidden knowl-
edge, accused of being a kind of entropy that slows production down
(Durand and Stewart 1998).
The disrupture between management’s words and the realities that
employees experience is increasing all the time. It resonates through
the growing divide between subjects’ desire for self-fulfilment and the
difficulties they face in satisfying this desire. Unfulfilled management
promises are what psychoanalysts refers to as semblance, meaning words
that are used without any real concern for their consequences i.e. words
without any point or associated action. Such words are cut off from
reality and therefore exacerbate the malaise that people feel as their lack
of self-realisation detriorates. All the teachings of the French psychoan-
alyst Jacques Lacan highlighted the effects or shocks caused by language
and words in terms of how they affect people’s physical well-being. He
equated this with traumas reconceptualised as symptoms or forms of
delirium. This is an approach that is very characteristic of one form of
psychoanalysis and its vision of reality. It is at the level of consequences
and symptoms that subjects become as human as they can. If the whole
of a company prefers that this space be retained for oaks trees instead,
it is easy to see how the opposite can happen, i.e. how a malaise can
spread. The problem is that in most companies, causing harm to peo-
ples’ bodies or minds is of little importance compared to efficiency and
productivity considerations. The end result of this betrayal of individu-
als’ psychoanalytical reality is an exacerbation of psycho-social risks and
ultimately rising suicide rates.

1018 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 pro-
hibit 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.
60   J.-P. Durand

The unprecedented nature of this dislocation between self-esteem and

the possibility of achieving it in work has affected the new worker, nota-
bly in France where employees find it increasingly difficult to endure
this. This can be witnessed in the rising number of visits to psycholo-
gists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts due to work-related afflictions—
not to mention the increasing number of workplace suicides. The divide
has become increasingly visible and therefore attracts more attention, in
workplaces but also elsewhere. The basic cause is lean production, and
specifically the stringent and ever-growing new demands associated with
it, due to the ongoing reduction in staff numbers (an endemic aspect
given the frugal connotation of the term “lean production”, Stewart
et al. 2009). There is some variation, however, in how people react to
this dislocation. Some who would appear to be strong (oak trees ) snap
more often than they used to when exposed to these situations, i.e. the
new work modalities have made them more vulnerable. The mainly
moral and mental hardening of working conditions based on endless
demands for greater efficiency has caused a huge rise in the number of
employees affected by social-psychic disorders.
Having said that, “psycho-social risk” (Clot 2010; de Gaulejac
2011, 66) does not appear to be an accurate way of describing the situa-
tion. On the one hand, it ignores some individuals’ pernicious desire to
underplay the risks of a given situation despite the obvious deterioration
in working conditions and resulting pathologies. This would argue for
replacing the term risk by disorder (such as the kind of problems peo-
ple might have with their muscles or bones)—and even trauma. That
said, all of these epithets rank the origins of malaise by placing psychic
problems at the top of the pyramid. Yet one thing the present book has
demonstrated is that many or indeed most of today’s pathologies can
be explained by the new organisation of work and new working con-
ditions. Hence the need to explain why the extent of work-related
depression and other pathologies has risen constantly over the past
30 years. The causes of the problems witnessed today might have to
be re-ordered. Specifically, social explanations precede psychic ones,
even if the former have their importance in the psychoanalytical per-
spective. Indeed, it is advisable to refer to pathologies by the generic
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
61

term of disorders instead of the more enigmatic vocabulary of risks.

Hence the present book’s reference to social-psychic disorders, in con-
trast to many international institutions, academics or other experts who
prefer euphemisms.
A second criticism of the construct of psycho-social risks is that it
totally denies the collective nature of work. A given individual, work-
station or function is always part of a whole (a factory floor, production
line, department, etc.). This is particularly true with lean production
which, relying as it does on flux tendu, interconnects activities and
workers. Unintentionally, the construct of psycho-social risk has con-
tributed to the grand maneuvre of individualised employment rela-
tionships, to the point that pathologies have started breaking out in
collectives for reasons relating to socialisation. The basic argument here
is that psycho-social risk-based explanations should account for individ-
ualisation; for the impossibility of a collective expression of malaise at
work; and for the rise of new pathologies. In short, this is a case both of
people closing in on themselves and of the individualisation of respon-
sibility that is part of a broader phenomenon. Indeed, the advance of
individualisation is particularly rapid when everyone does not fall apart
at the same time, just the most vulnerable. The collective dimension of
work and the malaise or pathology associated with it is hidden behind
the evidence of certain stylised facts. Atomisation has prevailed, in part
because it is counterproductive for people to talk about their personal
fragility in situations where competition carries more weight than soli-
darity. This accords with the title of a book that talks about how “Not
everyone will die but all are afflicted” (Pezé 2008). The question then
becomes how new types of workers are supposed to cope with a situa-
tion of this nature.

The New Worker: Learning to (Re)construct Himself

as a Divided Entity

Most subjects are somewhere between these two “ideal-types” (oak trees
and reeds ). The originality of the situation that has led to the emergence
62   J.-P. Durand

of the new worker is that in order to survive, subject operating in this

no man’s land is forced to re-construct or re-shape his psyche—when
he can—so as to accommodate the new and growing disrupture or
gap between management promises in terms of self-satisfaction at
work and a reality that can be quite disappointing. The situations that
the new worker experiences at work means he either accepts this dis-
location/divide/polarisation or else fall foul of his job because he suf-
fers social-psychic disorders, resigns or get fired. The new worker must
invent and re-creates himself by finding some kind of internal arrange-
ment. This usually involves coming up with resources enabling him
to juggle the two sides of the dislocation (or the flaw ) between the
demands being made on them at work and unfulfilled promises. This
is no longer a narcissistic flaw but a flaw in the reality employees are
being offered. Of course, the two are closely linked since subjects suf-
fering a narcissistic flaw and who cannot cope with a flaw or dislocation
at work are more likely to fall prey to the aforementioned social-psychic
disorders.
To accommodate this disrupture between expectations, promises
and a stringent framework of action preventing the new worker from
realising himself, he must adapt his whole psyche to the new situation.
This means recognising that he must construct himself as the disjointed,
fragmented, fractured, divided and flawed subject he has become. The
new workers who do so successfully adapt to and/or survive lean man-
agement because they have sufficient psychic resources to transform
themselves in ways congruent with the new productive model’s social
imperatives. They model their egos over the course of a long learning
process that teaches them to accept any social dislocations by develop-
ing an appropriate self-construction in response. In general, they do
not invest themselves entirely (in the Lacanian sense of this construct)
in their work but compose, preserve and hide more intimate aspects of
their lives. This modeling or shaping is tantamount to structuring per-
sonal divides or flaws so they can become a positive adaptation of the
individual’s psyche to the (new) situation created by lean management.
It is worth remembering that such adjustments were difficult to suc-
ceed in the past due to the fact that, paradoxically, people did not need
to seem like “oak trees ” to exist because they had flexibility and their
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
63

psyches were able to adjust to the social disconnect between expecta-

tions/promises and disillusionment.11
Where Fordians had to accept unequivocal submission, new workers
must find ways of coping with the disrupture between what is promised
and what actually happens, i.e., they must constantly find new ways
of constructing themselves in relation to this dislocation, basically by
shortening the distance between the different sides of a narcissistic flaw
that is constantly threatening to reopen. In short, new workers must
reconstruct themselves around a homothetic psychic or mental flaw
associated with the dislocation they experience at work, while remain-
ing capable of juggling both sides of the flaw or divide (i.e. constructing
the totality of one’s self ). In this case, it is the ego that assumes almost
official standing, becoming the equal of the person’s subjectivity due to
its inability to stave off the reality that breaks through the flaw. In this
sense, new workers must mobilise incredible creativity, not only at work
where they must find ways of working within the limitations imposed
by meta-rules preventing their creativity, but also beyond this so as to
resolve the flaws that lean management always puts in people’s way and
foments within them. Of course, the disrupture between management
demands and the impossibility of satisfying them creates and maintains
a further divide, one rooted in the de-structuring of workers’ personal-
ity between the desire to realise themselves at work and the frustration
of not being able to satisfy objectives for which insufficient human or
material resources have been allocated.12 It is in this de-structuring pro-
cess that subjects must maintain their egos. They do this by readjusting
their behaviour in a way that helps them to cope with new situations. In
some cases this means that where possible they must re-construct them-
selves, in the strong and literal sense of the term.

11The verb “adjust” has been chosen intentionally because it resonates with the theme of play at
work (Durand 2008; 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.
12The 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.
64   J.-P. Durand

Normally, getting people to accept this dislocation (and its fragmen-

tation of their work) should spark great of anger. It would be useful to
analyse why this does not happen more often and why collective action
has become so rare. Towards this end, the proposal here is that the
role attributed to social games (below) be interpreted as signalling an
attempt to smooth social relationships and construct acceptability for
a kind of work that has become increasingly difficult (albeit sometimes
more interesting).

The Importance of (Social) Games in the Face

of Disjuncted Work

Games have had a bad reputation in current thinking about work,

which currently favours approaches that revolve around suffering. Yet
both variants can coincide, with games helping people to accept or at
least tolerate suffering, including by masking it.
Playing games is not necessarily synonymous with pleasure but can
also be problematic, like when someone loses at cards. The term should
be re-thought as a mechanism for minimising the ambivalent nature
of social interplay. The problem is that the playful connotation only
expresses one dimension of the phenomenon (with the notion of pleas-
ure being entirely irrelevant). This is because social games also encom-
pass a social obligation reflecting the fact that it is impossible not to
participate in social life. In addition, it requires compliance with rules
(viewed as heteronomous constraints) and generates the satisfaction of
cooperating with a group—sometimes that enables the person playing
the game to both look good and be recognised. In short, playing a game
can itself be part of the situation out of which it is born, as well as part
of the social relationships that it creates itself. Social games might seem
to have no cost where they do not set any objectives but evoke certain
issues justifying players’ participation. In this sense, they are not as free
as they appear, seeing as they require different parties’ commitment to
ensure that everyone receives their own (often symbolic) gratification.
In short, social games are a serious affair causing many strategic or
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
65

symbolic local challenges that have meaning for participants and force
them to take part (Huizinga 1951).
If game-playing is a social phenomenon, it is worth revisiting the
different meanings of this concept as well as the various possibilities
to which it lends itself. Saying that a person is playing a game refers
firstly to the physics of an action that requires both a playing space and
a driver, while acknowledging that sufficient freedom exists to enable
the game to take place (without there being so much freedom that the
whole action loses all meaning, i.e., ignores current rules). Playing just
the right amount works because the different components of the action
are adjusted appropriately—with the act of participating in the social
game being responsible for these adjustments. At the same time, playing
is a micro-social activity occurring within the structures of meta-rules
that themselves reflect production relationships. Therefore (and for the
purposes of the present treatise), it would be inadvisable to portray such
social games as elements structuring the lives of companies or public
authorities employing millions of persons. Indeed, games can only be
done justice if the social roles that they perform are sufficiently high-
lighted, including in the way that subjects are structured through the
socialisation processes they imply. Game-playing in a situation char-
acterised by flaws diminishes the power of the superego while attenu-
ating (or even humanising) the effects of whatever demands are being
made, just as long as this is not something that senior management
has required or is co-opting for its own purposes (in which case it is no
longer a game). In short, game-playing links to opaqueness, a lack of
transparency and secrecy (in the sense that rules are defined by peers)
since by definition it is a facade, albeit one that has a pleasurable as well
as a playful dimension (Durand and Stewart 1998).
One of the best examples of these kinds of social games can be found
on automotive assembly lines. The game that co-workers play here is to
advance more quickly than the ordinary work rate by finishing four or
five vehicles at a time, leaving them free to rest for anything up to ten
minutes during which time they might walk around teasing those col-
leagues who are still working or else leave the factory floor before the
official end of the workday. The main value of this short free time is
symbolic since it shows assembly workers’ ability to control workflows
66   J.-P. Durand

and above all gives them time to walk up and down the line. Not all
industrial workers are in a position to get ahead of schedule, however.
That depends in part on their dexterity but also on whether their work-
station is more or less “advantageous” compared to their colleagues. The
purpose of this game is getting oneself allocated to a good workstation
or coming to an agreement with the individual responsible for work
allocations that the workload will not be excessive. This is a second-­
order game where the assembly specialist must entertain excellent rela-
tions with supervisors and other technical managers, convincing them
that the workstation to which he or she has been allocated should not
involve parts that are overly difficult to assemble, or require the han-
dling of complex or difficult tools (like pneumatic screw drivers whose
length makes it difficult for the person to move around the line). At the
same time, the negotiations in question here occur against a background
defined by certain rules—one of which being that people should not
compromise with supervisors and most also keep their distance from
technical staff. These rules and limitations are necessarily somewhat
flexible. Above all, they must be durable given the possibility that work
techniques and organisation can change. Hence a third level game-­
playing, one relating to the setting of rules and how they are negotiated
in assembly line work groups (Durand and Stewart 1998; Durand and
Hatzfeld 2003; Durand 2007; Reynaud 1993).
In sum, given the almost non-existent room to maneuvre at this level
social games do not relate so much to the actual content of work, with
most guidelines being specified by engineering teams. They do, how-
ever, relate to the immediate work environment, being the way work
is implemented and the forms this takes. Social games distance workers
from their tasks, thereby constructing a social meaning relating not to
their gestures but to behaviour on-site. “Playing is not ‘everyday’ life or
life ‘per se’. It offers a pretext for evasion by letting individuals enter a
temporary sphere of activity that has its own rules” (Huizinga 1980).
It is this meaning given to and by games-playing, and not to work-
ers’ specific body movements, that makes industrial work and work-
ing conditions acceptable (Durand and Stewart 1998). The power of
game-playing is that it “is first and foremost a free action. Playing games
when you are ordered to do so is no longer playing” (Huizinga 1980).
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
67

Social games make repetitive tasks less daunting. On top of this,

there is the fact that not every worker/assembly specialist can play, if
only because this would mean accepting one’s own marginalisation by
others—or admitting one’s weaknesses—seeing as anyone who does not
play the game is likely to be viewed as lacking the resources to partici-
pate in the group’s social life. Playing games

complements life, compensates for whatever is missing hence indispensa-

ble to individuals as a biological function; to collectives for its meaning,
signification and expressive value and for the spiritual and social connec-
tions it creates; in short, for the cultural functions it fulfills. (ibid.)

Because social games are part of a social group’s construction, they

mediate between the constraint of employees’ status and their imme-
diate working conditions, impoverished as they are by an extreme
fragmentation. By giving an activity meaning that gestures do not
intrinsically possess, social games transform a constraint into a fun activ-
ity, something that can be quite satisfying and to which participants
must, in any case, consent. Hence the idea by Michael Burawoy that a
company is best apprehended in spaces pacified by social games, consti-
tuting counterpoints to the conflicts that also occur in such spaces.

Two consequences of game-playing must be distinguished. Firstly, this

masks the production relationships for which the games were originally
designed. Secondly, it leads to greater acceptance of the social relationship
of production that define the rules of the game. (Burawoy 1979)

Social games never refer to the meta-rules that are always being
enforced. They refer even less to production relationships. What they
do, however, is occur in a framework defined by meta-rules that actors
have to respect. In Burawoy’s view, social games drive social (and
inter-individual) relationships at work while masking dominant struc-
tures. Theories about social games between peers working in a corporate
environment—or occasionally about worker relationships with senior
management and other departments connected to the ones to which
they belong—are redolent of a thesis first developed by Jean-Daniel
68   J.-P. Durand

Reynaud (1993) relating the importance of playing to the rules (of a

game) and how this creates meaning at work. Note that this thesis
means more then merely recognising the existence of joint regulation by
senior managers and operatives since it neither ranks games nor the dif-
ferent inter-individual power relationships permeating daily work lives.
To have scientific meaning, this micro-sociological construct must be
stated in a meso-social context (like a company or a public sector insti-
tution) but above all in a macro-social context constituted, for instance,
by a logic of capital accumulation governed by the strict laws of eco-
nomic financialisation. It is worth remembering that without context,
social games might seem totally ethereal, akin to people idling about in
a vacuum far from any social reality.
In public or private sector organisations affected by lean manage-
ment thinking, teamwork (with the forced and permanent mobility that
accompanies this) has tended to destroy older work groups and make it
harder to invent local work standards or rules of the game. By making
resistance more difficult (Bouquin 2008), lean management discourages
social games. Paradoxically, this might appear to be a weakening of the
productive system itself since social games are what create meaning at
work by cementing work groups. Conditioned by a certain micro-social
order organised around rules, social games are a serious affair that bring
together the two parts of work that have become disjointed due to lean
production principles (possibilities and promises on one hand; relative
disappointment in outcomes, on the other). In this way, social games
are part of the effort to bring the two sides of each subject’s narcissistic
flaw closer to one another. By so doing, they reinforce people’s sense of
psychological equilibrium.
Lastly (and thankfully for employees’ mental health), even when
applying the strictest lean management principles, such as they
appeared in Japanese manuals whose prime aim was cost-cutting (Ohno
1989), game players’ room to maneuvre cannot be totally eliminated.
Despite their reduced scope, games will necessarily always retain a
space where new adjustments are possible. Any attempts to establish
a total company, i.e. one where everything is fully controlled, will still
leave interstices enabling new social games setting new rules (Durand
and Stewart 1998). There will always be room for game-playing, some-
thing that Johan Huizinga calls irreducible. Where spaces of autonomy
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
69

are restricted, others will emerge. There is undoubtedly a deep trend

towards the limitation of such spaces but this will never be absolute. In
turn, it explains why social-psychic disorders—which can culminate in
suicide—are more frequent than ever before, even as growing numbers
of workers (the aforementioned reeds ) successfully avoid falling prey to
these disorders.
Sociologists analysing mainstream lean management should be
able to look beyond the simple thesis that certain organisational prin-
ciples create certain situations. Instead, they might prefer a dialectical
approach that both recognises the interstices of autonomy conducive to
adjustments being made while continuing to seek sources or levers of
resistance and opposition to dominant trends, ending in the emergence
of widely unexpected possibilities.

The Process of Constructing Identity at Work

Highlighting the social-organisational origins of social-psychic disor-
ders and processes that challenge employees’ psychic state raises ques-
tions about identity at work and how it constructs professional ideals
(see Chapter 4). The weakest employees, those with the most gaping
narcissistic flaw, cannot resist the aforementioned tensions, experiencing
a wide variety of types of insomnia, irritation and mental pathology, as
well as social-psychic disorders that lead sooner or later to their being
excluded from (or possibly, by) work. Others do better applying a vari-
ety of responses and behaviours that are more or less adapted to their
own subjective structuring and to the situations they face at work (along
with management expectations). Saying that they come through better
does not mean, however, that the tensions most white-collar and man-
ual employees suffer at work should be ignored. Quite the contrary, it
means focusing on the resources that they rely on: personal ones; those
resources that are present in the workspace; or else the resources found
outside of the world of work (family, friends, other networks).
Expressed differently, employee subjects are new types of workers
constructed through their personal history and who continue to build
up their identity by their daily experience. The identity of interest here
is their identity at work, ostensibly a never-ending process whereby new
70   J.-P. Durand

types of workers draw the resources they need to cope with the disconnect
between the autonomy they are given and the inflexible framework within
which they can exercise it. Without seeking to reproduce or discuss cer-
tain theories relating to identity at work (Sainsaulieu 1985) or profes-
sional identity (Dubar 1991), yet but while borrowing certain elements
from them, the present text differs insofar as it focuses both on process
while portraying identity at work as a kind of evolving response to the
aforementioned disconnect, depending on a subject’s background.13 At
the same time, it must be remembered that identity at work also reflects
whether an individual has joined a group or even identifies with it.
In turn, this makes it possible to construct a new theory of identity
at work, one depending on four main sources that albeit presented sep-
arately for the purposes of clarity relies on elements that are in constant
interaction. These four sources (see chart for topographic representa-
tion) range from the most general to the most subjective. They are,
respectively: profession; industrial relations; immediate work situation;
and the subject’s (or individual’s) history.

Branch, Company and Profession

The branch where employees operate can be more or less valued depend-
ing on the dichotomies between their manual/intellectual aspects;
whether industrial or tertiary sectors are involved; whether sales or
own-account activities are conducted; but also the type of product or
service on offer. The technologies that employees use, which generally
correlate to the branch and skills being implemented, situate them on a
scale ranging from the most traditional to the most innovative. A com-
pany’s name also conveys imaginary connotations replete with national-
ity, history, successes and failures. There is a ranking of corporate images
within a given branch, with senior managers attaching more and more
importance to this factor (i.e. brand awareness) not only because of its

13The 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).
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
71

impact on the dissemination of products or services but also to make the

company more attractive to the most prestigious employees. Beyond the
jobs created for employees ranked thusly and who produce differenti-
ated professional identities, the status attributed to independent workers
also plays a not insignificant role in their construction. Because access to
liberal professions is regulated, possessing this status has long been seen
as a great prize—even if this has started to fade due to the increasingly
administrative and tax-driven management of these professions.
Lastly, having a job also means belonging to a class, something that
has a more or less direct influence on identity at work. Despite the
progressive disappearance of social class references in the scientific
­
world (and from workers’ own concerns), it still functions implicitly,
albeit often surreptitiously. This is quite effective with, for instance,
many industrial workers (particularly young ones) rejecting any iden-
tification with the working class, saying that they no longer feel like
they belong to it. Similarly, most white-collar workers identify with
the socio-economic categories immediately above the ones to which
they belong because they share some of the attributes at work or, more
broadly, some of the associated modes of consumption. This identifica-
tion with (or rejection of ) the other influences employees’ perception
of their function and job, thereby affecting how they represent to them-
selves their own work as well as work in general. Still, even if the idea
of a profession has become a port-manteau construct, it remains a point
of cristallisation for all of these representations, comprising a key element
in the way people present themselves. In addition, alongside the profes-
sion, there are customers. Whether they are external to the institution
where an employee works or have been reconstructed as such as per the
flux tendu model, they make a significant contribution to the formation
of identity at work through the constraints they embody (see Chapter 2).

Industrial Relations

Industrial relations, in the broader sense of the term, refer to union

organisations’ relationships with senior management, Human Resource
Management (HRM), the kinds of jobs on offer in a company or
72   J.-P. Durand

institution (secure or precarious) and the quality of hierarchical rela-

tionships. All of these dimensions determine—together with the con-
tent of work and relationships among peers—the atmosphere at work,
itself an important component of identity at work. The style adopted
by one’s immediate managers (i.e., authoritarian, convivial or partic-
ipative), as well as senior management’s ability to communicate the
company’s orientations, problems or successes affects people’s pride in
belonging to the organisation. Similarly, employees’ image of a com-
pany is also affected by whether or not management fulfills its prom-
ises regarding salary increases or promotions. Executives’ independence
from (or dependence on) shareholders or partners also has an effect.
The nature of jobs and whether they involve regular recourse to
temporary workers or fixed-term or part-time contracts are all factors
sending a clear signal as to what a future new recruit might expect. Job
stability is, after all, a key factor in people’s sense of attachment to a
company or institution. Similarly, the hierarchy of job qualifications
intimates what chances someone has of being promoted or building a
career in the company. Where training policies are set by the institu-
tion, they will necessarily refer to different vocational or educational
levels of achievement as well as the (often professional) specialities that
employees have acquired through adult learning. The places where such
­training takes place (and implicitly how they are accessed) are also part
of how identity is constituted at work.
Despite fewer employees being involved in union movements, some-
thing that might be deplored given the need for all parties to respect
counterparts’ rights and obligations, union power and the social
advances they have achieved (paid leave, wage levels and social protec-
tion mechanisms) all affect an employee’s attachment to an institution,
as does the possibility of getting a wage hike. Employees tend to posi-
tion the definition of their relationship with their employer (and indeed
with work in general) on the basis of HRM model and practices. Where
HRM departments treat employees aggressively (hard HRM) and are
too quick to hire or fire, the effect on staff engagement can be coun-
terproductive. Because the competency models relies on the principle
that each and every individual is recognised at work (and indeed, that
their personalities are recognised beyond this), many employees feel
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
73

discouraged if they sense that they have been excluded or downgraded

by their employer, leading to a further dilution of their identity at work.

The Organisation of Work

Identity at work is largely determined by daily work, meaning by the

work activity itself, comprised of physical gestures (hence ones that
materialise in an immediate environment affected by working condi-
tions). A further factor is the mobilisation of the intellectual faculties
needed to accomplish the requisite tasks, on one hand, and the relations
with fellow workers needed to complete a task, on the other. In short,
work activity is not a given. Quite the contrary, it results from an organ-
isation of production and work and includes those relationships that
can help to frame issues like hierarchy and command structures.
As analysed in the preceding chapter, the generalisation of flux tendu
and lean production—being a radical re-organisation of production and
work—has profoundly changed the conditions in which work is exer-
cised. Operations have changed, with workers and technicians in the
industrial sector having less direct contact with materials. At the same
time, new sectors of activities have emerged that re-introduce this imme-
diacy (fast food, logistics, mass retail, transports in general). Lastly, ICT
has increased its footprint on economic activities everywhere. In the same
vein and as the rest of this chapter will demonstrate, relationships with
one’s peers or senior management have also been profoundly transformed.
Increased autonomy and assumption of responsibility, including in
execution tasks, has transformed people’s identity at work. Because work
has become more interesting, or appears to be so, and because employ-
ees can now invest a greater part of their subjectivity, identity at work
has clearly improved, with their relationship to work being viewed
today as much more positive than in the past. At the same time and
given management’s constant cost-cutting demands (plus the new time
pressures associated with the implementation of flux tendu principles)
working conditions have deterioriated. Even more interestingly, work is
also becoming harder, aggravating contradictions in the way that identi-
ties are constructed at work.
The main changes in the workplace can be analysed thusly:
74   J.-P. Durand

– The changing nature of work groups. Fordian work teams constituted

to reflect affinities between employees (geographic/ethnic origins,
union sensitivities, etc.) are being replaced by the managerial juxtapo-
sition of individuals involved in relations that are often functional, cold
and lacking in emotional investment. In the past, full-time employees
accounted for the lion’s share of a company’s core staff but there has
been a growing move towards work groups comprised of peripheral pre-
carious workers competing with one another, with the normalisation of
some individuals’ status threatening others with a downgraded status.
All of these workforce management principles “undermine the atmos-
phere at work” and induce employees to retreat into themselves.
– Autonomy at work may seem to be on the rise given employees’ greater
freedom to self-organise in their groups (as long as the prescribed
objectives are achieved). Indeed, a not insubstantial proportion of
all rules tend nowadays to be self-constructed by the work groups to
whom they apply (de Terssac 1992; Naville 1963). At the same time,
the gutting of next level managers and the principle of local self-regula-
tion have intensified peer-to-peer pressures. Defining stress as “the loss
of (individual) power to act in the face of (collective) constraint”, the
new organisation of work has added to general stress levels, with many
employees not controlling the resources (specifically the schedules) that
are crucial to their meeting heteronomously established objectives.
– Everyone agrees that work has become less physical and i­ncreasingly
intellectual and mental. The main question therefore becomes—espe-
cially where mental work is involved—how to ­distinguish between
real workload and perceptions thereof. The former is impossible to
measure in absolute terms and necessarily invokes the latter (Durand
and Girard 2002). It is in fact the perception of workload that condi-
tions peoples’ experience and image of work, i.e., the subjective rela-
tionship that everyone entertains with their job and which therefore
constitutes their identity at work. Note that this also depends on the
particular moment in an employee’s professional trajectory.
– Health at work. The qualities incorporated in each individual—
and which are closely related to their real workload and perceptions
thereof—have a direct impact on their health. Some professions
and jobs use employees up much more quickly than others. The
amount of physical or mental fatigue that employees feel at work will
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
75

influence how they perceive their job and work. In some cases, health
serves as a mirror enabling subjects to determine whether they recog-
nise themselves in their work and the jobs they occupy.

How Individual History Affects the Construction

of Identity

Employees are largely modeled and structured by their families and

school and/or university education before being recruited, with
their background helping to determine the positions or functions
they are most likely to occupy. The degree of initiative and freedom
­characterising a social trajectory is largely related to an individual’s social
milieu and education (family, socio-geographic environment, school).
Moreover, above and beyond employees’ socio-professional trajectories,
once the workday is over they must also find ways of inserting them-
selves into (and developing identities within) a family or urban structure
that will also affect their identities as workers (see Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1 Identity and recognising at work

76   J.-P. Durand

People’s subjectivity seems to reflect how they incorporate moral val-

ues throughout their social and professional trajectories. These relate, in
turn, to what each individual expects from a given working situation,
comprised of physical and mental working conditions, levels and modes
of remuneration, the behaviour of other parties (including managers or
peers) and degree of recognition (see section “Recognition at Work”).
This subjectivity can also be defined as a set of potential reactions acti-
vated by the interaction of what people acquire in the work situations
they are being offered, as defined above. Beyond these personal charac-
teristics, the identity at work that each individual constructs and which
constructs him/her in turn also depends on the resources that can be
mobilised in a working situation, i.e., the networks of social capital that
can be used to react more or less quickly and efficiently to problems
faced at work. In turn, this availability (or not) of resources also con-
tributes to the construction of identity at work.
The subjectivity of the ego, which might also be called an individu-
al’s history i.e. singularity,14 could be conceptualised as the always provi-
sional outcome of a person’s past, itself constructed under the influence
of a profession; daily industrial relations; and the experience of work
itself, something whose structuring effects have been deeply affected by
the generalisation of flux tendu and lean management.
In short, subjectivity can be defined as the always provisional results
of a person’s socio-professional trajectory and the immediate relation-
ship to work that is an integral part of identity at work. Furthermore,
the mobilisation of subjectivity within a work activity modifies relation-
ships at work and hence their identity at work. This is akin to a process
resulting from a multitude of causes of permanent transformation, as
the figure below demonstrates. Ultimately, identity at work cannot be
separated from one of its key conditions, that is recognition at work,
which in turn cannot be conceived of without accounting for the ele-
ments comprising identity at work and the process explained above.

14This 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.
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
77

Recognition at Work
Having a positive identity at work comes from being recognised at
work, something worth defining and then presenting in greater detail.
Recognition at, in and through work is the basis of self-esteem, a com-
modity that is particularly difficult to obtain given the divisions within
new types of workers, torn as they are between the promise of autonomy
and the assumption of responsibility within a work framework that is too
narrow to enable this. Faced with this dilemma, the strongest subjects
(the reeds ) will probably still muddle through whereas their weaker coun-
terparts, those suffering from the biggest narcissistic flaws, will fall by the
wayside. The end result is a range of identities at work based on recogni-
tion, ignorance or disrespect, translating into behaviours, attitudes and
perceptions of the world such as it is both at work and outside of work.
Work occurs against a background of diverse social relationships,
with each individual investing as much as s/he expects to receive in
material but above all symbolic recognition (two categories that are in
fact related). The nature of symbolic recognition (verbal or written, pri-
vate or public, tonality, etc.), the frequency with which it is expressed
and its very source (coming from one’s peers or different levels of the
hierarchy) all combine to create identity at work and modify everyone’s
relationship to work, hence their subjectivity. Here the Other serves as a
worker’s mirror, playing an important role in the recognition-based con-
struction of identity at work. Working therefore means, among other
things, fighting for recognition. This is redolent of certain points that
Alex Honneth made in reference to the struggle for recognition (2008).
They can be used to drive an initial theorisation of recognition at work.

Alex Honneth and the Struggle for Recognition

Honneth used his social philosophy project to renew the critical theory
of the Frankfurt School by debating with its founders Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer along with their successors, including Jürgen
Habermas (Voirol 2006, 2007). To simplify, Honneth tried to explain
what he sometimes called the moral development of society, relating to
78   J.-P. Durand

changes in social organisation or to historical changes, based on social

conflicts that should be restored at the very heart of theory. The origins
of these conflicts were to be found in subjects’ struggles for recognition,
including in some cases the struggle against disrespect from others.
In this way, Honneth was borrowing from a theory that criti-
cised normative visions of human emancipation and self-realisation.
Unlike the latter theory, however, with its frontline Marxist overtones,
Honneth saw the struggle for recognition as playing a leading role in
his theoretical edifice, situating its origins in individuals’ relationships of
intersubjectivity, a thesis borrowed from the social psychologist Georges
Herbert Mead. Honneth’s started with a principle where the pragma-
tist Mead had agreed with the young Hegel that, “Social life is repro-
duced through the imperative of reciprocal recognition because subjects
can only achieve a practical relationship with themselves if they learn to
understand themselves using the normative perspective of partners with
whom they interact, and who communicate to them a certain number
of social imperatives” (Honneth 2008, 113).
Here, Honneth was situating the conditions of recognition—an
essential principle in the moral construction of society—in the interac-
tion between subjects and other persons. In his translated words,

The connection between the experience of recognition and subjects’ atti-

tude toward themselves results from the intersubjective structure of per-
sonal identity. Individuals are only constituted in persons where they
learn to view themselves, using ‘the Other’ as a source of approval or
encouragement and as beings endowed with positive qualities and capac-
ities. The extent of these qualities hence of this positive relationship to
oneself increases with each new form of recognition that the individual
applies to him or herself as subject. In short, the experience of love creates
access to a sense of self-confidence; the experience of legal recognition to
self-respect; and the experience of solidarity to self-esteem. (2008, 208)

In other words, subjects’ individual experiences are as aforemen-

tioned rooted in their relationships to others. Having said that and
even though this may lead to a phenomenology of forms of recogni-
tion (something that Honneth tried to construct), the crucial thing
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
79

for the purposes of the present text is that intersubjective relationships

be situated in a social context that supersedes individuals but where
they can also draw the resources enabling them to have relationships
with others. In effect, an alter ego is not only another ego but some-
one conveying a social, political and economic environment. Thus,
an alter ego is a socialised individual, becoming in this sense the mir-
ror of one’s own ego, which is therefore both socialised and singular.
Because an alter ego has incorporated the values dominating a particu-
lar family, urban or work space, it refers the ego back to its own image
in these circles of immersion. Here the intersubjective relationship is
not the one connecting two individuals but instead which attaches an
ego to different social worlds by means of supporting alter egos. This
plurality of support systems indicates in turn that the ego is able to
access more and more statuses reflecting the diversity of social worlds
today. The same applies to alter egos, with whom the ego begins to
share an increasing number of intersubjective relationships. In short,
the abstraction of intersubjectivity such as it functions for Honneth
empties it of historical thickness. It lacks the social and practical expe-
rience that is generally neglected in sociology’s underlying moral and
social philosophies.
On occasion, Honneth seems to be trying to respond to this contra-
diction, for instance when devising a moral grammar applicable to social
struggles (Honneth 2006). What he is mobilising here is non-respect, or
other persons’ disrespect for an individual who might then try to “exit
this paralysing situation of passively accepted humiliation in such a way
as to create a new and positive relationship with his or her ego” (Honneth
2008, 196). Viewed as a way of transcending Marx, who Honneth sees
as being stuck in production and economic utilitarianism, what he pro-
poses here is a complementary construction that tries to re-emphasize the
dissatisfaction which arises when injustice betrays expectations of moral-
ity. The author returns quickly, however, to intra-individual relationships,
since “resistance and social resistance motives are constituted within a
framework of moral experiences stemming from disrespect for deeply
rooted expectations of intersubjective recognition” (ibid., 195).
The final issue here is the epistemological nature of the relationships
that Honneth establishes between his social philosophy of recognition
80   J.-P. Durand

and its roots in the intersubjectivity of individuals struggling for rec-

ognition. A Hegelian way of expressing this is that, “As subjects form
their identity they are (almost transcendentally) forced to engage in
intersubjective conflict corresponding to the degree of socialisation in
which they find themselves, thereby obtaining recognition of demands
for autonomy that had not previously been confirmed on a social level.
This thesis is born out of the conjunction of two equally strong asser-
tions: firstly, that a successful developement of the ‘Self ’ presupposes a
succession of certain forms of reciprocal recognition, whose subjects—
secondly—feel a vacuum reflecting their experience of disrespect, forc-
ing them to react by engaging in a ‘struggle for recognition’” (ibid., 84).
The final part of this sentence establishes clear conditions defining rec-
ognition interactions in intersubjective relationships between individu-
als, since it is the experience of disrespect that causes the struggle for
recognition. The first part, on the other hand, raises two questions:

– Individuals are forced “to engage in intersubjective conflict due to

a quasi-transcendental force”. The social nature of this constraint
largely escapes the author, who finds no scientific explanation or basis
for this phenomenon—with, to a certain extent, the use of the term
“transcendental” constituting an admission of the difficulty he faces
in explaining the origins of a force that might be imagined as a social
constraint or as a need for game-playing (something that remains
unexplained);
– Depending on individuals’ as yet undefined but clearly differentiated
degrees of socialisation, they participate in the struggle for recogni-
tion that is associated with their demands for autonomy. The ques-
tion then becomes how certain it is that all individuals, in all social
conditions, will make such demands, and whether the vision being
proposed here is not excessively “class-centric”.

What Honneth offers is a vision of society that is disconnected from

the reality of sociological analysis and other forms of knowledge rooted
in human and social science. He writes, for instance, that, “The cul-
tural idea that society has of itself provides the criteria underpinning
the social esteem of individuals whose capacities and performances
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
81

are judged intersubjectively based on their aptitude to materialise the

group’s culturally defined values. This form of mutual recognition also
presupposes the existence of a social organisation whose shared goals
unite individuals in collectives of values” (ibid., 149). What remains
unclear is “a society’s cultural idea of itself ” and how this might be
anchored sociologically. An approach of this sort is apt to create illu-
sions about a particular society’s historical development and character-
istics. Honneth claims that, “As ethical goals open up to different values
and as hierarchical structures are replaced by horizontal competition,
social esteem because individualised and introduces greater symmetry
into relationships”. It remains that the criteria upon which this affir-
mation is based are unclear, i.e. whether they stem from evidence or
in-depth analysis of the real functioning of daily life at work or in the
city, or whether they are based on international comparisons of societies
that are all dominated by commodification today.
The priority attributed to intersubjective relationships is not very
convincing, neither in terms of the explanations given for the disrespect
and insults that people suffer nor in terms of the foundations specified
for the social values and norms sparking the struggle for recognition and
causing Honneth to embed social conflicts within a moral logic (2008,
191). The thesis here is that whereas other authors highlight the struc-
tural causes of social conflict (with some emphasizing divergent eco-
nomic interests and others the nature of production relationships), they
do not explain how and why individuals advance via social movements.
Hence Honneth’s proposal of a phenomenology of

forms of recognition of law and social esteem that provide a moral frame-
work for social conflicts because their very operational principle depends
on general criteria relating to the whole of society. Particular norms such
as moral responsibility and social values, or else personal experiences of
disrespect, can be interpreted and represented as realities to which other
subjects are also exposed. (ibid., 194)

The question here relates to the origins of social values and how they are
constructed, whereas Honneth’s core focus remains a kind of intersub-
jectivity in which disrespect basically leads (or can lead) to the struggle
82   J.-P. Durand

for recognition.15 The transition from intersubjectivity to social values is

unspecified, as is the way the former constructs the latter.
The following excerpt provides a possible explanation for this transi-
tion from intersubjectivity to social values.

Out of what we have said until now, it would appear that all confron-
tations and forms of social conflict obey the same basic scheme within
the struggle for recognition. The emergence of a collective movement of
resistance or revolt is always related to a fixed framework of moral experi-
ences within which social reality is interpreted according to a historically
variable grammar of recognition and disrespect. (ibid., 196)

Social conflicts are depicted here as resulting from the aggregation of

individual struggles for recognition. At the same time, “a fixed frame-
work of moral experiences” constitutes a sort of moving bonus for indi-
vidual action whose origins are unknown (and which may in fact be the
source of social values). The two propositions function simultaneously
and create a kind of circularity where social values justify individual
values that construct, in turn, social conflict through the way in which
they are aggregated. The conflicts become both consequences and causes
of individual struggles, as well as “issuers” of values.
The thesis that the aggregation of individual behaviour creates
social movements has not been defended in any particularly effective
way16 and appears to be very inferior to the kind of critical theory that
Honneth claims to wield. Although the paradigm of aggregation does
show how conflicts are born, it generally lacks the power to explain the
causes of conflict, meaning the motives of non-recognition rooted, for

15This 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 sym-
bolic interests).
16The 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 injus-
tice 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.
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
83

instance, in social, economic, cultural, symbolic and other inequalities

that other authors describe as injustices (see Kelly 1998, while working
from a different register nevetheless Kelly’s use of Mobilisation theory
bears similarities to the issues raised here).
In short, even as Honneth tries to elucidate an already ancient ques-
tion as to the reasons for the weaknesses of the different struggles for
recognition or against injustice, he is not very good at this. After crit-
icising theoretical approaches reduced to “economic utilitarianism”, he
makes a big mistake with intersubjectivity when he replaces social expe-
rience with moral values. Far from building a compromise in which the
recognition model does not replace the competition model where the
acquisition of rare goods is concerned, but instead merely supplements
the utilitarian approach (ibid., 198), the primacy that intersubjectivity
is awarded here cuts it off from the social sphere due to the author’s
inability to situate this in a context capable of explaining intersubjective
behaviour.
However, and this is the paradox of Honneth’s thinking, even though
his propositions seeking to turn the conditions of recognition into the
foundations of emancipation did not really succeed where they were
expected to, they do explain the reasons for (or highlight the basis of )
the non-recognition that opposes all emancipatory ambitions in mod-
ern capitalism. Honneth’s theory helps to explain why social struggles
have faded, at least temporarily, in the post-industrial capitalist world:

– Because disrespect exists, the struggle for recognition lacks a locus or

(pre-existing) social movement enabling its expression. Yet these are
prerequisites for a kind of struggle that cannot occur in their absence,
except in diluted forms such as populism or individualised malaise
leading to depression and even suicide (think of social-psychic disor-
ders caused by working conditions including disrespect);
– Moreover, the reference groups underpinning these moral values are
so dispersed (socio-economic situation, ethnic and religious identifi-
cation, gender, age, etc.) that moral values tend in some case to dis-
sipate and dislocate, and in other cases to consolidate the group by
excluding outsiders (i.e. fundamentalism). This means there are fewer
possibilities for emancipatory struggles to emerge.
84   J.-P. Durand

Honneth situates the question of recognition at the centre of his theory

of conflict. The intersubjectivity-based approach that seeks to comple-
ment utilitarian theses has been absorbed by the priority given to the
moral issues that are an intrinsic part of his philosophy. The question
then becomes which approaches are capable of reformulating the social
nature of recognition in such a way as to explain the breakup of identi-
ties at work following the generalisation of lean management, with all
the consequences this has had for workers.

Towards a Theory of Social Recognition

Developing a theory of recognition at work, meaning recognition of

work and in work, clearly has a twofold advantage. On the one hand,
it helps to design a topology of identities at work in each particular his-
toric-economic context. On the other hand, it helps to make sense of
the way in which well-being at work is constituted. This is immediately
useful for challenging all sources of disrespect and non-recognition at
work. Moreover, due to their varying objectives, these two concerns can
alternatively converge or else develop in distinct fields.
In any event, given the multiplicity of often approximative references
made to Honneth, it seems necessary to transcend this intersubjec-
tivity framework and specify that the focus in the present book is on
social recognition at work. The adjective social can have two meanings.
In the first, the work being done is useful to the society, company or
public administration that recruited the employee. Otherwise, it can be
the kind of function fulfilled by doctors or lawyers and which provides
value to the whole of a community. The second meaning looks at work-
ers and their qualifications or relational capabilities, without neglecting
their behaviour and ‘knowing how-to-be’, ascertaining whether this sat-
isfies their managers and/or peers. Not all actors in a given environment
offer workers the same degree of recognition. This is because each alter
ego recognising the work of an ego will communicate or incorporate
one and only one part of the social sphere, with recognition surpassing
its own subjectivity at this level to achieve a modicum of universality. It
is worth repeating, however, that this only constitutes one segment of
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
85

universality, being the aspect to which one or the other alter ego might
feel attached, turning the person in this way into a social individual. It
is through the recognition of alter egos that egos achieve self-esteem.
In short, social recognition cannot be based on a principle of uni-
versality. Instead, there needs to be a more pluralistic understanding of
social recognition, that is, unless the consensus view is that the adjective
‘social’ already includes a sense of diversity. Conversely, the fact that a
range of different viewpoints exists should not be equated with infinite
atomisation, given the existence of statistical irregularities enabling
classifications or groupings into large sets. It is here that the definition
of the social depends on how individuals and groups (groups of indi-
viduals called social groups) act within a given situation. Moreover, it
is in this sense that the Other carries a fragment of the social sphere
and that the recognition that the Other gives to the ego does not come
from a single individual but becomes something social. Hence a similar
idea formulated by Alain Caillé focusing on the social value of persons
(2007, 198) in opposition to Honneth’s variant of recognition.
Faced with the impossible universality of recognition (in particular at
work), a number of voices have been arguing for an “institutionalised
version” thereof. According to Michel Lallement, a double imperative
exists for creating the conditions enabling a policy of recognition. This
involves,

First laying out policies labelling work quality within frameworks that
have been collectively negotiated to avoid the pathogenic effects of rec-
ognition where this has been reduced to interactions between two sub-
jectivities that have been unequally deprived of resources. Then secondly,
diversifying and ranking the legitimate use of a work quality recognition
policy that by itself will be unable to develop a single instrument capable
of responding to the different protection needs required to achieve indi-
vidual integrity. Once this double condition has been satisfied, it becomes
possible to introduce different paths to recognition by and in work.
(Lallement 2013, 87)

This goes further than Yves Clot, for whom the quality of work is con-
structed through argument. What Lallement suggests here is opening
86   J.-P. Durand

up spaces of compromise to negotiate work recognition policies.

Michel Wieviorka, on the other hand, has called for a new system of
benchmarks that are more or less capable of constructing new indus-
trial relations—“Something we have been lacking since industrial work
movements ran out of steam and the historical industrial era came to an
end” (Wieviorka 2013, 50). The question here is whether the construct
of recognition “could be federated or integrated into employees’ expec-
tations, on one hand, and into a company or society’s ability to deal
with them, on the other” (ibid., 47). Hence his suggestions for recog-
nising workers’ investment in their work (outcomes and performance);
for the recognition of and right to career advancement (promotion,
training, autonomy); and for the recognition of individuality within
the reference to collective identity. Many of these questions are already
being discussed in companies and public authorities, including certain
aspects of the “competency model” leading employees to compete with
one another. The crux here is the idea that compromise must be cen-
tral to these discussions. All these issues relate to recognition yet can also
be used to impose a stricter supervision of employees. This shows again
that, as Honneth has pointed out, recognition is a question of conflict
depending on that actors or social forces that it is specifically mobilising.
The struggle for social recognition is akin to a process of identifica-
tion and conflict, with hierarchical conflict encouraging, for instance,
identification with one’s peers. It takes place both within a framework
defined by local inter-individual relationships and also on a broader
scale within a profession, social class, age group, gender or ethnicity.
The difficulty resides in the impossibility for analysts to integrate (as
opposed to simply juxtapose) immediate recognition by others based on
intersubjectivity, on one hand, and recognition by one’s alter egos, on
the other, meaning the things that communicate social meaning includ-
ing the collective to which people belong and their sense of collective
identity. In the sense that analysis distinguishes between understanding
and recognition (and how this occurs), the process is indivisible. The
distinction between singular recognition and collective identification
within a group adds to the complexities of recognition at work.
Saying that recognition is a social issue is tantamount to saying that
it supersedes the intersubjective relationship that may be just one form
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
87

thereof. It also means that recognition seems first and foremost to be a

collective phenomenon since a host of social interactions are played out
under or behind the intersubjectivity, and not just intersubjectives ones.
The point is that before anything else, intersubjective relationships are
social in nature. The goal then becomes to transcend analysis of imme-
diate relationships to focus more on non-visible social aspects. This
involves an objectification and incorporation of social responses appro-
priate in a particular situation, including intersubjective ones.
Recognition also offers social, material and symbolic resources that
also justify the fact that individuals seek them without falling prey to
instrumentalisation or utilitarianism. Yet this too is not an unequivocal
reality. Because such resources are rare, they can easily become objects of
conflict and alliance. Indeed, it is possible to analyse this aspect as a man-
ifestation of the breakdown between capital and work, with the struggle
for recognition being part of the equation but superseding it as well.
In short, Honneth’s ideas are narrowly philosophical (despite his
description of them as post-metaphysical) in that they start with the
idea that recognition is based on intersubjectivity. Yet it is clearly pos-
sible to root a social conception of recognition in the values and norms
of (self-)constructed groups driven by the evidence-based (i.e. tried
and tested) sense of social belonging that is associated with this. Where
intersubjectivity leads to recognition it no longer drives social activity
but instead social situations such as employment, work, ethnicity and
gender and age. In the way that these situations structure intersubjective
relationships, they also establish the conditions under which social rec-
ognition occurs and make this happen (or else prevent it). Viewed thus,
this proposition appears to turn Honneth inside out since it replaces
intersubjective experience with social practices and values associated
with a sense of social belonging, using them as the foundations for rec-
ognition. As such, it is closer to an identity model, at least one whose
identity-related roots are tied to a multitude of situations and experi-
ences (including class, ethnicity, gender and work) (Durand 2007). To
develop a theory of emancipation as suggested by the critical theory and
its advocates (including Honneth), it would appear that analysts must
necessarily refer to the conditions under which work takes place; to the
relationships between work and capital (essential to understanding the
88   J.-P. Durand

distribution of resources); and to analysis of consumption (hence now-

adays to the sea changes caused by a financialised globalised economy).
There are two reasons, however, why more is needed. Firstly, social
well-being, something that each subject lives singularly, is based on each
individual’s social recognition. Secondly, social struggles and movements
call for a fair distribution of economic, social, cultural, symbolic and
other resources and necessarily refer back to each subject’s struggle for
recognition. This aspect is both a singular aim and the condition for
people’s emancipation through social movements.
In sum, recognition and identity at work are indissociable and must
be analysed together for a variety of reasons:

– Recognition and identity are clearly two complementary aspects

strongly affected by workers’ relationship to their work. Recognition
relates directly to subjects even in its social manifestation and as pre-
sented above it involves an intersubjective relationship with others.
Identity at work, on the other hand, is more a question of one’s col-
lective and identification with a social group;
– Recognition and identity are both processes based on conflicts and
the different way of breaking down capital vs. labour. The conflicts
constituting these processes are mutually self-sustaining;
– Recognition and positive identity at work generate material
resources, competencies and solidarity while increasing the symbolic
capital of the subjects concerned17;
– Social recognition leads to self-esteem, which is a condition of
well-being and having a positive identity at work.

Recognition may be a central element of identity at work but it has yet

to be determined to what extent new types of workers, fragmented,
divided and flawed as they are, caught between autonomy, the promise
of responsibility and stringent meta-rules circumscribing the framework
within which they act, are capable of struggling for this recognition. It
must also be seen how, when faced with a disconnect, they cope with

17Bourdieusians interested in work-related studies will probably want to look at the ways in

which work generates and disseminates symbolic capital.

 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
89

the dual risk that this loss of identity entails. If they ‘play the game’ and
remain deeply engaged in their work, the displacement of (i.e. infinite
increase in) management demands will continue to impede recogni-
tion at the same time as workers’ isolated involvement means they start
losing peers’ support and ‘gratitude’. In turn, this increases the risk of
malaise at work and confusion about identity. On the other hand, if
workers take the limits to their autonomy and responsibilities seriously,
they may surreptitiously reject the targets they have been given and
compromise with reality (i.e. use wrong figures on their balanced score-
cards). In an era where collective work has been weakened and trade
unions run a risk of becoming extinct, this behaviour is problematical,
if only because it creates the kind of malaise at work that no employee
can live with for very long.

Towards a Typology of the New Worker

and Workplace Identity

Renaud Sainsaulieu’s famous 1977 text proposed four “main mod-

els for relationships at work”. Despite the pending crisis of work and
exhaustion of productivity gains, all of which put an end to the 30-year
postwar boom period, work at this time was still being analysed in
the context of a triumphant capitalism with total confidence in its
own future. Despite critiques formulated by trade unions, employees
and researchers interested in the scientific organisation of labour, as
Sainsaulieu demonstrated this was the dominant vision in companies
and public authorities everywhere. The models he then wrote defined
“four ways of situating oneself within an organisation and getting
involved as a collective worker”. This is worth emphasizing since his
approach differed in all but a very few ways from contemporary soci-
ology of work, due to the weakening of union power but also because
of the primacy accorded to individuals in society generally and in soci-
ology through imitation. Sainsaulieu’s collective framework had a very
strong influence on the typology he proposed, the explanation being
that it was through collective action that employees’ material demands
could be at least partially satisfied, with many achieving recognition of
their collective identity. The four models were:
90   J.-P. Durand

– A fusional (also known as mass) model primarily involving skilled

(male) French workers lacking any control over their working condi-
tions and enjoying very little room to maneuvre due to the rational-
isation of work processes. These employees were able to affect events
“through a solidarity conforming to a collective of their peers, and by
relying on the authority of a chief or (trade union) leader who was
the only one able to steer the masses” (Sainsaulieu 1985, II);
– A negotiation model involving highly qualified professionals or
reproduction managers whose competency and insertion in strategic
productive nexuses meant they were well situated to negotiate alli-
ances and social recognition;
– An affinities model excluding group actions and preferring “emo-
tional solidarity, membership in a few networks of special relations
between colleagues but also including bosses” (ibid.). The people
involved here were technical agents, industrial workers possessing
diplomas, young employees or self-taught managers seeking rapid
professional mobility;
– A withdrawal model that according to Sainsaulieu differed from the
work model insofar as it focused on the various kinds of personal
engagement that constitute an organisation’s collective life. The focus
here was not on personal pathologies but on the collective attitudes of
social categories (women, immigrant skilled labourers, farm workers,
etc.) who had other more enriching concerns outside of the workplace.

This typology is useful for two reasons. It shows that current issues are
generally rooted in the past but that the vocabulary has been totally
transformed (affinity, withdrawal). Secondly, paths for obtaining desired
resources are no longer the same, with collective solutions being largely
replaced today by individual efforts. Hence the present book’s proposal
of a typology that is quite different, remember that we are discussing the
context in France, with collective action now being no more than one
possibility in a world dominated by largely individualised projects. The
new model must, for instance, account for a transformation of employ-
ment in which 12% of all jobs are atypical in nature in France, some-
thing affecting upwards of one-quarter of the active population today.
Above all, pressures relating to timing, objectives and evaluations have
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
91

changed at work and have led, as discussed above, to a sharp rise in

social-psychic disorders.
Instead of suggesting identity snapshots, it is preferable to reason
in terms of trajectories in order to build a new dynamic into these
identities’ construction. The four main types of identity at work that
Sainsaulieu proposed should be construed as ideal-types characterising
abstractly constructed situations, with people’s real trajectories having
undergone many upheavals reflecting their individual histories and/or
the history of the companies or public authorities for which they work.
In other words, ideal-types are classes of trajectories, comprised of actual
subjects’ different trajectories and relating more or less closely to ide-
al-types. Hence the need to highlight their infinite diversity, while iden-
tifying patterns helping to develop specific classifications (which in the
present instance mean ideal-types).
Figure 3.2 depicts these four main types of identity at work. By draw-
ing the time (basically, the length of service or seniority) on the X-axis

Fig. 3.2 Dynamics of identity at work

92   J.-P. Durand

and the more or less positive identity at work on the Y-axis, identity
variations can be portrayed to the point of representing extremely dra-
matic cases such as suicide at work, something that did not figure in
Sainsaulieu’s findings. An oval-shaped zone ranks situations of malaise
at work and the number of possible responses within an activity.
Another group of dashes looks like an uncertain cloud representing the
possibilities of collective action, resistance and unionism. This increases
along with the length of service, intimating that young workers tend to
wait before committing themselves, something that can also be observed
empirically (with a few exceptions) in specific sectors. As discussed
below, some trajectories are barely if at all affected by collective action,
except in unusual instances confirming the general observation. Having
said that, the figure also shows a large number of individual trajecto-
ries operating somewhere between the ideal-type of content vs. disre-
spect that has been affected by these more or less collective actions of
resistance (a phenomenon discussed in greater detail in following chap-
ters). A fifth oppositional ideal-type might be included here (Goussard
2011), one symbolised by the most militant and hardcore activists of
the kind found in certain left-wing French labour unions (like CGT
or SUD) and sometimes even in more moderate ones (CFDT, CGC).
However, given low union membership in France and general weaken-
ing of unions’ oppositional power, it seems more accurate to demon-
strate practices relating to how these new impositions at work might be
rejected and specifically in those places where these practices have been
seen, being more diffuse today than the frontal assaults witnessed dur-
ing the postwar boom years.
Because employees have qualities, personal competences and external
resources corresponding to the jobs and functions they occupy, many
succeed in developing an identity of contentment. These employees
will have achieved professional trajectories corresponding to what they
had anticipated during their formative years (when they were students)
or what peers expected of them. They tend to be socially recognised by
peers and senior management. Here the talk is of a successful career
that others will want to emulate through their work in the institutions
that the successful person traversed, overcoming conflicts or moments
of pressure from peers or senior managers. Successful people transcend
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
93

these difficulties in fulfilling trajectories, with new organisations of pro-

duction and work serving as a trampoline for further upwards mobil-
ity. This positive identity can be found as much among managers or
engineers as employees, skilled industrial workers or technicians despite
being more frequent for the former than the latter. A study by Lucie
Goussard (2011, 338–341) places engineers and heir managers at the
top of this trajectory movement. Having graduated from the top schools
and enjoying social networks putting them in “pole position” when they
start their career, many follow a seamless path upwards. Of course, this
trajectory tends to only involve males while excluding newcomers.
Identifying with contentment (“identité du contentement” as a kind
of happiness, but not a full happiness) can cause an individual to adhere
to a company’s policy, although not necessarily (Flocco 2015). The con-
cept of contentment leaves a number of possibilities open. For instance,
satisfied employees might adhere to a company’s values, accommodate
them, or even move away from them—all depending on their personal
trajectory. Maintaining a contentment identity as a concept helps to
avoid criticism whereas adherence identities can be viewed as a form of
alienation. Contentment opens a greater number of doors than attach-
ment (which is itself an identity) and can lead very quickly to servil-
ity, sometimes voluntarily. A contentment identity is not specific to a
given sector of category of employees since it largely involves matching
personal resources to whatever is required for a particular function or
position. At the same time and for the same reasons, this contentment
identity is really shared by employees or workers who lack resources. It
tends to be rare among people in this category, given their greater needs
in times of high structural unemployment. This is because the exacer-
bation of inter-individual competition during unemployment periods
works quickly to disqualify weaker individuals and benefit those who
possess additional resources (competencies, social network, etc.). A con-
tentment identity is a good way of translating subjects’ strong commit-
ment to being an oak tree. Of course, people in this category tend to
lose all control over a situation (and above all, over themselves) when-
ever they suffer rejection or personal failure at work.
A reluctant identity (“identité du dépit” or “identité du retrait”) is not
totally alien to Sainsaulieu’s “withdrawal identity”, except that here it
94   J.-P. Durand

becomes a collective position comprised of passivity and fatalistic resig-

nation. Otherwise, a reluctant identity reflects individuals’ isolation
in situations where they are unhappy with the idea of being resigned, in
particular because of the divisions that new types of workers experience
between openness to autonomy and the reality of rules, leading in turn
to an unhappy acceptance of these kinds of situation. Many employ-
ees who enjoy job stability also suffer from a reluctant identity. This
includes permanent but also interim staff members as well as employees
on fixed-term contracts hoping to gain permanent status. It is a situa-
tion that plays out differently in different sectors, as the following chap-
ters discuss.
Withdrawal or reluctance are things that employees embarked upon
a contentment trajectory might experience. Some are very affected by a
specific incident, with others worn down by the wall that prevents them
from being themselves at work—embodied in brutal situations (loss of
confidence in the manager, loss of a stable job, etc.) or in the long pro-
cess of becoming “tired of being oneself ”. The end result might be an
ambiguous attitude where the person neither announces nor accepts
things but is full of doubt and disengagement. As such, reluctance can
also be characterised by a modicum of unhappiness at work.
Between an identity of contentment or reluctant, there exists an end-
less variety of possible identity trajectories. Seeking a precise designa-
tion for this space requires over-simplification. This is because many
employees (and independent workers) are ambivalent towards their own
situation, as witnessed inter alia in contradictory statements they might
make during one and the same conversation. One example is the com-
mon reference to “work that is harder but more interesting”. This situa-
tion—together with centralising management methods and/or the more
or less overt repression of unions—make it harder for union activists to
express demands. Signs of a lasting social-psychic disorder should nor-
mally cause management to try and help the employee in question. Yet
this sort of immediate (i.e. subliminally requested) solidarity has almost
entirely disappeared in companies and public authorities. The demands
in question tend to go unstated, meaning they are neither perceived nor
treated. They are harbingers of future pathologies that end up being dis-
covered when it is too late. If health and safety committees have become
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
95

so popular today, it is because they are some of the few places where
employees are free to express themselves in companies and large public
authorities. But it is also because malaise at work has got worse due to
the imperatives of work being organised in a way that enables flux tendu
with a smaller workforce. Labour unions have been unable to fulfill the
role to which they aspire for at least three reasons: fewer union members
participate in work processes (and those who do often lose their sense
of engagement due to pressure from senior management, or else are
absorbed into participative functions); because it is hard dealing with
social-psychic disorders via traditional union responses (see “L’expertise
CHSCT: quelle ressource pour le syndicalisme?”, La Nouvelle Revue
du Travail, 3/2013); or due to the absence of strategic responses to the
wholesale destruction of jobs (Leveraged Buy-Out, mergers, sudden off-
shoring decisions).
In the vast zone in which most workers inhabit, they tend to control
to a greater or lesser extent the divide between autonomy and the nar-
row framework within which they work. This tends to depend on the
degree of violence that the divide introduces into their work activity but
also into their psychic structure, reflecting in turn the size of their nar-
cissistic flaw. Some subjects with a reed profile might, for instance, move
closer to a contentment identity whereas others (usually oak trees ) will
live unhappily with a reluctant identity.
Workers who cannot access the collective or private resources that
make individual and psychic solutions possible tend to fall prey to
a negative identity at work, something akin to an abandonment iden-
tity (“identité d’abandon”). At the beginning of this downwards spiral,
employees might reject the sort of satisfaction that is ideally associ-
ated with work. Not being able to realise themselves at work, they lose
touch with their professional ideals (Chapter 4) and surrender instead
of waging the battles they might otherwise engage into maintain rec-
ognition or a positive identity vis-à-vis senior management or peers.
This abandonment identity is constructed in a certain way against and
without the person, often occurring at an advanced stage of their career.
Abandonment also signifies the abandonment of self (Linhart et al.
2002), with resignation being accompanied by pathology. The spark
might be a serious professional incident like a direct argument with the
96   J.-P. Durand

boss, or hearing the observation that it is impossible for the person to

reach their objectives (following which they accuse themselves of poor
performance) or else marginalisation by a group of peers. Decline tends
to be sudden and rapid and can be represented on a quasi-vertical curve.
Where employees lack the necessary resources, they can easily fail to
return to their previous trajectories and end up falling by the wayside.
Unable to find the necessary solidarity within their institution, they feel
bitterness and are easily irritated by the slightest comment. During this
active rejection phase, employees simulate expected behaviour to gain
time, but this changes nothing in terms of the abandonment path they
have chosen. Beyond simulation, they might also adopt obstruction-
ist behaviours, something often done at an individual level in modern
work organisations, with the kind of collective obstruction witnessed
during the 1960s–1970s being extremely rare. Similarly, acts of sabotage
are exceptional nowadays, even if they are on the rise. In and of itself,
an abandonment identity accelerates pathologies such as stress, insom-
nia but also repetitive strain injuries (RSI) including musculoskeletal
disorder or back problems as results of physical work. Such pathologies
also lead to absenteeism that then becomes a pretext for firing the most
fragile employees. Some commit suicide, identifying the origins of their
unhappiness by carrying out this desperate act at their place of work.
Abandonment identity is deeply destructive to people at work. Union
activists possess scant resources and often face extreme individual situa-
tions. Alarms indicating possible industrial action are a mediocre solu-
tion with no effect on the causes of the phenomenon, which stems from
an organisation of productive work that totally escapes local manage-
ment and even HRM, which has lost all ability to influence daily work.
Individualised treatments (psychiatric consultations and/or anti-depres-
sants) are not the answer, in part because much of what happens occurs
outside of the workspace during long sick leaves even where the illness
has not been recognised as having a professional origin. In sum, when
people leave, or ‘drop out’, we need to think about the structural rea-
sons for this and moreover, whether we might begin to imagine a struc-
tural response to a structural problem. This will not happen, however,
where the vision of HRM is Darwinian (or simply cynical) and where
the people who abandon (or refuse to be) themselves in the face of work
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
97

demands no longer have their place at work. Such situations are redo-
lent of the suicides that happened when France Télécom implemented
its Next programme (Technologia 2010).
The fourth ideal-type is a detachment identity (“identité du détache-
ment”) corresponding to the new precarious jobs found in sectors like
mass retail, fast food, logistics or call centres. In the past, these jobs
were done by young people, most of whom only planned to spend a
few months or years, often working part-time. Today they are the only
jobs in certain economically devastated regions. A number of compa-
nies and activities are positively choosing impoverished spaces because
it is easier to hire a desperate and docile workforce there (Malet 2013).
Transitional jobs of this sort are often the only sustainable seasonal work
in these places.
Contract details are not very important at this level since open-ended
permanent contracts readily translate into the fastest way of getting
fired, particularly in sectors such as fast food. For this sort of work,
with few exceptions employees are not engaging in a “career” but simply
working for wages. A detachment identity starts with the principle that
for employers and employees alike the content of work has very little if
any importance and people are hired with the idea that they will ulti-
mately leave the job. A principle of mobility is at the very heart of this
system and particularly these kinds of jobs. Hence people’s temporary
adherence (i.e. attachment) to—and weak investment in—their work
and job (Brochier 2001; Gasparini and Pichot 2007). The distinction
made elsewhere between reeds and oak trees does not really work here
since people spend too little time on the job to develop any serious per-
ception of the effects of work and its organisation. It becomes impossi-
ble, under these conditions, to constitute an identity at work.
The dynamic underlying a detachment identity is increasingly shap-
ing the identities at work of young recruits destined to be subsequently
hired in other sectors. Nowadays, working for McDonalds is consid-
ered a positive recommendation for many companies in certain areas
of activity. ‘Social training’ and the shaping of this detachment iden-
tity, combined with principles like systematic mobility and unguaran-
teed employment, all combine to prepare employees to operate on the
periphery of the aforementioned work groups in all sectors of activity.
98   J.-P. Durand

Lacking specific skills and sometimes with minimal schooling, detached

employees quickly adapt to any professional situation as long as it does
not require precise skills such as the ones permanent core employees
tend to have. Nowadays these jobs account for 12–13% of equivalent
part-time jobs (a percentage that is growing slowly despite the two cate-
gories’ shared representations). Nearly one-quarter of the active popula-
tion alternates between periods of unemployment and so-called atypical
jobs that open the door to other jobs for most young people, particu-
larly over the past decade. No one has yet assessed the effects of this
‘social training’ on how people behave later when they achieve stabi-
lised employment but it is possible to perceive how worker identities are
being matched here with the requirements of lean production and the
necessary shaping of new types of workers.
***
Constructing identity at work is a never-ending process that is always
subject to turnarounds, some of whose effects are irreversible. Identity
and recognition at work are the collective and individual sides of one
and the same coin, being the construction of a social subject. A mul-
titude of very heterogeneous exogenous factors contribute to this con-
struction (Fig. 3.1). Something that subjects find difficult is coming up
with a point of reference. One of the most important of these being
recognition at work by others, especially where this entails a relation-
ship superseding simple intersubjectivity, a la Axel Honneth. This is
because such relationships offer a social basis for recognition conveyed
via a socialised alter ego. Even if the subject is both recipient and trans-
mitter of this process and finds fulfillment therein (comprised of self-re-
alisation in work or of feelings of failure, isolation or rejection), s/he
will still have a sense of belonging to a work group. The individualised
process of constructing identity at work cannot be separated from each
individual’s membership in a work group or more precisely, an arrange-
ment of work groups. Hence the diverse range of singular trajecto-
ries that can be assembled in four types of identity at work (Fig. 3.2)
characterising subjects’ various reactions by their psychic construction.
Some live more or less happily and enjoy social recognition leading to
 3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied Recognition    
99

self-esteem. Others fail due to complex processes of exclusion that man-

agement discourse tries to hide.
The question is whether social recognition at work has started to
dissipate or even disappear, something that would cause cracks in (and
even the annihilation of ) things such as self-esteem and well-being or
positive identity at work. As a production system based on flux tendu
with a smaller workforce, lean management requires new types of work-
ers with sufficient psychic plasticity to cope with the gap it introduces
between promises of autonomy and the reality of an overly narrow
execution framework comprised of meta-rules. Analysis found in the
following chapters and derived from long investigations are therefore
needed to facilitate understanding of how new types of workers deal
with this transformation in their core work.

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 4
The New Worker Dispossessed of Work

Flawed and divided humans are torn, on the one hand, between the
promises made to them as part of their work activities and, on the other,
the resources that employers give to them (or which they can mobilise
through their entourage). This chapter shows how the new rationalisa-
tions of production and work implemented as a result of lean manage-
ment and “frugal production” further widen the flaws presented in the
preceding chapter.
One of lean management’s main characteristics is the fact that almost
all workers in all sectors today—from bottom to top—are affected
by it. In September 2013, for instance, there was the suicide of Zurich
Insurance’s Finance Director, a man in conflict with his CEO about
how the latter would be presenting disappointing corporate results.
This prompted an editorial in the French business paper Les Echos (10
September 2013) to opine that, “The Finance Director found himself
up against the contradictions at the heart of modern capitalism, crushed
between shareholders, entrepreneurs, regulators and decision-makers – all
prepared to make an outrageous interpretation of rules”.
Of course, malaise or suffering will vary at different levels of hierar-
chical responsibility and in different professions. For industrial workers

© The Author(s) 2019 103

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_4
104   J.-P. Durand

operating on automobile assembly lines, for instance, the main prob-

lems are physical in nature and caused by the ergonomic effects of the
time pressures they are under. But their problems are also mental since
the repetitiveness and monotony of this work deprives it of much if any
meaning (Durand and Hatzfeld 2003). Even in so-called service sectors
such as catering, mass retail but also mass tertiary activities (banking,
insurance, transportation), there is very little chance of fulfillment at
work. The present chapter provides a detailed observation of possible
changes in work organisation and management demands, showing how
for employees ranging from order pickers working on logistic platforms
to research and developement (R&D) engineers and including indus-
trial design engineers, the new imperatives have created new types of
workers by increasingly conditioning (and/or subjugating) them, all
in the name of greater autonomy. Indeed, the likelihood is that social
reproduction mechanisms have been strategically more important for
understanding modern societies than the production mechanisms Marx
discussed in Das Capital ’s famous new chapter published in 1971.

Logistics as an Example of Industrial Workers

Operating in a Service Activity
The generalisation of flux tendu throughout industry and mass retail has
led to the externalisation of an activity that companies long ran inter-
nally, namely goods transportation between factories (from suppliers
to customers) or from production units to distribution sites. This soon
required some fairly intensive management decision-making, with the
absence of buffer stocks adding to the procurement activity’s complex-
ity and fragility by necessitating the just-in-time delivery of specified
quantities.
The end result is that logistics (supply chain management) has
become a fully-fledged sector employing more than 800,000 people in
France (excluding the transportation sector), with more than half being
industrial workers performing industrial activities on logistics platforms,
doing things such as handling merchandise, unloading lorries (trucks),
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
105

stacking racks reaching as high as five metres, preparing orders for recip-
ients and loading lorries.
In this way, logistics incarnates a brief history of industrial produc-
tion and indeed the history of capitalist work over the past 150 years.
The sector has become a relatively accurate way of gathering and syn-
thesizing the disparate elements involved in production and work
re-organisation:

– The search for control over time and space has extended, shortening
the time it takes to execute orders as well as distances between oper-
ational locations. This has increased input/output ratios in different
industrial (or indeed service) sectors and augmented the value-added
per unit of time.
– Rationalisation has become a core principle in productive and work
practices alike.

In sum, supply chains might be construed as a quintessential aspect of

commercial production, being the locus for organising (Virilio 1984)
and above all accelerating (Rosa 2010) speed, with both these factors
being dominant aspects of the social changes witnessed over the past
40 or 50 years. Clearly, the essential translation of this shift is the flux
tendu system epitomising the new modes of production. Logistics is also
a way of integrating industrial and service activities, the question then
becoming whether it constitutes a service activity in and of itself. The
answer is clearly affirmative even though logistical organisations tend to
vary according to the paradigms found in different industries, includ-
ing because they mainly involve handling materials and tangible objects
(Raffenne 2009). Even so, logistics involve the kinds of informational
flows that go with service activities. Supply chains often link indus-
trial and service activities, with examples including consumer goods
or mass retail food companies. Logistics are also at the heart of services
provided to (industrial) companies and epitomise several major current
trends, starting with the outsourcing of all non-core business. Analysis
should dissociate logistics in industrial sectors from logistics involving
mass retailers’ direct distribution to end users (including online sales).
106   J.-P. Durand

Most stocks in the former case are found in lorries or factory floors and
involve minimised volumes. Logistics here tend to be largely automated,
requiring in turn a smaller workforce. In the second example, the oppo-
site applies since orders shipped to individuals and stores must be pre-
pared one at a time. The present study focuses mainly on work done in
logistics platforms in the mass retail sector (and serving online sales).
The gradual disappearance of catalogue sales has been accompanied
by a constant rise in Internet business. Today it is widely considered
that 5–6% of end user trade happens online, with an annual growth
of around 15%. Where consumers undertake the major (albeit non-
remunerated) task of documenting and comparing prices (to convince
themselves they made the right choice), one element in their decision is
how fast the supplier fills their order. Hence the need to organise a par-
ticularly effective delivery process, with many items being received by
customers fewer than 48 hours after their purchase.

A Sudden Return to Taylor and Ford

The fragmentation of tasks on logistics platforms has reached a record

level, with order pickers no longer having anything more than simple
tasks to perform, namely picking a precise quantity of objects that they
then put on a caddy and take to the delivery platform. Pickers can be
basically guided in two ways: they can use portable scanner screens
(replacing the computer printouts they had in the past); or they can
wear voice recognition headgear that will tell them exactly where to
go in the warehouse. They then validate the items they pick up using a
scanner in the former instance and communicating product details and
numbers via a microphone in the latter. In catalogue sales warehouses,
pickers communicate their orders to the packers who prepare the ship-
ments. Where this involves logistics platforms in the mass retail sector,
it is the pickers who place products on pallets that are then wrapped in
plastic film for shipment by lorry.
Amazon runs the following process at its Montélimar facilities in
France (Malet 2013). After using a scanner screen to become aware of
the location of the item requiring picking, and once it has been found,
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
107

pickers scan the package barcodes. If there is a beep indicating initial

approval, they visually verify (they can do this, for example, when taking
a book) that the product corresponds to the one indicated on the screen.
They also check that the product is in good condition and scan the bar-
codes before placing it in the caddy. According to one interviewee,

The screen will then immediately show the next item I have to pick.
For example, sheet music for Nocturnes by Chopin, situated aisle 134,
shelf C, row 412. The computer calculates in real-time which item I have
to take. This depends on my position in the warehouse, which it knows
precisely. Software optimises my movements so that I spend no more
than a few seconds walking between two items I am supposed to pick up.
I grab my rolling cart and advance towards next item. (Malet 2013, 75)

Here, the machine system (IT and the rigorous arrangement of tens of
thousands of products on shelves) completely dominates human efforts
and gives workers no time to breathe. Even rest breaks are shortened as
a result of the warehouse’s enormous surface area, which means work-
ers are operating at a great distance from their rest stations. Machines
subjugate humans in this example and constantly dictate their opera-
tional schedules. Trainee pickers might only pick up 50 items an hour
but more experienced ones are expected to up this rate to 120 or 130
items an hour, meaning 900–1000 items for every 8-hour workday,
during which time they will have walked more than 20 km. This dom-
ination of humans by a machine command system is strangely redolent
of the automotive assembly line that Ford invented to dictate industrial
workers’ interventions on the vehicles they were manufacturing. It also
explains why these new employees use the term factory to characterise
their logistics platforms, while referring to their own social status as
industrial workers. The entire history of the automotive industry, like
the assembly of mass consumer goods such as household appliances,
furniture or electronic products, has seen people struggling to slow the
pace at which factory lines advance, or to increase the number of people
occupying the tougher workstations. What happens here, however, is
that the individualisation of workstations, combined with a high unem-
ployment rate, prevents any possibility of slowing the work rate.
108   J.-P. Durand

Labour analysts who have otherwise concluded that Taylor and

Ford are out-of-date or ‘dead’ do not seem to have noticed this aspect
of the modern wage-earning condition. Yet many new jobs in the ser-
vice sector (mass retail, fast food, call centres, logistics platforms, etc.)
not only reproduce a Taylorian division of labour but use his rational-
ising principles to simplify work as much as possible, the aim being to
help unskilled employees achieve excellent dexterity within a few short
days. This extreme simplification of tasks also means that work becomes
routine, monotonous and extremely fatiguing. J.-B. Malet, a journalist
hired by Amazon to analyse its working conditions, noted that,

All kinds of people suffer backaches, problems with their neck or wrist
(musculoskeletal disorders) because they are scanning all night. Their
legs also hurt. There are long periods (often around 3:30 AM) when my
own legs tightened up unexpectedly as if the muscles and bones suddenly
decided to solidify into blocks of granite. When this happens for about
10, 15 or 20 minutes it becomes very hard to advance at the rate required
to ensure productivity. Your legs turn to stone … but then loosen up
again after a while, so people can finish the night shift. (Malet 2013, 94)

The discussion here is how physical exhaustion, especially at night,

when work disturbs natural biorhythms, encourages workers to visit
vending machines during their breaks and buy energy bars full of sugar
to overcome the exhaustion.
The pressure that machines place on workers, in this case, scan-
ners that always indicate the next location Amazon pickers must
go to once approval has beeped for the article they are currently tak-
ing, is tantamount to a kind of harassment that employees can never
escape. Workers on these platforms are therefore experiencing some-
thing akin to what their predecessors experienced during the post-
war boom years, back when there were much criticism of the “hellish
work rates” found in the automotive industry, with many assembly
line workers considered “old” and physically used up by the age of 40
(Durand and Hatzfeld 2003). On today’s logistic platforms, employers
rely enormously on interim staff members, one example being Amazon
decision to add during the pre-Christmas period in its French facilities
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
109

something like 1200 temporary staff members versus 350 permanent

ones. Above and beyond indisputable seasonal phenomena, this also
attests to a management policy of resorting to a disposable workforce
that can be asked to toil mercilessly for however long a given mission
lasts in those regions where underemployment is worse than elsewhere.
The advent of voice recognition software has made conditions even
worse for Amazon’s pickers working by further accelerating what were
already some fairly untenable work rates. At other logistics platforms,
for instance, the ones dispatching consumer goods to supermarkets,
pickers hear an item’s address over their headphones, walk to the address
and validate it as well as the item and number of packages by speaking
into the microphone. The time spent unproductively at Amazon read-
ing the scanner does not exist anymore in this other location. Whether
they want to or not, employees receive information in hidden time and
must move to the new location to pick whatever item has been desig-
nated there. From the economic perspective of the employer manag-
ing the time that the worker is being paid, the idea here is to mobilise
different senses simultaneously (hearing, sight and touch) before using
words to further galvanise workers’ energy through the movements they
undertake (walking around, picking items, stacking them on a pallet). If
as economists like to repeat “time is money”, voice recognition systems
have propelled a new stage in work intensification by making percep-
tion simultaneous with action. As explained by one picker, “You can’t
hear anything, in fact you can’t even think anymore. And still you know
exactly what to do, as if you’re getting instructions directly to the brain”
(Gaborieau 2012, 10).
One consequence has been a halving of operational times compared
to when workers used to read off lists, with today’s pickers requiring a
mere 15 seconds to move between items. Headgear is a veritable revolu­
tion since it frees up people’s hands (they no longer have to read lists or
scan anything) and above all because they no longer have to spend time
shifting their line of vision from the list to items that need to be taken
off the shelf. A few specialists have predicted the end of voice recogni­
tion software because it has over-accelerated work rates. However, given
that it forces workers to use different body parts at the same time (ears,
eyes, legs, arms and hands, voice), many find this quite feasible and
110   J.-P. Durand

compensate for their accelerated picking rate in the way they handle
their caddies.

Picking has become a race to meet quotas, earn a bonus or catch your
breath. Self-driven caddies are the instruments driving everything pick-
ers do. They also inject a bit of fun into the job by breaking up the rou-
tine. Pickers catch their breath by leaning on caddies. They spend 40% of
their time moving around filling orders. Each mission can takeupwards
of 600m or even 1 km and they do are 30 to 40 missions a day. 70% of
the time is spent walking around at about 10 km an hour. (…) In and of
itself, this is not only a fairly un-strenuous job but also a fun one. It gives
people time to breathe or catch their breath while meeting their quotas.
(Lagrange 2014, 19)

This simultaneous use of a person’s senses and other organs—even as

workers no longer have to think to perform their tasks—transforms
people into veritable robots during their time at work. It instrumen-
talised workers in the radical meaning of this term, making them
into objects directed and manipulated by impersonal orders given by
machines (computers linked to headgears cum microphones). In a cer-
tain way, it is the culmination of the mechanisation process, not for
the machinery aspect (something called automation) but because this
is a case of humans being overrun by machines and reified as part of
their productive work. Then there is the way that voice recognition
software keeps workers from communicating with one another. Doing
this freezes the software, which then has to be rebooted, wasting every-
one’s time and drawing unwelcome attention to the perpetrators. In
this way, voice recognition systems can be seen as the embodiment of
Foucauldian disciplinary mechanisms. They are total machines that
organise tasks and discipline while automatically monitoring every
worker’s productivity. Hence management’s decision to increasingly
implement the system in warehouses, associated with new ideas like
doubling fork lengths so that each caddy can carry two pallets and halve
the time pickers spend walking about (which currently accounts for
something like 40% of their total time at work).
Every part of workers’ bodies are affected, especially since they no
longer enjoy any real downtime. No surprise then that accidents are
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
111

20% more frequent in these functions than in the construction indus-

try, and twice the average across all industries in France. There has also
been a 12–14% rise in orthopedic problems.1 Voice recognition-driven
picking has become “the archetype of flux tendu ” (Gaborieau 2012),
although its mobilisation regime remains deeply Taylorian given
that a bonus system is still in place. Management is perfectly aware
of how many packages each worker handles in an hour, day or week,
with bonuses reaching up to 30% of an employee’s monthly wage. At
Amazon, “Scanners, which are indispensable to managing picking
orders and merchandise flows, are akin to little electronic cops record-
ing people’s slightest movements”, especially given the excellent wifi
connections in most warehouses nowadays (Malet 2013, 87). Having
said that, although management is constantly aware of how much each
worker is producing, the workers themselves do not possess this knowl-
edge and must ask their bosses for it. This constitutes an informational
imbalance that gives senior management direct power over operatives. It
also meshes with the tenets of a system that the critics of organisational
modernity and informational capitalism thought was gone but contin-
ues to dominate.
Where work is guided by voice recognition systems, workers are not
only imprisoned by the voice they hear through their headsets but also
physically dominated for the same reason.

To take a break and go smoke a cigarette, you have to go through secu-

rity gates (which are there to prevent merchandise from being stolen)
and leave your gear in the team supervisor’s office. In other words, the
tools chain pickers physically to their place of work. They are more or less
forced to keep them on, like electronic bracelets. The same applies when

1According to Didier Lagrange (2014), “Picking involves a succession of movements and gres-
tures that stress the whole of the body. People use their eyes and neck muscles, for instance, to
read codes. Pushing caddies means bending your legs, grabbing with hands, twisting backs. The
same applies when stacking items. Above all, the same gestures are repeated day in day out”. And
yet, the work is not considered strenuous since it alternates repetitive gestures with caddy driving.
Defined thusly, the strenuousness index seriously underplays the difficulty of this work by ignor-
ing factors like package weight and how many empty pallettes workers handle (weighing nearly
5 tonnes a day).
112   J.-P. Durand

workers must go to the toilet. This constraint is not only explained by

managers’ battle against “soldiering” but also because they want to pre-
vent theft. (Lagrange 2014)

End Game or the Impossible Appropriation of Work

The manner in which picking work has changed is redolent of what

has been happening to automotive assembly workers. As technologies
(especially digital ones) have progressed and work organisations have
changed, there has been a steady decline in workers’ control over their
own work (or in their micro-management of the timing and order of
their operations). In the past, pickers working on logistics platforms
would stack items on pallets as per a rational and impersonal logic
where the heaviest and strongest items would be stacked on the bot-
tom and the lighter more fragile ones on top (to avoid being crushed).
This led to competition between experienced pickers trying to stack the
‘prettiest pallets’, i.e. ones that would last the longest during handling
operations (and cause the fewest problems when they were loaded or
unloaded from lorries). These were pallets made to last and where pick-
ers would think about making things easier for their downstream col-
leagues when stacking. The objective was rarely talked about explicitly,
although workers did have a chance to converse with one another when,
for instance, teasing newcomers about the “monstrous” pallets they were
preparing. In the end, the goal of stacking a well-built pallet created a
great deal of pride that was felt by the whole of the work group, irre-
spective of its degree of virtuality.
For more experienced pickers, stacking a ‘beautiful pallet’ made
sense, not only because it helped downstream colleagues do a good job
but also because it was a way of reappropriating work by being able to
pick items at a pre-determined work rate and stacking pallets that were
both aesthetic and functional. Indeed, this ‘game’ was often pushed
to an extreme, with some workers stacking pallets that were nearly
1.80 metres in height, masterpieces nicknamed towers in France. There
were times when workers would demonstrate their skills by slowly going
up and down the aisles of the warehouse with a forklift carrying towers
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
113

of packages that might sway back and forth but never fell (Gaborieau
2012, 23). This was less of a playful game and more of collective social
action in which participants were seeking one another’s recognition, not
only for their own benefit but also to constitute and reinforce the work
collective. In this way, the game was expressing social membership in a
greater body that was developing its own rules to enable its existence as
a collective. In this context, the term game should not be construed as
something fun or distracting but as a serious matter helping a collective
to exist for its own reasons and if necessary as a counterpoint to other
groups. Specifically, the rules of the game intentionally forced partici-
pants, unlike management rules, to do certain things, opening in this
way a space of autonomy that the workers could control themselves. As
for those who did not want to take part in the game, they ran a risk
of being sidelined and not developing any particularly strong connec-
tions to the group. Lastly, the greater the power of the collective and the
more it was recognised, the greater the frequency of the game-playing.
Moreover and in a similar vein, as participants broadened their space of
autonomy, they discovered that this strengthened them in their dealings
with management.
The introduction of scanners and voice recognition systems did away
with the towers game by returning focus to the management objective
of accelerating the picking order, specifically by reducing the amount
of time workers spent moving about the premises. In addition, pack-
age stacking no longer depended on choices made by workers seeking to
create a ‘beautiful pallet’, with picking now being ordered by machines
applying another logic, namely the need to gain time. This undermined
employee autonomy and normally should have led to the disappearance
of the towers game. The ingenuity of the more experienced workers was
such, however, that they preserved much of their autonomy by finding a
way of getting around the automated system

that consisted of learning by heart certain polarising codes requiring

workers to go to products’ storage locations before knowing the quanti-
ties needed. Getting these numbers made it possible to know how many
products were being ordered before picking them, hence to figure out
what form the order would take. By writing on paper which products
114   J.-P. Durand

were going to be announced by the digital voice, workers were r­ e-creating

the former working conditions where they had had lists. In turn, this
renewed their sense of enthusiasm, a necessity for good quality work,
even as it helped them to avoid the segmentation of tasks. The initiative
took a lot of effort, however, since they had to memorise many differ-
ent codes. (…) But there is no doubt that this adaptation strategy helped
re-introduce a form of activity where action was preceded by reflection.
(Gaborieau 2012, 27)

According to Gaborieau, however, warehouse managers reacted quickly

to workers’ new practices by changing the polarising codes regularly.
The reason they gave was that pickers’ reappropriation of work and
reconstruction of autonomy would increase the number of errors. In the
name of a quality and efficiency logic overriding workers’ own modus
operandi (stacking ‘beautiful pallets’ robust enough for handling opera-
tions and helpful to downstream colleagues), what workers were clearly
being asked to do, in both the past and present, was to leave their sub-
jectivity at home once they got to the factory.
Yet despite managers’ attempts to get rid of social games, workers
never stopped feeling that they needed to exist. What then happened is
that actions were displaced to the only remaining space of autonomy,
namely their games (or struggles) with the clock. Workers started to
accelerate their work rates, both to show that they could do more than
asked and also to get ahead of schedule and accumulate free time dur-
ing which they could move freely around the aisles, including to have fun
with colleagues. This was the same approach seen in automotive plants
where workers occupying certain workstations that were not particularly
constrained from a technical perspective, in a game that centred on mobi-
lising relationships to get themselves assigned to these stations, finished
their work before others. At that point they would go around showing off
how available and ‘free’ they were (Durand and Hatzfeld 2003).
The race against the clock where workers accelerate their work rates
in order to have time for breaks might be analysed as a kind of dialectic
pitting reappropriation against alienation; as a case of work being reap-
propriated in a context of alienation. Alternatively it could be a form
of resistance to work-related constraints. In the latter case, it is both
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
115

individual and collective in nature. The former insofar as it is incarnated

by particular subjects; but above all the latter since games only exist
when they are social in nature. At the same time, it must be remem-
bered that the existence of output-related bonuses sustains the game
while sending it off in a different direction. Such games are voluntary
but converge with practices in which everyone who can do so invests
energy in getting their wages increased.
In this battle to regain time, and within the aforementioned limi-
tations, it is also worth noting that the reappropriation of work does
not occur within the work itself or in the tasks (like stacking ‘beautiful
pallets’ or towers ), but alongside of this. The emphasis here is on the
power of heteronomous forces in a manual picker’s profession. One
example inlogistics warehouses serving more than 200 stores involved
“caddies being seen as a thing of power and source of pride, with people
pushing at up to 10 km an hour pallets weighing several hundred kilos
and reaching 2 metres in height. It took a lot of dexterity to do this”
(Lagrange 2014, 18). The subjugation enforced by the voice recognition
system was offset in this case through a playfulness that workers expe-
rienced in the way they used their caddies, something that the author
maliciously described as “chariot races” in spaces where this was very
dangerous because of all the forklifts and pedestrians (including supervi-
sors) inhabiting it.
In this social game revolving around the construction of free time,
workers no longer belonged to themselves during the acceleration
or self-acceleration phases, thereby epitomising a situation of aliena-
tion. The paradoxical objective of this kind of total alienation is that
it involves subjects who are briefly liberating themselves in the way
they try to control time. Of course, they must deny (or at least hide)
the fact that they are working to free up time because otherwise man-
agement will consider possibilities for further increasing their work
rates or raising the thresholds at which they earn a bonus (Burawoy
2015; Roy 2006). This raises the prospect that an alienated game is
similar to the alienation that a person’s ego undergoes within the cap-
italist wage-labour nexus. Because of the reasons why games are played
in workplaces, however, this acceleration of work during the down-
time ‘stolen’ from senior management creates meaning (outside of the
116   J.-P. Durand

content of work itself ) while also giving meaning back to the activities
that workers perform at work.
This new attempt to reappropriate work through the acceleration and
intensification of tasks happened here to the detriment of people’s phys-
ical health, which was being undermined even more quickly and ulti-
mately led to breakdowns (Gaborieau 2012, 39–43). It is probable that
new types of workers suffer more physically than morally, specifically
because logistics platform management rarely makes promises about
re-enchanting them with work (Malet 2013). Unless that is the less peo-
ple speak about solitude, the more it affects them.

Subjects’ Isolation as a Factor of Malaise

Voice recognition technology indubitably turns workers in on them-

selves since their ability to hear is partially removed, to the extent that
the machines running the situation get upset whenever human col-
leagues converse.

So no one talks anymore or at least much less than before. If you say
something, the machine freezes up and then you have to keep repeating
things. It drives you crazy and in the end everyone comes up with their
own way of making it work. The sort of orders I give are like ‘1, 2, OK…’
but not much more than that. I don’t have any time to chat anymore. You
do your work and that’s it, as if you were alone in the warehouse. (quote
by Gaborieau 2012)

Note the author’s reference to a sound bubble encapsulated in the

way that workers’ headgear cuts them off from the outside world. In
those places where this technology has not yet arrived (see, inter alia,
Amazon’s shop floor), management forbids pickers from speaking with
one another when they meet in the aisles. The argument being that it
is crucial to recruit a workforce that is cheaper and more efficient than
robots. Instead of human exchanges, “music - which is supposed to
stimulate, galvanise, and spark top performance by getting people to
transcend themselves – becomes an outrage that people must survive”
(Malet 2013, 37). Senior management maintains a climate of suspicion
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
117

and the workers they appreciate the most (and to whom they might one
day offer open-ended contracts) are those who inform them about col-
leagues’ behaviour, usually without even realising it.
This isolation of workers enclosed in “sound bubbles” and cut off
from the world by a wall of repression causes autistic behaviour. Here
it is worth looking at a hypothesis formulated by Jean-Michel Besnier
according to which modern companies have an interest in recruiting
slightly autistic employees, in part because they have problems under-
standing body language, subtexts and metaphors. Ambiguity destabi-
lises them since everything must be clear, true or false (Besnier 2012,
84–85).
This isolation weakens one aspect of the social being that constitutes
all humans. On top of confinement, the individualisation of employ-
ment relationships means that management has exact and instantane-
ous knowledge of each worker’s output, ostensibly so that everyone is
treated equally and awarded bonuses “fairly”. Workers have the impres-
sion that their bosses are standing right behind them all the time, spy-
ing on them to find out how quickly and precisely they are doing their
job and whether they are making any unhelpful or wrong gestures. This
physical and emotional isolation, combined with the individualisation
of human management, undermines work-related collective life on the
floor. Where workers reconstruct collective spaces for playing social
games that allow them to accelerate outputs to free up a small part of
their time, senior management often takes advantage of these occasions
to talk about its own interest in increasing output by raising work rates.
The idea that this kind of isolation should be maintained and is even
desirable shows how regressive it is to have a situation where digital
technologies (scanners and now voice recognition software) are used
to control workers’ time and task organisation. In the recent past, and
without pickers even standing physically close to their delivery plat-
form merchandise handling colleagues (or to truck drivers or storeroom
staff), it was still possible for information to circulate between different
employee categories, helping pickers to define what made a good pal-
let. Everyone belonged to the same collective that, even if it was virtual,
helped construct a collective identity at work, thereby creating meaning
and giving meaning to work.
118   J.-P. Durand

Clearly, it could also be argued that the loss of meaning at work is

not particularly important to a company’s managers and even less so to
its owners. Having said that, it is likely that workers’ interests in work
(hence its quality) is an important factor of mobilisation and some-
thing that should draw senior management’s attention. This component
of mobilisation at work is quite clearly more effective than Amazon’s
totally artificial and highly vain construct of a ‘family’, with the firm
having organised a host of events, festivals and outings all intended to
capture the subjectivity of employees who have not been fooled (and
attend such events more by obligation than by choice). This is already
the sign of a company that is totally fixated on controlling new types of
workers’ emotions. Amazon’s slogan, plastered on walls everywhere, is
“Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History”. This reveals its ideological pro-
gramme, which consists of trying to get each worker to believe that they
can write the company’s history much as its owner is doing, because
they have the same interests and can receive the same rewards.
It is worth revisiting the cost of workers’ losing the meaning of work,
what it means when a collective vision of work disappears, and in the
present instance, the broader processes between pallet stacking and
the customer’s store. Handling and transport staff started to complain
that pallets were not holding together when they reached the delivery
platforms; at different loading or unloading points, or at destination.
Employees were therefore forced to rebuild the pallets, something that
they rarely knew how to do, or place the items on one or two other pal-
lets, with a real risk of damaging the packages or products themselves.
These extra tasks were clearly not supposed to be part of staff members’
functions and had to be carried out in the interstices between different
workstations. It was invisible work that led to a further deterioration
of working conditions in two ways: firstly by intensifying work without
any recognition of this, and second even worse, by going unremarked
by workers frightened of criticism. In warehouses that made direct
deliveries to stores, pickers did more than simply handle packages.

Analysis of this activity showed a multitude of brief and repetitive

sub-activities such as waiting for replenishment deliveries, handling pal-
lets, writing labels, covering pallets in film, solving problems with voice
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
119

recognition software, cleaning up work areas or taking out the rubbish.

All of these indispensable activities were considered ‘unproductive’ hence
accomplished in what might be called ‘masked time’. (Lagrange 2014, 24)

Certain competencies had been rendered invisible so they did not have
to be remunerated. For instance, pickers would theoretically arrive in an
area, grab a package and stack it on the pallet.

But this was not so simple given that the cardboard boxes, despite having
similar shapes, differed widely in size, height and depth. Workers had to
put as many boxes as possible on a 1.2 metre × 0.8 metre pallet, stacking
them in a way that did not exceed a height of 1.8 metres with all of the
package labels being visible on the outside. This raised questions about
the best solutions for stacking packages and pallets. Taking all these con-
straints into account (the area to stack, the three dimensions of a package,
its weight, total height and the position of labels), many different actions
were possible - yet pickers had no more than 36 seconds to get to the
designated location, grab the package, verify the reference and position it
optimally. (Lagrange 2014, 37)

There was no recognition of this dexterity when the package’s suppos-

edly optimal location was calculated, except in a negative sense that
temporary staff members could struggle with the tasks and see their
mission shortened.
In other words, everything relating to well-being at work, and which
could (in the work process itself ) give meaning to tasks’ contents,
encourage operatives’ interest in work as well as their commitment to
objectives that should have been established in conjunction with them,
none of this was of interest to mid-level managers or indeed to senior
management. Indeed, it might be observed that these upper echelons
became less interested in these questions, especially since the aforemen-
tioned extra costs could either be externalised or else were lower than
the benefits they hoped to derive from employees’ greater autonomy at
work. Modern managers generally view this latter aspect as something
that is very unpredictable and tend to prefer more immediate control
over subordinates’ tasks and work actions than over uncertain emotional
subjectivities. This shows how far the advocates of ending the so-called
120   J.-P. Durand

scientific organisation of work that Taylor invented and disseminated

throughout the twentieth century are from the frontline reality today.
It also highlights how complacent they have become in producing an
emollient normative discourse whose main purpose is to be totally
coherent with respect to the expectation they have of workers perfor-
mance. Whether the same critique applies to the kind of intellectual
work associated with product design remains to be seen.

The Taylorisation of Industrial Design-Related

Intellectual Work
The implementation of lean management principles, mainly focused
on cost-cutting, is as witnessed above in the logistics sector not always
an adjunct of industrial or manual work. Indeed, despite making it
harder to achieve many objectives, it increasingly accompanies the reor-
ganisation traversing all service sectors, including personal services (see
Chapter 5). This section of Chapter 3 focuses on another service activ-
ity, that is, product and service design and the R&D activities accompa-
nying them upstream.
Until the 1960s and 1970s, most productive reorganisations and
work rationalisation efforts related to industrial activities, prioritis-
ing manual work hence industrial workers. Over the past 30 years, the
same productivist logic has led to a rationalisation of intellectual work.
It is always harder and above all more complex to rationalise thinking,
imagination or intuition as opposed to physically productive gestures.
And yet, the seminal principles of lean production and management
are being systematically applied at increasingly deep levels to intellec-
tual work. The outcomes have been irregular, however, depending on
the perspective adopted.

The Slow Maturation of Management by Project

Organisation

Since the nineteenth century, objects have been designed and indus-
trialised (i.e. mass manufactured) in clearly separate stages. Design
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
121

departments come up with ideas and then sketch an object and its
components. Engineering departments follow by designing machines,
moulds and the manufacturing work organisation. The factory floor
executes orders by machining parts before assembling them. These
sequential processes have one major shortcoming asides from their slow-
ness, however, namely that any manufacturing problems will for tech-
nical reasons tend to be noticed quite belatedly, for instance, on the
shop floor, at which point the processes have to restart from the very
beginning.
With the end of the postwar boom years, competition between com-
panies became increasingly severe. To earn market share, each began
trying to renew its product range as quickly as possible, diversify-
ing products and producing for less cost while maintaining minimum
­quality.2 From 1980 to today, production organisers (in the broader
sense of the term, including people who design and industrialise prod-
ucts in large series manufacturing) have constantly revolutionised the
main principles of this approach. Sequentiality has been replaced by
simultaneous object design operations, prototype preparations (where
these have not been simply replaced by computerised simulations) and
facility, tool and manufacturing process design. ICT also plays a crucial
role since there is no longer a need to redesign parts to fit the needs aris-
ing at each process stage. Nowadays there are engineers and technicians
working with software professionals using information taken from huge
shared databases.
Saying that these as yet unfinished transformations have taken more
than 30 years helps shine a light on all the hesitations, experiments and
abandonments affecting the new forms of design and intellectual work
organisation. Industry has transitioned from a project management
approach to one based on management by projects, featuring actors
operating under the guidance of project leaders. Today’s management by
projects organisation has thoroughly restructured all design activities in
line with a host of new rules (Goussard 2011).

2The quality of a product (i.e. of a “durable good”) in a capitalist system always has two con-
tradictory aspects: it must ostensibly possess sufficient quality to provoke a purchasing decision;
but be of sufficiently poor quality to enable planned obsolescence so that the consumers will
repeat-purchase as quickly as possible.
122   J.-P. Durand

Ensuring the simultaneity of design activities in design and engi-

neering departments and among (floor) manufacturing engineers is
sometimes referred to as concurrent engineering. This is one way of
illustrating the idea of parties ‘running together’ or converging towards
the same goal (Navarre 1993) by means of a kind of productivism that
this organisational technology has helped to reinvigorate. Management
researchers have written many articles and books analysing these
transformations in the ways that industrial goods are being designed
and produced. Only a small part of this evolution is fully understood
(Clark and Fujimoto 1991; Clark and Wheelwright 1992; Giard and
Midler 1993), to the extent that bodies like the AFITEP (Association
Francophone de Management de Projet ) has started trying to coordinate
practitioners’efforts to enhance performance.
The principle of simultaneous product design operations forces prod-
uct engineers (along with engineering departments and factory floor
engineers) to collaborate on projects. One effect has been to more or
less eliminate process restarts, something that has helped to lower costs.
Bringing together or combining these three functions that are so essen-
tial to industrial production is largely an attempt to improve product
manufacturability, i.e. to simplify manufacturing and lower costs while
enabling better quality. Furthermore, subcontractors and suppliers are
being integrated into this process very early on, working hand-in-hand
with main contractors’ design departments so that all new compo-
nents in the item being manufactured benefit from the new possibili-
ties allowed by concurrent engineering. This has helped costs to fall by
between 20 and 40% over the past 20 years, even though consumers
have not necessarily noticed this change given that most products have
also become more complex and incorporate new functions. Examples
include better automotive safety systems and new computerised car
driving functionalities.
Simultaneous engineering and management by projects organisations
have also considerably reduced new products’ design time and time-
to-market, while also reducing specific design costs. This is partially
due to ICT but above all to the cessation of endless iterations between
the main manufacturing functions, halving the time it takes to go from
the drawing board to the marketing phase. In this way, companies have
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
123

been able to constantly renew increasingly sophisticated product ranges,

helping them to survive merciless globalised commercial wars.
The transition from the traditional sequential design-­
industrialisation-factory floor organisation to a management by projects
organisation where representatives from the three functions collabo-
rate on one and the same product project has induced senior managers
to generally rely on three new types of tools that have to some extent
been specifically forged for these new circumstances. The first is IT, a
formidable tool enabling functional integration since all of the actors
involved in a particular product now use the same data source. Not only
have the needs for information power grown constantly but new tools
(professional software) are constantly being developed, always with the
same concern for compatibility. It remains that IT system integration
rarely performs as well as people want. The second development is the
aforementioned closer working relationships between individuals com-
ing from these three functions (i.e. the subcontractors associated with
a product), to the extent that many have started to work from the same
premises to encourage both a common culture and more frequent daily
contacts for the many problems they face. Note that this is at odds with
the construct of intangible capitalism since face-to-face contact between
individuals engaging in simultaneous engineering using bespoke plat-
forms appears to be more effective than interactions mediated by IT
or e-mails. In many instances, buildings have been specially designed
to foster interpersonal exchanges or communications between various
sub-functions. This involves open spaces but also situations where teams
are located at specific locations, for instance next to a lift in areas dedi-
cated to a specific project.
The third tool that concurrent engineering requires is a matrix organ-
isation. Increasingly demanding projects require increasingly cutting-
edge knowledge, hence more specialised engineers and technicians.
None of these parties can be fully occupied by one project, with the
exception of long-term projects or ones that do not require any specific
knowledge. In other words, most engineers and technicians work on
several projects in parallel, depending on the needs of the moment. As
such, they operate under the temporary responsibility of a project man-
ager, sub-project manager or batch manager (working on a segment of
124   J.-P. Durand

a sub-project). All the while, they maintain their professional definition

by retaining the same relationships with colleagues who always provide
the resources they need and help them to discuss and maintain (or even
progress) their professional knowledge. Furthermore, depending on
the dominant tradition in a particular area, it is the local career man-
agers who will be overseeing each engineer or technician’s professional
development.
Crossing a project logic with a professional logic generates a matrix
arrangement. This has become the cornerstone of modern concurrent
engineering and more generally of management by projects organi-
sations. In purely formal terms, it is easy to see what conflicts might
arise every time engineers or technicians make concrete decisions, for
instance whether the latter’s choices should prioritise their project or
profession, which may not only involve the personal capabilities that
they have developed but also the locus where they are likely to undergo
evaluation. Another possibility is a ‘friendly arrangement’ between these
two outlooks, with project managers informing professional managers
as to individuals’ value. Many human resource departments advocate
this latter approach but it is relatively rare in practice (Goussard 2011,
96–98). A matrix organisation is an attempt to find a compromise
between two imperatives with divergent interests. This makes it a source
of tension between engineers and technicians unable to choose one logic
or the other, and who therefore find themselves torn between contra-
dictory design quality imperatives (professional logic) and the need to
meet deadlines (as demanded by project managers). It is also a source
of difficulty for project managers and product managers familiar with
the dilemmas that their subordinates face, especially since they them-
selves will have known similar situations before being promoted into
management.
In addition to a productive system that is already complex because
of its organisation and due to the growing sophistication of products
that have become increasingly ‘smart’ through the incorporation of ICT,
there is also a phenomenon that is difficult to explain in a linear way,
namely the sedimentation of different design organisation models ever
since the 1980s. Unlike what might otherwise be expected, an organi-
sational model never eliminates all traces of its predecessors. Quite the
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
125

contrary, earlier models might serve as a foundation for the later ava-
tar, including because this allows production to continue during the
transition period. Indeed, the older models might last in some sense,
but their nature will have changed in such a way as to dominate the
new organisation (Midler 1986). This means that professional practices,
management demands and the rigidities of an increasingly powerful but
constantly changing information system all serve to mask new opera-
tional rules while adding to the number of often contradictory orders
that employees are being issued.

Flux Tendu and Constrained Involvement in Design

Activities

At the same time, and possibly one of the key transformations experi-
enced over the past 30 years in the world’s product design and indus-
trialisation process departments, management by projects organisations
rooted in ICT have started importing flux tendu principles (always with
a smaller workforce to lower costs) into different sectors of activities.
Design processes have become a vast informational flow similar to the
flow of materials through factory floors or distribution and logistics
functions. Each engineer or technician operating under these conditions
becomes responsible for designing and drawing one part, depending
on their specialty. They have to depend on colleagues’ upstream perfor-
mance (delivery times and quality) but must also deliver quality design
on time to avoid impeding their downstream colleagues. Each receives
milestones that they must absolutely respect to avoid endangering the
entire sub-project or project.3 This means there is no inventory between
workstations: between batches; or between sub-projects within a larger

3Phases generally overlap, with employees all working with data that has yet to be determined or
validated by the project manager. If they have to wait until all choices or data are determined,
this would be akin to returning to a sequential logic. Overlapping injects a modicum of flexibility
into the system but also flux and uncertainty since even if the data offers some certainty, it never
stops coming. This can perturb employees who may be forced to revisit tasks or modify output
that they thought they had successfully finished.
126   J.-P. Durand

project. “The project is a kind of timeline where tactical action succeeds

one another and where something must be delivered at each stage at a
predetermined time” (aviation engineer quoted by Petit 2012a). It is the
idea of a succession of actions that is worth noting here. Together with
the idea of fluidification, this defines new working conditions where
nothing ever stops and where employees are closely tied to scheduling
and other obligations.
Project managers determine each individual’s workload by dividing
projects into sub-projects and then into batches that are allocated to
operatives together with the relevant milestones.

We are responsible for everything we do. They have created strong links
between individuals although not in the sense of solidarity and team-
work. Instead we are working ‘for someone’. Me, I’m working for you,
meaning that if I don’t reach my objectives, I cause problems for others
because they also cannot do their work and fall behind (…). And these
people will have other people bugging them, waiting on them, after
the delivery is made. (automotive technical expert, quoted by Goussard
2011, 129).

In other words, accepting the principle of informational flux tendu,

something that is very hard not to do, means that engineers and tech-
nicians are accepting the objectives and time constraints that are an
intrinsic part of the process. Everyone has to meet certain milestones
or more colloquially, ‘go through every gateway’ to avoid penalising
downstream colleagues and finish the project on time. According to one
aviation software development engineer, “For us, deadlines are written
in stone. You’re expected to get things done on time and no one wants
to hear about problems you might encounter. So we alway say that
everything is hunky dory and we’ll definitely finish on time. Of course,
what that means for quality afterwards, well what do you think? What
counts today is meeting the deadline, not quality” (quoted by Goussard
2011, 152).
If this constraints system is to work (meaning that employees are
supposed to commit to it and believe in it), they need to find some
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
127

satisfaction in this. Constraints cannot simply be unequivocal with peo-

ple expected to react happily irrespective of the associated possibilities
for expression or self-realisation. The interest that these engineers and
technicians have in their activities is professional. Preserving a profes-
sional logic in a matrix organisation means that they are adhering to
the tenets of their professions as designers and want to be recognised
by their peers as such. In many instances, it is the actual product (auto-
mobile, aeronautics, aerospace, etc.) or the renown of the company
employing these individuals that sustains the social recognition they
enjoy and their pride in occupying a certain function, hence in doing
the work associated with it. More concretely, in a process where prod-
ucts are becoming ever more complex (and therefore require constantly
higher performance), clearly there will be new constraints but these nec-
essarily require a sense of involvement since designers’ responses mobi-
lise both their energy and subjectivity.
Constraints inherent to an informational flux tendu model must be
conceptualised via a dialectic combination whose modalities revolve
around engineers and technicians’ involvement, something closely
related to their profession or immediate design activity. Implementing
this constrained involvement at the heart of engineers and technicians’
daily work makes it acceptable, despite the associated time pressures.
The one dimension that is recognisable in this mobilisation at work
is employees’ expanding autonomy and greater responsibility. This is
because engineers are technicians working within urgent frameworks
that are forced on them. They can all choose a project, out of the two
or three projects on offer (or as many as eight in extreme cases), to start
working on. Or else, they might prefer to get information about a new
project instead of completing the documentation accompanying the one
that they have just completed. ICT has the great advantage of enabling
workers to temporarily disconnect from their collective, making it seem
like they are working on their own. The absence of any immediate man-
agement in the places where this activity takes place creates an impres-
sion of self-organisation that quickly develops into a sense of freedom,
or even the impression of momentarily escaping from the shackles of
time. These are all great ways of mobilising engineers and technicians’
128   J.-P. Durand

subjectivity, including because, by “working for themselves” with all the

pleasure that this offers, they sense they are participating in work of a
much greater magnitude, that is the work of their collective and firm
(Flocco 2015).
Indeed, in one of the paradoxes associated with the complexity of
management by project-based (and especially matrix) organisations,
it is even possible that this has led to greater satisfaction at work.
Organisations’ inability to produce solutions to the new problems they
create is much more mobilising for an engineer than the routine work
caused by the fragmentation and simplification of work. As designers’
work slides towards the management of diversified resources, changea-
ble information and above all the kinds of activites carried out by other
frontline engineers and technicians (whether inhouse or subcontrac-
tors), the number of variables increases as does overall uncertainty. Note
a hypothesis formulated by Sébastien Petit (2016) that this constitutes
a new cooperation regime, one renewing ways of mobilising engineers
who have chosen this profession because it gives free rein to their intui-
tion and creativity. If this is no longer possible through their main activ-
ity because everything there has been standardised and specified once
and for all, the complexity of the organisation, by creating uncertainty,
is the place where game-playing spaces will open up.
At the same time, engineers and technicians’ desire to control the
organisation of their time means that they must also jump through cer-
tain hoops. These are the famous meta-rules, analysed in the first chap-
ter as spaces of freedom circumscribed by various constraints. Some
depend on the profession itself, including unavoidable technical data
that does not need discussing here. Others involve the more or less
explicit functioning of the project group, such as it is run by the pro-
ject leader. Questions at this level include which (written, oral, e-mail)
procedure should be used to validate results; who should do this (some-
one working on the project or else coming from the outside); the role
of the person who allocates resources and changes them as needs be
and soon. Clearly the main meta-rule is how much time is allowed for
meeting the objectives, for instance, of a particular batch or project
sub-section.
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
129

Crossing this with the imperatives associated with informational

flows,4 meaning the constraints born out of the meta-rules govern-
ing management by projects organisations as well as other constraints
associated with the need to meet project milestones, it is clear that
Taylorian work organisation principles have slowly invaded industrial
product design, notwithstanding the noble reputation of this function.
Management by projects organisations with their seminal principles—
and with project bosses who implement them at lower or higher levels
depending on the size of the project or sub-project—have been trans-
formed into design work organisations. This reproduces the Taylorian
division of labour, with the division today being between those who
organise work (intellectual in this case) and those who execute it. Such
organisations rationalise engineers and technicians’ intellectual work
much as they did in the early twentieth century when they rational-
ised industrial workers’ manual labour on factory floors. According to
Sébastien Petit,

This rationalisation of work, borrowed from the scientific organisation

of work, comes in three phases. 1) Objectification of work processes and
practices; 2) Measurement of work and cycles; and 3) Implementation of
standards, pertaining both to design tools and organisational structures.
(2012a, 8)

Hence the thesis of design engineering (Petit 2016) used to character-

ise transformations relating yesterday to manufacturing and today to
design. Despite the different nature of the work in question, the ration-
alising principle is the same. Meta-rules reign nowadays in place of

4To be more precise, an internal informational flows tool coordinates the time pressures weighing
on employees. This is a groupware module organising the collective work of employees who meet
rarely if ever. Groupware connects everyone via a shared knowledge base, linking all members
of a virtual collective by e-mail while communicating the delivery dates that management has
decided. Despite only giving people a little room to manœuvre, groupware forces on everyone
group rules comprised of senior management objectives and desires, especially regarding deadlines
(Craipeau 2001; Durand 2007; Goussard 2011). This machine-based supervision is akin to an
economic kind of operational management, even if its effects on the de-humanisation of work
leave it open to the criticism that it excludes all other social relationships.
130   J.-P. Durand

restrictive orders imposed upon industrial workers by their engineering

departments, as was the case all throughout the last century. More spe-
cifically and as illustrated below, despite the increasing complexity of
products and design processes, the principle of work simplification that
is at the heart of Taylorism, and more generally in capitalism, as noted
by Marx, continues to have a real impact, including through the idea
that this must be implemented by less qualified in-house workers or else
outsourced.

Tools and Justifications for Rationalising Intellectual Work

By and large, the main purpose of rationalising manual or industrial work
has been to increase the value that employees produce per unit of time.
A multitude of tools and processes have also been implemented in efforts
to rationalise design activities, through the application of several kinds of
logic. The main approaches involve:

– The fragmentation and simplification of work. Applying a Taylorian

division of labour to the design of industrial products, chief engineers
design a work organisation that engineers and technicians then exe-
cute. The process can lead to operatives being less qualified than might
normally be expected given the trend towards product complexity.
– Management by projects (replete with the matrix structure that ena-
bles this kind of organisation). Taylorian principles are applied here
through the fragmentation of work and real-time monitoring of pro-
jects (with greater roles for ICT and reporting). Work allocated to
engineers and technicians is conceptualised in a way that respects the
milestone approach associated with flux tendu with smaller workforce
systems.
– Process-based organisations. Here design (and production generally)
is fragmented into segments. Senior managers control inputs and out-
puts to calculate precisely the value added during each stage. The end
result is an increase in reporting.
– Reduced visibility for engineers and technicians. Their role is no longer
to work with major modules or sub-assemblies but instead with simple
parts, a further application of the work simplification principle.
– Subcontracting calculations or basic part drawings or designs. The
activities being subcontracted are low value-added ones, something
that is easier to implement once the work has been simplified by the
prime contractor, who might then outsource it to a less qualified hence
less expensive workforce (which as often as not is not unionised).
Subcontracting radically transforms the work that the prime contrac-
tor does, with its engineers and technicians no longer designing but
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
131

taking responsibility for getting things designed. They become manag-

ers of the work that other people do, determining subcontractor speci-
fications and closely monitoring performance until the ‘part definition’
occurs, being the final stage before manufacturing starts.

Altogether, transformations in product design have created a new system

reversing earlier paradigms, with quality, manufacturability or delays no
longer seeming as much of a priority as they did in the early 1990s.5 The
main goal today is to cut costs. Systemic change is a direct consequence of
business owners’ communication of their financial imperatives.

Management by projects organisations converge here with Ford’s battle

against the porosity of working time. A matrix organisation means that
every engineer or technician works on several projects simultaneously,
only participating in each on a part-time basis depending on their par-
ticular speciality or profession.

Everybody is working in parallel and concurrently. When you finish

one job you turn to the other and change everything around. Everyone
advances together. You carry out ten tasks at a time instead of one after
the other. (aeronautics engineer, sub-project manager, quoted by Petit
2013, 7)

The proliferation of projects, all subject to the aforementioned time

imperatives, automatically causes engineers and technicians to all work
more intensively in order to meet all the milestones that have been
determined for all the projects they work on at a given moment in
time. Another key reason why people are doing so much overtime and
above all why engineers and technicians are working at home at night
or on weekends is their 24/7 access to the company intranet. Similarly,

5The new paradigm is illustrated in the following statement by an engineer-project manager:

“The main challenge in design today is how to evolve from a plan logic to a specifications logic.
(…) Workers believe they can function using plans but many other factors must be taken into
account, like procedures, costs, etc. With specifications the focus is on needs and people must
learn to ask for whatever it is they need, for instance, to design an engine. (…) Modern compa-
nies are all focused on returning to their core business and doing whatever they can to collaborate
effectively with subcontractors” (Petit 2012b).
132   J.-P. Durand

they also have permanent access to their work databases, shorten-

ing the amount of time they need to complete tasks like documentary
research, drafting delivery specifications and above all e-mails. Whereas
in the past when people had a free minute or two between meetings
or projects they could simply reflect on life and ‘breathe’, today they
are busy all the time, with employees’ mental workload increasing due
to the rapid and ongoing changes in the objects or themes they have
to concentrate on. The fact that every single moment of the working
day is filled doing something nowadays is one major consequence of the
rationalisation of intellectual work.
Conditions are somewhat different in the IT sector mainly due
to extremely rapid technological changes in this sector in Europe.
The main consequences have been twofold: tasks that can be done in
Eastern Europe (or Asia) tend to be offshored there; and workers in the
world’s more advanced countries find themselves having to re-skill con-
tinually all the time. Sudden unpredictable change maintains constant
extreme pressure on employees working in the IT industry or ancillary
service sectors.

They face a permanent risk of de-skilling or losing knowledge as com-

puter infrastructure standardises, as more and more businesses move to
the cloud and as the dominant programming language shifts from Cobol
to Java or C++. Shocks in the working environment potentially affecting
career development are greater in the IT sector than elsewhere. (Deprez
2014, 10)

These rationalisation techniques no longer relate to the organisation of

work but more to a rationalised management of competencies (knowl-
edge management), revolving around new certifications that employees
must continually (and successfully) earn. Certification may be voluntary
but it is also highly recommended. Published online, everybody knows
who has had how much success in doing what.
Very different from the traditional routes to work rationalisation, the
new procedures are causing just as much stress and anxiety. Workers
who do not progress along the certification trajectory feel insecure and
suffer competition from fellow employees.
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
133

“If something is wrong in the IT business, it is long-term commitment.

Those who do not evolve constantly and improve their qualifications all
by themselves run a risk of being left behind by companies that make
no long-term commitment to them, causing job losses as the employ-
er’s needs change” (ibid., 12). The same author goes on to say that
around 10% of Belgian IT employees lose their job every year because
they no longer meet expected standards. “It appears that management
has chosen not to maintain IT workers in a coercive environment dom-
inated by fear or strength but simply to preserve a state of uncertainty”.
(ibid., 14)

Managing complex situations (in IT or other sectors characterised by

sudden change) requires a break with task rationalisation such as it is
still being practiced in sectors characterised by long or medium-term
cycles or else (for the automobile, aviation, and energy sectors, etc.) that
rely on a management by projects organisation. This break includes a
rationalised management of competencies and knowledge, generally sig-
nifying that employment becomes increasingly flexible, a trend legiti-
mised by senior corporate executives honing in on employees’ (and
sometimes contractors’) lack of adaptability.
The oxymoron that is the construct of constrained involvement stems
from a dialectical approach to the constraints imposed by a manage-
ment by projects organisation or through knowledge management,
on one hand, and to the spaces if autonomy that the same organisa-
tions and practices accord engineers and technicians, on the other.
Where meta-rules restrict and mould autonomy, this tends to be
because these rules have organised things thusly. If today more than
yesterday there seem to be numerous ways to meet an objective (or to
order requisite tasks), the magnitude of possibilities still appears quite
narrow compared to the scope of obligations generated by meta-rules.
Lucie Goussard (2011, 149), for instance, has proposed the concept of
self-prescription to characterise the process whereby engineers and tech-
nicians organise their own work and above all internalise the norms
embedded in meta-rules governing the conditions under which tasks
are executed, without forgetting the kinds of behaviour enabling such
actions.
134   J.-P. Durand

The New Worker Facing Dislocations in Design Work

To bridge the gap between their actual professional conditions and the
promises they were made about the creativity they are supposed to man-
ifest through their design activities, engineers and technicians must have
sufficient psychological strength to avoid their emotions getting cut of
control. All of the efforts made by new types of workers, such as those
described in the book’s second chapter, consist of accepting this dis-
rupture’s reflection in their own personalities and constructing (or re-
constructing) themselves to cope with the circumstances.
New types of workers’ confrontation with reality is particularly dif-
ficult because they struggle to talk about it. They do not see a weaker
trade union as the answer, especially given the new work organisation’s
reputation for offering responses to all the questions that people might
ask, including that of its ‘participative’ virtues. On the other hand, the
dual hierarchical system in which they operate (having to report along
both project and professional lines) de-personalises them, specifically
where time management and objectives are at stake. Weaker employees
tend to resent managers due to the flaw or divide between the prom-
ises of autonomy they have been made and the reality of the deadlines
that they must meet—the purpose being to give them a sense of guilt
and get them to assume responsibility for the impossibility of producing
quality work on time. There are numerous stories of employees help-
ing to define their objectives without considering that these have been
forced upon them by other persons offering them insufficient resources
or time. The fact that management refuses to listen to these complaints
or runs away from them does not really change much for the people
affected, who find themselves face-to-face with the flaws they carry
within themselves.
What remains is the presence of peers and the collective to which the
person belongs and where they can express themselves, generally quite
informally. In the past, responses of this nature could often be provided
by the affinities-based collectivities found inside of companies. However
the situation is very different today. The old collectives have progres-
sively fallen apart, either due to employees’ growing mobility or because
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
135

management prefer constructing work groups themselves instead of

accepting the ones employees have put together. With the advent of
management by projects organisations, this phenomenon has worsened
since today’s engineers and technicians are as much a part of their orig-
inal collectives as of the projects in which they are participating. Note
that the work groups in question are variable in composition and dura-
tion. As explained by one automotive industry technician,

I work on a number of projects and deal with different project managers,

department heads and project section leaders. Every time you move from
one project to another you change your reporting lines and teammates.
You find yourself in the middle of colleagues who you do not even know
and it can be pretty destabilising. Even worse is how hard it is coming up
with a consensus opinion before our weekly meetings. I have been work-
ing with certain people for ten years but when the new organisation came
out we were all having to handle new indicators that none of us agreed
with. Nowadays if you ask a colleague what they think about things you
won’t get answer. They’ll look at you suspiciously like they don’t know
you and are wondering if you’re a spy sent up by senior management to
report on anything they say. There is a lot of distrust today. Nobody is
sure of their neighbor anymore and there certainly isn’t any unity. (quoted
by Goussard 2011, 434)

Multidisciplinary project groups comprised of diverse professions char-

acterised by different work rationales (or even by accumulated enmity)
adds to this instability and disaggregation of group life.
In short, the collective nature of work has started to fade and even
disappear, meaning that it has become increasingly individualistic. Yet
work continues to be described in collective terms, especially by man-
agers or consultants who clearly see the usefulness of putting together
work groups based on criteria that they themselves have specified but
which increasingly appear tantamount to an assembly or juxtaposi-
tion of atomised elements rather than a work collective. Thanks to
groupware, employees who have nothing in common (except for their
technical knowledge) and who do not know one another end up col-
laborating on projects. This attests to the strength of the current
136   J.-P. Durand

technical-organisational system, comprised of a management by pro-

jects organisation crystallised into an integrated management package or
groupware that is able to fragment, segment and divide up designers’
intellectual work so that people who do not know one another can work
together. This both negates the spirit of cooperation and preserves the
principle of cooperation6 in the words of Marx who demonstrated the
powerful effectiveness of this approach while emphasizing that coopera-
tion effects of this sort never benefit employees seeing as they are imple-
mented by capitalists and no one else.
Having ICT govern the collective nature of design work has caused
major transformations due to increasingly formalised, utilitarian, instru-
mentalised and machine-based communications between individuals.
People wander less between their workstations, with conversations dur-
ing meetings also becoming increasingly standardised. All the civility
(or more broadly, sociability) that used to surround workers’ technical
interactions has been eliminated and replaced by cold inter-machine
communications. The lubricants that used to envelop technical
exchanges are now being depicted as social and human gangue and are
deemed to waste time since nothing of direct value is being produced.
Groupware or software accompanying management by projects organ-
isations are tools used to create a controlled convergence between indi-
vidual activities ordering controlled cooperation.
Like all collaborative work (Durand 2009), management by pro-
jects organisations tend to be presented as network organisations, inti-
mating that they also involve a horizontal structuring of work. Yet any
employee caught up in these sorts of networks will necessarily have
his/her work appropriated by its finality. In other words, all networks,
even where they have been computerised and softened by the flatness
of their implementation, feature a head who defines the work to be
done by group participants. It is not because everyone possesses a lateral
vision of their colleagues’ work that the network constitutes a horizon-
tal entity. Quite the contrary, companies use networks to play a subtle
game where they give actors an illusion of horizontality in a way that

6See chapter on cooperation in Das Kapital (1948, Book 1, Volume 2, pp. 19–25).
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
137

benefits the network organiser, who can vary in management terms

from batch manager to project leader.
This kind of horizontality is particularly illusory since the very
essence of a network is to organise a unilateral visibility of work.
Whereas project coordinators or leads are able to get a detailed overview
of everything that happens, operatives cannot do this. More specifically,
unilateral transparency also means publicising know-how that only ben-
efits project leaders who can then decide whether or not to disseminate
it widely. This is congruent with the principles of Taylorism, i.e. the
accumulation of knowledge by senior management alone.
Like other applications of flux tendu principles, management by pro-
jects organisations rely on peers’ collective discipline since all designers
remain connected through an invisible chain. Other persons’ neg-
ative assessments in case of delays or lack of quality can be extremely
harsh. Here, an individual’s lack of long-term effectiveness (compared
to a norm that has generally been constructed collectively) is no longer
publicised by the project leader or head but by work colleagues who are
supposed to express their anger at the mistake(s) that any one of their
colleagues makes. The first enemy of individual actors in these new
kinds of worker collectives is the new transparency that has been built
into a principle of management, as well as the exclusion of the weakest
and most vulnerable. It is no longer the hierarchical boss who decrees
this marginalisation but the collective itself. Moreover, the legitimacy of
such actions is harder to criticise since it can no longer be called arbi-
trary as would be the case were one person (the boss) making the call.
The collectivisation of power makes it even more powerful and abso-
lute. This is particularly troubling since it is the collective that banishes
the individual in question, breaking them down and proving in this way
that they were right to have their inadequacy criticised.
Criticism of how managers use their power to get collectives to treat
individuals in a certain way harks back to the management by projects
organisation that, in order to achieve expected outcomes, refuses to pre-
vent the kinds of tensions found in flux tendu systems and is willing to
sacrifice the weakest link to ensure that the system survives. Because
controls are internalised here in the group or in the collaborative col-
lective, they become practically invisible and are internalised by all
138   J.-P. Durand

members. Everyone’s subjectivity is manipulated to serve the interests

of the group as a whole without any resistance being possible. It is then
aligned to objectives that no one has chosen but which are portrayed as
self-evident or ‘natural’.
It is a condition of new flawed humans that they have no choice but
to accept and live this disrupture between their own engagement in and
involvement at work, which does, however, provide a modicum of satis-
faction, and the flux tendu constraints inherent to management by pro-
jects organisations. In particular, the time pressures associated with this
system lead far too often to outcomes that are imperfect because incom-
plete. It is this acceptance (characterised here as a flaw traversing the
subjectivity of the designers at the heart of the intellectual work ration-
alisation process) that is made possible because management by projects
organisations

contain coercive properties capable of individualising and suffocating any

and all criticism. In this way, the productive system is not only coercive
insofar as it specifies the standards and rules that must be respected, but
also because it takes away employees’ ability to contest things. (Goussard
2011, 459)

As for the difficulty or even impossibility of creating a collective voice

(Hirschman 1970), this is because designers are muzzled by the coer-
cion dominating both their actions and the kinds of immediate activity
found in management by projects organisations.
Engineers and technicians will be affected individually and on a daily
basis by a multitude of unforeseeable circumstances making it difficult
for them to face up to the obligations forced upon them by flux tendu.
Yet they must fulfill these obligations to avoid penalising colleagues
downstream. The talk here is of a degraded mode of activity:

We are asked to plan things but remember that our work has often been
degraded. The situation today is one where the unpredictable is a normal
hence systematic aspect of work in the engineering departments responsi-
ble for dealing with unplanned actions, which are often passed back to us
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
139

to resolve due to their urgency. People are always asking us to make some-
thing a priority. (aeronautics project pilot engineer, quoted by Petit 2013)

In short, people’s daily work routines are being overwhelmed by recur-

ring unpredictable and random events that both upset operational
patterns by intensifying time constraints (since everyone must execute
more operations per unit of time) and also raise new questions or cre-
ate new problems, sparking a sense of curiosity that quickly translates
into passion for the task being accomplished. This is a good illustration
of how new types of flawed workers are dislocated between two abso-
lutes: enthusiasm for work that is full of uncertainty; and insufficient
resources (and increasingly stringent constraints) making it difficult to
reach whatever objectives have been set. The new workers are forced to
accommodate this fragmentation of goals and absolutes. It is a disloca-
tion that they must constantly juggle if they are to survive.
As regards the categorisation delineated in this book’s second chap-
ter, most individuals-subjects can live with and accept this dislocation
at work because their emotional and psychological trajectory has struc-
tured them to possess sufficient strength and power to develop resources
enabling them to overcome contradictory injunctions. Having said that,
those who suffered narcissistic wounds in childhood and were therefore
fragilised (even if their behaviour appeared under certain conditions to
be as “strong” as everyone else) suffer from this situation and struggle to
cope with the conditions governing work in a management by projects
organisation. Since they can no longer hope for any collective and/or
union remedies, except in very few companies under very particular cir-
cumstances, the only way out (A. Hirschman) is via forms of individual
pathology.7

7Other ways out of this predicament are more feasible, like employees adopting a withdrawal
stance at work (something that management tends to criticise in the name of productivism) or
behaving like hermits or refusing to cooperate—all attitudes that meet with social opprobrium.
See Chapter 5 for accepted new forms of marginality at work, specifically with respect to the
employment of highly educated young persons.
140   J.-P. Durand

I tried to muddle through, talking with my bosses about things like dead-
lines. I did some training and changed stations but it was always the same
thing. When you first change you believe in it and work hard but then
things go bad because you quickly realise you’ve been burnt forever sim-
ply because you once told people that things weren’t perfect. And then
you realise you’re not being judged on how well you work but on your
reactions and ability to get stuck in, to keep ticking over. Of course, if you
do that, they pay well. (automotive technician, quoted by Goussard 2011)

After a period of time during which people withdraw into themselves or

lose their self-esteem, they often start suffering depression and respond
by taking anti-depressants before ending up on sick leave. All the com-
panies interviewed for the present book featured these exact cases char-
acterised by the same descent into hell. The fact that company health
and safety committees have become the most active staff representation
bodies in almost all the companies and public authorities interviewed
by her not only attests to the weakening of trade unions but above all
signifies that “work is not working” and that it requires, in the words of
many work psychologists, a cure.

The Normalisation of Research

and Development
Upstream of the design of products or services, there is another activ-
ity, R&D, manifesting similar tendencies with some relatively unex-
pected consequences. Engineer-researchers’ working conditions have
considerably deteriorated, despite most belonging to a professional cat-
egory that should normally have sufficient resources to ensure satisfac-
tory conditions. The question here is how increasingly complex research
(and especially the management of research) processes have transformed
researcher-engineers’ work, with one example being drawn from a large
European electrical energy generation company. The background to this
study is financial globalisation, mainly driven in the present instance by
the deregulation of energy production and distribution, as decided by
the European commission in Brussels.
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
141

For researcher-engineers or technicians, but also for managers (group

heads and above all project leaders8), the main problem at this level
relates to excessive workloads and the consequences thereof, to wit the
extension of working times, with people having to work more at home
in the evening or on weekends. The line of questioning applied here
relates to the sources or causes of the deterioration in working condi-
tions, even as the research objectives (meaning the visible and official
workload associated with this sort of effort) having scarcely evolved.
The thesis being developed here is that the complexity of work (here for
researcher-engineers in a situation characterised by a constant or only
slightly diminished workforce) increases people’s workload but can still
lead to greater satisfaction at work. In the present instance, it would
appear that the complexity of the research process is something that
engineers (and above all, senior R&D managers) are barely aware of. No
one has had much to say in this area, possibly because complexity has
led to a proliferation of invisible tasks that take up more and more of
the engineers’ time. The first step in analysing this is to look at how
research is being conducted in most scientific circles today. This will
be followed by analysis of changes in the management of R&D itself,
focusing as much on managers as on researcher-engineers.

Researcher-Engineers’ Complexified Workloads

By necessity and professional conscience, researchers are constantly

looking to build up their knowledge and improve performance as
regards their research object. In turn, this is likely to broaden their net-
works and encompass new disciplines capable of responding to ques-
tions on the margins of researchers’ initial focus. It also means working
with other researchers (or laboratoires) to help build up their own

8Project managers (who might run anything from two to seven projects, and sometimes even
more) and group leaders (managing between four and seven project managers) are all researcher-
engineers. Those who became group managers all opted for a “hierarchical path” that generally
offered greater financial opportunity. Project managers are not hierarchically superior to other
researcher-engineers.
142   J.-P. Durand

scientific knowledge. Scientific development is tantamount to scientific

deepening hence diversification, necessitating greater horizontal coop-
eration between researchers. Nowadays, networks of this sort tend to
grow online or during (often bilateral) meetings held at scientific con-
ferences. They are special relationships that generally take a while to
develop, requiring convergence around scientific paradigms and mutual
trust regarding the use of findings (i.e., researchers should not pub-
lish one another’s discoveries). All of which is time-consuming, albeit
with a temporality that is more technical than social in nature, as well
as more extensive and lengthier. Growing a network also means ensur-
ing that each participant is at the same level in terms of knowing what
other members know—with much of this work happening in a foreign
language.
What this means is that to achieve the kinds of scientific results that
senior managers in R&D divisions normally expect, there must be an
increased investment in time, as much in order to access partners’ pub-
lished (or still private) knowledge as to transmit one’s own knowledge to
someone else. All this is done remotely as part of a job with segmented
and fractured working hours, with researcher-engineers also being
required to deliver results by given dates on all the different projects in
which they are engaged.
The rise of ICT (including Internet and digital messaging) has
accompanied scientific research and transformed the conditions in
which it is conducted. Scientific findings’ dissemination has been
enhanced by the very large number of digitalised publications found
today. The lag between articles being published and read by researchers
worldwide has shortened considerably. Moreover, nowadays all research-
ers working in a given lab are in a position to develop knowledge
instantaneously regardless of where it is produced and without having
to wait for initial drafts or copies thereof. In certain disciplines, grey
market findings (i.e. ones publicised even before being sanctioned by a
prestigious review somewhere) can be found online, often with agree-
ment from the publishing review and in any event long before assessors
have formalised their evaluations. Digitalisation has accelerated publi-
cation rates, as has the increased number of reviews (itself reflecting the
digitalisation process). In turn, this forces researcher-engineers to read
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
143

more if they want to stay abreast of the latest discoveries (or simply
emerging trends) in their field of research. This accelerated production
rate also forces authors to speed up output if they want to remain visible
and be as widely referenced as possible.
The accelerated publication rate and proliferation of publications
means that researcher-engineers’ mental and intellectual limitations
have been reached (Waters 2008). This has sparked a second phenome-
non, namely increased specialisation, with the power and attractiveness
of any given research field being measured nowadays by the number
of individuals participating in it. Such a snowball effect makes it even
harder for anyone who wants to play a leading role. What then happens
is that approaches are made to the best researchers (meaning, according
to current standards, those who have published the most) to constitute
their own network. At the same time, these individuals are the hardest
to access since they are the most in demand. The cost of developing and
maintaining a high level network increases as participants rise in their
field. One paradox is that this necessary densification of time intensifies
exchanges between researchers (mainly by e-mail today, rarely by phone)
with conversations no longer pertaining to scientific content but to the
publications (and conferences) they must participate in. Hence the need
to read more and more e-mails to stay informed of research activities
and, more or less directly, their orientations.
The visibility of researcher-engineers and their groups (or even pro-
jects) therefore requires participation in (and organisation of ) scientific
events, whose numbers have continued to grow, as well as the drafting
of new communications that might one day be published as chapters in
books. Digital publications and conference organisations have become
veritable industries that are relatively profitable for editors and special-
ist agencies despite eating up enormous amounts of researchers’ time.
Project leaders or group managers in R&D divisions have two reasons
to be interested in this expanding phenomenon: to stay informed to
choose the best events where researcher-engineers in their field might
participate; and to monitor the quality of communications or proposed
publication to enhance the image of their own group.
On top of these transformations in research conditions reflecting the
advent of digitalisation, something that has increased time pressures on
144   J.-P. Durand

researcher-engineers, there have also been changes in the status in soci-

ety of science and technology. In turn, this has had a direct effect on,
for instance, electricity production. On one hand, the three professions
involved in this activity (hydraulic, traditional thermal and nuclear) are
worried about ‘natural degradation’ from which their facilities might
suffer, including the effects of erosion, seaweed, sedimentation or living
organisms that might interfere with facility operations. On the other
hand and in terms of electricity generation (much of which relies on
fossil fuels that cause pollution and create other risks), companies and
their R&D divisions face a host of demands from social, political and
economic interests worried about their activity’s effects on the environ-
ment. All of this is apt to give birth to social movements.
The different kinds of logic here are totally heterogeneous (and even
contradictory), something that tends to be of great concern to the
different internal and external parties ordering or funding a compa-
ny’s research programmes. In no particular order, the varieties of logic
requiring juggling in this case include the economy, the environment,
employee protections, market competition, European regulation often
without any application criteria, requiring the creation of new stand-
ards. All of these often contradictory demands for anticipation, preven-
tion or reparations hamper research-engineers’ activities by amplifying
the fields of research and forcing participants to broaden their areas of
competency. Researchers’ response tends to be the development of new
networks responding to these demands.

Changes in Management and Research Supervision

Over the past 20 years, the senior management of the company in

question has generally stopped providing direct funding to R&D pro-
grammes largely defined by researcher-engineers and by managers
in charge of electricity production or distribution. This latter group
had found itself transformed into a customer of the R&D division
despite only funding 50% of this activity. The clear meaning here is
that researcher-engineers and their managers were having to find extra
resources by participating in external and internal calls for tender where
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
145

they often had to compete with operators from outside of their own
company (private or public laboratories from both France and abroad).
Competition here related as much to knowledge and scientific know-
how as to a research project’s return costs. In other words, cost con-
cerns, which used to be of scant interest to R&D divisions, became
paramount. Globalised competition for the supply of electricity, and
above all the opening of the European space, as decreed by Brussels,
became a way of pressuring R&D divisions into lowering their research
costs. This profound transformation in the division’s status, and more
broadly, its research conditions, affected group heads as much as pro-
ject managers, who now had to gear their laboratories’ output towards
demands expressed by customers with the researcher-engineers them-
selves being asked to find funding so as to be able to continue studying
the topics that they wanted to develop.
More broadly, this example shows how from the bottom to the top of
today’s R&D divisions, everyone is being forced to maximise the value
of their work in order to pursue their research interests and continue to
exist. This means finding the appropriate funding,9 an activity that eats
up a great deal of time for group managers and project leaders forced to
find arguments convincing their internal funding sources (production
division) or external fund providers (France’s ANR Agence Nationale de
Recherche, European projects, national or international agencies, mate-
rials builders, etc.). It is the ability to negotiate that becomes their call-
ing card, meaning the ability to find capital and human resources. This
involves creating relationships of trust with correspondents and increas-
ing familiarity with customer needs; supplier or partners’ product offers;
lending conditions; and last but not least “their” engineers’ aptitude for
satisfying scientific demand and the R&D division’s objectives. All these
different kinds of knowledge and know-how are things that are not
taught yet have come to constitute an integral part of scientific research.

9Otherwise there is a major risk for researcher-engineers that the department to which they belong

or the project they are working on will disappear due to a lack of funding. Thematic reconversions
may take a while to materialise (one to two years) but they traumatise the researcher-engineers
affected. Changes of this kind appeared to be a major cause of malaise at work in the R&D divi-
sion in question here.
146   J.-P. Durand

Given the complex organisation of this company comprising the

present case study, which had opted, it is also worth noting, for a matrix
solution, project heads had to formulate and present their projects in
at least four or five different ways. Once related to project launches
(every four years); one the (annual) Strategic Committee that decided
which projects to keep or reject; one was for the (annual) Technical
Committee that both oversaw implementation in light of customer
needs and monitored feasibility (depending on the needs allocated to
it); and one was for the (irregularly scheduled) Competency Review that
inventoried the competencies the laboratory was offering internal and
external customers. Lastly, the Production Environmental Committee
also assessed cross-department project costs for the three profes-
sions involved, meaning they also wanted sight of the initiatives being
undertaken.
Because of the different kinds of logic driving these funding, moni-
toring and project evaluation bodies, 30–50 page reports were regularly
being drafted, together with PowerPoint slides that usually had to vary
even if the contents remained the same. This is because the effectiveness
of the communications used to convince counterparts (above all fund
providers) was largely judged on whether the project was expressed in
terms matching the specifications provided. Every project manager was
therefore forced to formulate and reformulate the same contents using
different channels. Hence the possibly illusory request that notes be pre-
sented uniformly, ideally with a single document being used in all these
different instances. This clearly reveals the arbitrage between effective-
ness (the need to formulate one and the same project differently when
addressing different counterparts) and time management (especially
where group work is involved).
Project managers’ supervisory responsibilities went even further than
this. While remaining clearly responsible for ensuring the simultaneous
execution of all of the projects they ran, by ensuring that each research-
er-engineer met all of the milestones set, they also had to avoid any
one project team suffering in case a particular researcher failed to meet
his/her intermediary deadlines. This shunted time pressure onto the
researcher-engineers, even though each was already involved in at least
five projects. One virtue of the matrix organisation is that it allowed
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
147

researchers to invest in several projects to avoid having to wait until the

end of project X’s phase Y before progressing. Crossing a matrix organ-
isation entailed application of flux tendu to research work and increased
fragilisation of the overall process, with a cost-cutting focus translated
into real intensification of research monitoring activities.
Research contracts are often sanctioned by deliverables that usually
entail reports offering solutions to more or less concrete problems; or
else proposals for practical outcomes or theoretical models capable of
addressing more generic questions. These deliverables produced by each
researcher-engineer individually and as part of each project segment are
assessed by the project leader before s/he leaves the team. What then
happens is that the group leader reads a summary note (of between 8
and 20 pages) before validating the work. It frequently occurs that one
or the other of these participants will be asked to re-read a scientific
article derived from the research itself, since researcher-engineers con-
sider it very important to retain international research connections, even
if the scientific publications in question are marginal to their evalua-
tions and especially to their advancement.
Lastly, expenditures (investments, operations and missions, including
on-site) are also subjected to rigorous authorisation and monitoring pro-
cesses. Budgetary channels parallel to research activities require healthy
relationships with the administrators in charge. Research resource
management takes up researchers’ time with highly time-consuming
tasks that add no value in terms of the actual research itself. Such tasks
include reading and answering e-mails enabling or negotiating the con-
ditions for these expenditures (concrete administration). Because project
managers, or group or department managers, lack a sufficient number
of assistants, they are having to devote much of their time to tasks that
take away from their research activity, despite this being their core func-
tion. Moreover, these invisible tasks that they fulfil often go unnoticed
by senior management or fellow researcher-engineers, encroaching on
their normal agenda. Not only are they having to extend their work-
ing day or week but their minds are increasingly preoccupied with items
that have little to do with the real meaning of their function.
The only way to fully appreciate the intensity of these relationships
is to remember that they are being deployed simultaneously. Where
148   J.-P. Durand

project funding and reporting actions are linear and sequential, with
each researcher-engineer juggling at least two or three items at once, a
far greater number of relationships will be necessary given all the differ-
ent partners and counterparts involved. Furthermore, where each pro-
ject is at a different stage of advancement, each of these relationships
and counterparts will necessarily differ in tenor. Having to respond to
partners’ requests or questions also affects researcher-engineers’ work,
since the replies must be as soon as possible. Any delay could cause part-
ners to take their own time answering whatever questions they receive
in the future, not by “calculation” but because the perception of tardi-
ness tend to be sanctioned by a deterioration in cooperation, leading to
further delays in subsequent replies. In short, today’s real-time (or more
precisely, instantaneous) culture requires everyone to reply within a day,
or that evening from home or even hotel when the researcher is out in
the field or attending a conference.
All in all, there is a great need for a dynamic reading of real work-
loads, replacing static analysis that only focuses on research activities’
sequential dimension. Such dynamic analysis would look at the increas-
ing number of relationships that stakeholders entertain and the diver-
sity thereof. This might affect, for instance, project leaders who lack any
hierarchical function or group heads operating as next-level managers.
Beyond a detailed monitoring of scientific output and the management
of budgetary resources, formulation of budgets, cooperative agree-
ments, spending authorisations, including supervising researcher-engi-
neers, is a major part of these persons’ function, even if they can rely
on human resource advisors to discuss issues like career development,
malaise at work, etc. Group heads can cooperate with project managers
to recruit researcher-engineers, track their careers and use their annual
personal appraisals to help them develop into experts and senior prac-
titioners. For those who do not want relationships solely based on hier-
archy or authority, because they know that intellectual professions are
less likely to accept such arrangements, people management takes a
great deal of time, whether this involves more or less informal meetings
or intra-individual relationships where they have to explain things and
convince and induce colleagues to adopt the viewpoints that manage-
ment desires, and this, without exerting any coercion. The fact that so
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
149

many paths and arguments are being used to achieve these goals show
to what extent they are a concern for managers, who will take advan-
tage of any opportunity they find to ensure that all of a group’s projects
make progress. This must also be done in a manner that is coherent for
each researcher-engineer and senior manager. Things that might appear
as a functional strength, like the diverse nature of the different inter-
ests and philosophies being pursued, all of which injects great mean-
ing into managers’ work, can turn against them if this means managing
too many researcher-engineers. The maximum feasible number seems to
be around 20 persons, although some research groups have as many as
40. Individuals’ intellectual capacities run up against their limits when
the number of items requiring management exceeds a certain level and
relationships that must be entertained for management reasons. This
can quickly turn into social-psychic disorders when tasks relating to
the functions that people occupy cannot be completed within speci-
fied delays, culminating in managers spending up to 10 hours of daily
contact with researcher-engineers, ultimately totalling 60–70 hours of
actual work per week. It may be the invisible nature of the mismatch
between time constraints and the actual volume of work characterising
these functions that makes things particularly unacceptable for man-
agers suffering from this problem. The invisible, or possibly inadmis-
sible, nature of the mismatch raises questions about everyone’s ability
to organise time and work to meet their objectives. In turn, the peo-
ple affected can easily degrade, in appearance at least, from a situation
defined by invisible inadequacy to an atmosphere of full-blown doubt
replete with a loss of self-confidence.

The Intensification and Extension of Increasingly

Invisible Work

Researcher-engineers’ tasks can be organised into six main catego-

ries whose volumes depend on the status attributed to the various
interested parties (researchers, project leaders and group heads). Here
they are ordered by the decreasing degree of required intellectual
concentration:
150   J.-P. Durand

– Drafting and reading articles, research reports;

– Drafting and reading progress papers or summative reports
(reporting);
– Attending research conferences and seminars;
– Formal and informal scientific or organisational work meetings, both
internally and externally10;
– Fieldwork;
– E-mail (or telephone) exchanges with a wide range of correspon-
dants, irrespective of their scientific or organisational hierarchy (with
organisational interactions accounting for more or less two-thirds of
the sum total).

Reading and writing activities, articles, relationships, e-mails, etc., can

occur during flexible timeslots whereas the three other types of activi-
ties are constrained in terms of when they might happen. One example
here is fieldwork where it is impossible to miss a meeting that has been
organised. There is a tendency to increase the amount of time spent at
meetings or in conversation, mainly on e-mail. One corollary if research
activities or findings cannot decrease is a slow rise in the actual time
spent at work. The amount of time at the office has remained more or
less constant but people are spending more time working at home (in
the evening, on weekends, during off-days, when on holiday), mainly to
finish relatively flexible “delivery” tasks life reading and drafting articles
and notes, or processing the e-mails that arrived when the recipient was
out of the office.
Having to read and respond to, or forward, 50–100 e-mails daily,
depending on one’s functions, takes up an enormous part of the day.
Project managers and group heads often talk about how hard if not
impossible it is for them to have a day free at the office for reading or
writing. They are always being bothered by unscheduled and/or urgent

10Setting meetings (even using doodle) is a real problem, with people often juggling four or five

doodles simultaneously. Once the first finishes, the others may have to be changed if they are
not updated in real-time. All of these changes will have a cascade effect, interfering with people’s
schedules and making them lose a lot of time sharing information about meetings and moving
them around.
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
151

tasks or meetings, or massive e-mails, limiting how much time they

have to read or write. E-mails also cover a wide variety of topics, rang-
ing from materials management to research strategies, the organisation
of conferences or seminars, decisions affecting other persons (such as
which experts might be good at which conferences), monitoring work
done by researchers, daily organisational questions, etc. Mental agility
tends to be the main quality required for research managers who make
micro-decisions in all kinds of areas and must be adroit enough to
ensure that none comes back to haunt them one day.
From an organisational perspective, e-mails are a topic in and of
themselves. Because they do not require that both counterparts be pres-
ent at the same time, unlike telephones or videoconferences, they can be
processed at any time of the day and anywhere. They can also be inter-
rupted at any moment and continued subsequently, once again, unlike
the phone. As such, e-mails are like a series of moments at work that
can each be shortened to as little as one or two minutes and happen
at any point in time during the workday. This is redolent of the mira-
cle solutions that Ford probably dreamt about when seeking, through
his fragmentation of tasks, ways of overcoming the porosity of working
times. The idea here is no longer how to occupy workers’ work time
as fully as possible, especially the basic problem of quantifying workers’
gestures. Instead, e-mailing, and the Internet links often associated with
them, seem a better tool for rationalising work done by different catego-
ries of intellectual employees, especially since the meaning they give to
work is often conveyed by, or contained within, the e-mail itself.
With all these e-mails requiring a response and in light of all the dif-
ferent tasks that people carry out in their offices or in nearby corridors
or in colleagues’ offices, there is no doubt that professional research
has become a very fragmented, far-reaching and dispersed business
(Datchary 2012). Project managers and group heads use the expression
‘zapping’ to describe their jobs, not only in relation to e-mails but more
broadly when talking about how they divide their time between the dif-
ferent issues they face. It may be this fragmentation of time and disper-
sion, in the statistical sense of the term, that is the most invisible aspect
here, meaning the one that contributes the most, for those who feel it,
to a sense of malaise at work.
152   J.-P. Durand

Thesis on people and the increasingly diverse origins, resulting from

the aforementioned complexity of research processes, means that e-mail-
ing in particular and the Internet in general have a greater effect than
ever on researcher-engineers’ work due to their need to respond in real-
time to whatever questions are asked. Not only must they cope with
huge volumes of demands but they are expected to do so instantane-
ously (Durand 1991, for example differentiates between immediacy
and instantaneousness). This alters working conditions by fragmenting
working times. The instantaneousness of responses may reflect the fact
that the messages being exchanged transit through a tool that eliminates
any sense of duration and turns things into a “categorical imperative”.
Machines transform expectations of other persons’ responses into a
kind of moral obligation, as if they were right there. Whoever does not
respond quickly can be accused of laziness (think of Ford) and runs a
risk of being disrespected. There is also a phenomenon of e-mail addic-
tion, for example texting, whereby people become obsessed, expecting
to get a message and wanting to know their correspondents’ attitude on
a particular topic or new issue immediately. Desire is the foundation of
social relationships.
Assessing how much invisibilisation11 has occurred is not so inter-
esting per se but because this is something that the field of industrial
relations has tended to under-play. People know how much time is
expected for answering an e-mail but this is made invisible by a kind
of tacit masking or unspoken compromise. Everyone talks about it but
no one has looked into how the work associated with e-mails adds to
people’s actual time at work, possibly because e-mails, or at least some
of them, materialise during the interstices of the workday. It remains
that this invisible work increases work and the intensity of activity by
reducing the porosity of working times. Yet no one is resisting it. This is
because of the diffuse nature of a phenomenon that prevents a formali-
sation apt to crystallise discontent or spark new demands.

11Invisibilisation refers to the process whereby work tasks remain hidden due to lean manage-

ment. Examples include treatement of emails, preparing activities such as arranging transporta-
tion and housing, readings reports, following Masters or PhD students in the firm, and so on.
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
153

Basically, the rationalisation of intellectual work (research in the pres-

ent case) has occurred so slowly over the past 20–30 years that the daily
effects have gone more or less unnoticed. The nebulous or inconsistent
nature of such change, occurring incrementally without any sudden rev-
olution in ordinary work, has meant a slow increase in the volume of
work achieved without any major changes in overall objecives.
The consequences on the world of work have been threefold. Firstly,
the increasing complexity of research, the fissiparity of disciplines or
objects and the proliferation of partners have led to a fragmentation
and dispersion of tasks (due to unprecedented increase in the number
and variety of partners) often requiring greater intellectual concentra-
tion. Secondly, e-mail has served as an important function in both the
intensification and the extensification of working time. It has reduced
the porosity in the working day while also extended it. The consequence
has to increase overall workloads. Finally, time pressures associated
with research objectives mean that researcher-engineers in general, and
project managers and group heads in particular, often work at home
to finish their e-mails or to read and write articles or research notes.
These activities have a different effect on temporarily timing than the
fragmented temporality found in the office and it can be difficult to
concentrate intellectually in an open environment. We can take as an
example of this office environments occupied by several people plagued
by constant disturbances preventing authors from engaging in necessary
reading or writing.
This increased drain on researchers’ mental faculties during office
hours, together with the extension in working times, mean that many
researcher-engineers, but above all project managers and group heads,
are now suffering from social-psychic disorders when trying to sleep at
night. These can affect family relations at some point in their profes-
sional trajectories. To reverse this deterioration in working conditions,
one priority must be the recognition of certain activities that used to
seem peripheral but have become central to the profession today.
Compromises relating to the current invisibility of these research sup-
port or management tasks, where people’s real workload goes unrec-
ognised, meaning they are still working during their leisure time, is
unsustainable. Such compromises are too precarious for there not to be
154   J.-P. Durand

an attempt today to rethink and increase the visibility of activities that

are still considered peripheral.
***
One real paradox at this level is the excessive rationalisation of intel-
lectual work in a bid to increase the efficiency thereof while lowering
engineering or R&D costs at a time where these very same engineers are
being paid between €4000 and €10,000 a month to do secretarial work
for at least one-quarter of their working hours. This is either a bad strat-
egy, an error of human resource management or else a Machiavellian
calculation intended to make people work longer.
From a strictly economic point of view highlighting the way in which
a workforce is valued, questions might be asked about the competitive
advantage for a company of getting engineers to execute secretarial tasks
or very basic accounting. Clearly, it is difficult to determine the border
between research in the strict sense of the term and managerial support
for research. The same applies to the appropriate division of labour with
or without the presence of a research assistant. It would be wrong, how-
ever, were this dilemma to hide questions about the over-remuneration
of certain activities where engineers produce no real value-added.
Still from an economic perspective, the desire to cut costs, in the
present instance, labour costs, at a time when research conditions are
becoming more complex and more work is needed to stay in touch
international competition, creates a risk of greater inefficiency. There
must be a point of no return (like the breakeven point used to assess a
factory’s productive facilities) where cutting labour costs is counterpro-
ductive. Similarly, there must also be new inefficiencies that are worth
analysing when tasks that are invisible because they are considered
minor, such as research support, take up the time of staff members who
are highly remunerated but now find their research potential limited.
The ensuing social-psychic disorders are nothing more than indicators
of even more radical risks that have been taken.
The present chapter has shown how one and the same trend trans-
formed the work carried out by workers in the logistics industry
(or automotive sector: see Durand and Hatzfeld 2003) including aer-
onautic engineers and R&D researcher-engineers. The intensity of
 4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work    
155

the effects of this work rationalisation trend has varied depending on

workers’ activities. But in all these cases, new forms of dispossessing the
contents and meaning of employees’ work are being witnessed. This no
longer only happens when work escapes their control, as seen in the ele-
mentary definition of alienation in capitalist production relationships. It
increasingly refers to the way in which tasks and work for which every-
one is responsible are being controlled and executed. Indeed, this may
well be a new trend towards the de-subjectivation of people at work
given the mobilisation of subjectivities via a framework comprised of
increasingly stringent norms, as exemplified by new time management
norms.
The generalisation of flux tendu and obsessive reduction of costs has
re-organised companies by turning urgency into a standard manage-
ment method. This is as true in logistics as it is in engineering or R&D,
where globalised competition for new product marketing has instru-
mentalised these functions into a new direct human resource manage-
ment tool. The associated imperatives may create a few new spaces of
autonomy that management doctrine is happy to highlight, particularly
where engineers are involved, but the reality of daily work is at odds
with these aspirations. The management of design subcontractors by
prime contractors’ engineers, in the aeronautics or automobile indus-
tries, and the search for funding in the R&D sector (here in the energy
sector but potentially involving all University research) constitute new
functions that add little value yet burden engineers and technicians’ tra-
ditional tasks.
The present chapter has presented a detailed analysis of work processes
highlighting the disruptures between employee expectations and the real
nature of their activities. Faced with this dislocation, several employee
interviews have shown how those who possess the weakest psychic
resources are on the verge of mental breakdown or have already experi-
enced one. To escape this, the new workers must constantly find ways of
keeping their heads above water by reshaping their immediate relation-
ships sot they can overcome their narcissistic flaw and continue to work.
All of this is also happening in what some refer to as the service soci-
ety, albeit with specificities that tend to be a little better at hiding the
reality of issues. The next chapters will focus on this phenomenon.
156   J.-P. Durand

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 5
The New Worker in Service Activities

Over the course of the twentieth century, service activities grew in

many countries from one-third of GDP to more than three-quarters.
The ever-deepening international division of labour also caused massive
industrial offshoring, with factory jobs leaving the world’s older indus-
trialised countries for new emerging markets. The fact that at the end of
the century both trends were playing out simultaneously in the Global
North encouraged the tropism of populations in this part of the world
toward viewing the service sector as a lifeboat for their otherwise failing
economies.
There are at least two weaknesses in this line of reasoning, how-
ever. Firstly, the ‘explosion in services’ was in fact a relative phenom-
enon since calculations in this area actually include a large percentage
of secondary activities where workers are in direct contact with physical
materials, meaning that many people who used to be classified as indus-
trial workers are still employed in this sector, albeit often in new kinds
of jobs. These new jobs include fast food, mass retail, logistics, public
or private infrastructure maintenance, amongst others. Above all, ser-
vice activities in the Global North can only be conceptualised through

© The Author(s) 2019 159

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_5
160   J.-P. Durand

physical manifestations (cars, airplanes, railway, healthcare, energy,

research labs, reflecting the robustness, innovation and quality levels of
the industries in which these activities are rooted (Colletis 2012). Not
only does the infrastructure and instrumentation that service activities
require need to be manufactured but they must also be maintained, a
fundamentally industrial activity employing huge numbers of workers,
technicians and engineers.
In reality, industrial and service activities are becoming increasingly
hybridised. This should not disguise the underlying industrial real-
ity, characterised by weaker competitiveness resulting from a shortage
of productive investment in countries like France, without mentioning
the social and fiscal dumping that many of the world’s emerging econ-
omies practice. Indeed, it might be worth questioning the very concept
of ‘industrialised services’, which conflates this very real hybridisation
with the service sector’s importing of ‘efficient’ industrial management
methods, which is nothing more than rationalisation largely based on
Taylorian division of labour principles and an intensive introduction of
flux tendu and lean management logic.
The present chapter’s main goal is to define service activities by dif-
ferentiating them, at a basic level, from industrial activities. Producing
and selling a physical good does not entail the same competencies as
using it or more broadly as entering a service relationship. This justifies
analysis of the specific means used to implement lean production man-
agement solutions. Questions at this level revolve around how these
changes affect the organisation of work, development of competen-
cies and perception of work in the service sector, for example, whether
or not new kinds of manufacturing methods are being applied here
to create new types of workers, how far the rationalisation of services
can go, after accounting for workers’ ordinary resistance or adaptation
strategies, rooted in the very nature of services, the origins of recent
efforts to systematise the work that users and consumers do now-
adays and the political and economic significance of this, and finally
how this relates to the ongoing deterioration in service quality, some-
thing that new types of workers encounter through their consumption
activities.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
161

Revisiting Theoretical Approaches

to the Service Sector
The present chapter focuses on the transformation of work in the service
sector. It does not seek to define services exhaustively, since, among oth-
ers reasons there exists already a long list of publications by economists
and management specialists comparing developments over the past cen-
tury in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, based on the percent-
age that each accounts for in a country’s GDP or employment statistics.
The main difficulty here is determining the scope of analysis, especially
because sector activities are often counted in some other sector, if indeed
the company or public administration engaging in such activities is cate-
gorised elsewhere. In Sweden, the issue has been resolved quite originally
by creating corporate medarbetar (Durand 1994, 34–35) who are neither
industrial workers nor white-collar employees but positioned between
the two insofar as they engage in manual labour like industrial workers
but also manage functions like procurement or quality.
To ascertain what work means in the service sector, it is better to
identify the main factors influencing different work situations, in addi-
tion of course, to analysing the kinds of qualifications that are used to
rank workers. One seminal vision of the service economy (Singlemann
1978) distinguishes four main categories of service activities:

– Distribution, including transportation, communications and trade;

– Services to intermediary producers (so-called proservices) and to
companies (accounting, IT, engineering, etc.), banking, insurance,
premises management;
– Social services: healthcare, education, adult social care, public
services;
– Services to persons, including domestic help, hotels, catering, main-
tenance of private assets, leisure, etc.

This categorisation provides information on the types of services

expected in each of these sub-sectors. In reality, work is highly depend-
ent on another factor, namely the number of users or customers and
162   J.-P. Durand

their nature. A mass tertiary service, such as banking or insurance, is

different from a customised service offered by an independent worker
and/or company employee. Similarly, it may be useful to differentiate
working in a small hotel as opposed to a large holiday resort, or in a cor-
don bleu restaurant versus a fast food joint. Hence the need to enrich
Singlemann’s clear but somewhat stylised categorisation by distinguish-
ing between more or less anonymous mass services, even ones that go to
the effort of profiling customers, and singular services whose employees
must develop responses adapted to particular circumstances, including
by trying to rationalise, and even standardise, responses in a way that
reduces production costs. This might entail personal services, dry clean-
ing, hairdresser, helping disabled persons and such like or even business
services (bank loans, telecoms contracts, freight insurance, professional
training programmes). One crucial aspect here is defining who the ser-
vice targets, irrespective of the substance of the work that must be done
to provide the service. Observers tend to focus on personal services
because as beneficiaries themselves they are familiar with this activity.
Statistics show another reality, however, with business services having
risen over the past 40 years by a factor of three in the United State, for
example, to the point of accounting today for more than one-quarter of
all employees in the country’s service sector.
Mass or singular services in any given sector can also target both
private individuals and businesses. Examples include banking, insur-
ance, property and even healthcare. In these sectors, mass services tend
to be offered to the general public and more personalised services to
companies. Paradoxically, personal services have become increasingly
commoditised, as exemplified nowadays in hospitals (Gheorghiu and
Moatty 2013) and retirement homes. This justifies combining in one
and the same sector of activity the social and personal services found in
Singlemann’s model, given the increasing merging of the two, at least
in Europe and France, where things are somewhat different than in the
USA. Hence the table below, which offers a typology of services based
on sector activity, crossed with the mass or singular nature of the service
and the type of tasks that workers carry out in each category. Business
services, somewhat ubiquitous, are in bold (Table 5.1).
This typology should be checked against a third approach that
is less descriptive (but more analytical) and which looks at services’
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
163

Table 5.1 New classification of services

Types of services
Mass services Singular services
Distribution, —Messaging, private —Freight transport,
communi- courier services messaging (corporate)
cations —Personal transportation —Wholesale trade,
(train, airplane, bus, import/export
underground) —Telecoms, telematics,
—Mass retail online services, com-
Telephone, media, pany intranets
video games, advertis-
ing, Internet,
—Waste management
(household and
industrial)
Banking, —Private banking —Investment banking
insurance, —Personal asset —Corporate property
Sectors of activity

property, insurance insurance, business

business —Industrial maintenance transportation
services —Outsourced services: IT, —Corporate property
logistics, accounting… —Estate agents, notary
publics
Social and —Healthcare: hospitals, —Doctors, chemists,
personal retirement homes disability care
services —Education: primary, —Health at work, indus-
secondary, higher trial accidents
—Retirement planning —Adult education
—National or local —Public administration
authorities of corporate accounts
—Fast food, corporate (tax, subsidies)
catering services, —Top-of-the-range res-
leisure activities taurants and hotels
—Tour operators, holiday —Maintenance of cars,
resorts other household
assets
—Dry cleaning, hair-
dressing, etc.

Source Author and Singlemann (1978)

commercial nature. There may be a consensus that commercial services

produce value (called surplus value by Marxists) but questions remain
as to whether the same applies to non-commercial services. Classical
economics consider that the latter—often broadly related to state pro-
visions—are funded by a levy on commercial activities, in contrast to
164   J.-P. Durand

Marxist orthodoxy that views the remuneration of workers engaged in

non-commercial services as a transfer of the surplus value generated
through the sum total of all commercial production. Other Marxist
authors view employees in non-commercial sectors as parties producing
value but not surplus value (a debate worth having on another occa-
sion). The idea here is that “work might not be productive in capital
terms yet generate output, value and new income” (Harribey 2013,
369). The argument mainly revolves around the fact that a dramatic
decrease in the number of blue-collar workers producing surplus value
in the world’s older industrialised nations has not prevented the con-
tinuation and even acceleration of non-commercial services provided by
the state or the third sector. The idea of capitalist surplus value spill-
ing over from so-called productive sectors is undermined by the unequal
volume of capital required for non-commercial service activities. At the
same time and as analysed below, employees operating in non-commer-
cial service activities often suffer as much pressure as their commercial
service counterparts, irrespective of the different forms such pressures
might take (see Lapavitsas 2013).

Simplified Definition of Service Activities

Intuitively, services differ from industry insofar as they do not involve

the production of tangible goods. It remains that the range of activities
involved justifying the use of the plural form makes it hard to define
services. From barbershops to estate agents, from supermarket manage-
ment to automotive procurement, most services have little in common
with one another, asides from the fact that they are all intangible. Hence
the decision to use a definition formulated by Jean Gadrey, who tried to
unify all these activities around a common principle, namely that,

A service activity is an operation seeking a step change from a reality C,

owned or used by consumers (customers or users) B, with service provider
A responding to demands from B and often communicating with them
but without producing a physical good that might circulate in the econ-
omy independently of support provided by C. (Gadrey 1992)
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
165

The strength of this definition is that it highlights the materiality1 of

service activities that transform reality C, merged here with the bene-
ficiaries of this reality, that is to say the parties deriving advantages in
terms of their body, subconscious or soul. It also conflates this reality
with the things that belong to beneficiaries such as the places where
they live, their means of transportation, the places where they work
or the goods they own. The idea here is that for any commercial or
non-commercial exchange to occur, service activities must be considered
inseparable from the tangible support that they are given by their pro-
viders, even when the former exist independently of the support system
C in question.2 In other words, the support system C that J. Gadrey
called more accurately ‘reality’ C to emphasize its heterogeneity refers to
a multitude of goods and situations, including physical objects or sys-
tems, individuals, information or rather, information systems, organisa-
tions, institutions and so forth. The advantage of this definition is that
despite the wide range of objects covered, it offers a conceptual unifi-
cation of service activities by working under the necessarily vague con-
struct of a modified reality.
Jean Gadrey offered the following to represent his vision of service
activities (Fig. 5.1).
The approach is fully operational since even as it defines the service
activity, the material modification of reality C, a distinction is made for
its enabling conditions, being the negotiations that materialise through
a service relationship where beneficiaries and service providers define
the price of the service as well as its overall aims, specifically what real-
ity, depending on or belonging to the beneficiary, is going to be modi-
fied in what way.

1A distinction can be made between tangibility (palpable items like durable goods) and material-
ity (since some material manifestations are not palpable, like the connection between ducklings
and their mother duck).
2In and of itself this theme already merits in-depth analysis. According to Jeremy Rifkin (2000),

it explains the transition from an age of ownership to an age of access, or capitalism’s shift from
being based on purchases of durable goods to the organisation of the way their qualities and
advantages are used. One example is someone renting a complete worldwide individual transpor-
tation service instead of purchasing a car. Another is being able to guarantee constant building
temperatures instead of buying heaters or air-conditioning.
166   J.-P. Durand

Service relationships =
informational interactions
Between A and B B = Recipients,
A = Service provider customers, users (individuals,
(public or private, companies, local authorities)
individual or organisation)

A’s intervention Forms of ownership or appropriation

affecting C of C by B. Possible intervention by B affecting C

C = Reality* modified or worked upon by

service provider A for the benefit of B

* Reality here means:

- Material objects or systems (transportation, repairs, maintenance, etc.);
- Information;
- Individuals, sometimes according to certain physical or intellectual dimensions;
- Organisations, also sometimes according to their dimensions (technical, structures, collective knowledge,
etc.)

Fig. 5.1 Defining a service activity (Source J. Gadrey, op. cit, p. 19)

It is this service relationship that was central to most analyses of ser-

vices for two decades. The corpus of these analysis began with the con-
struct of repairing interactions, first formulated by Erving Goffman in
his book Asylums (1961), which observed relations between a practi-
tioner and his patient. Service relationships were conceptualised later on
by Jean Gadrey (1996) and Isaac Joseph et al. (1989), who broke them
down into three totally interwoven dimensions:

– Sociability, or the pleasantries found at the beginning of any

exchange. Included here is the nature and level of politeness rituals;
signs of respect (or disrespect); and the tonality at the beginning of
the interaction, which partially conditions the outcomes of the activ-
ity and whether customers or users are satisfied;
– A contractual dimension determining the scope of the intervention
and above all the conditions and costs. Depending on the kind of
service, the terms of the commercial exchange will be more or less
pre-determined institutionally or else have to be adjusted following
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
167

an occasionally tense interaction where users or purchasers try to

receive a few guarantees before the service’s implementation;
– A technical dimension, being the reason why the service interaction
and demand exist. This dimension allows practitioners to obtain
the information they need for diagnostic purposes before treating
patients or objects requiring repairs.

Following the first two stages, which are essential to the continuation of
the service relationship because they determine its economic and sub-
jective conditions (i.e. whether the relationship based on trust or mis-
trust), the technical dimension became the prime subject of scrutiny.
This is something that everyone sees in their interactions with doctors,
mechanics, postman or even when ringing a call centre to get a printer
fixed. Service relationships would always be constructed as encounters
between demands by users/customers and providers’ ability to satisfy
said demands. To grasp this at a more granular level, specialists tended
to ask questions developing understanding of the situation which in
reality C required modification, before making a diagnosis enabling
renewal. By so doing, they were purporting to shape the novice who
was expressing the demand in order to advance their understanding
of the reality requiring modification. In return, the user/customer was
supposed to offer the expert better information via increasingly precise
responses. It is this ongoing adjustment that was supposed to improve
the quality of diagnostics and repairs, something that service literature
termed the co-production of service during the 1990s–2010s.
The quality of the services provided, especially personal services, was
therefore depicted as stemming from successful exchanges between cus-
tomers/users and experts. Hence major research into linguistic accom-
modations considered essential to service co-production. The starting
point was that specialists had to adopt a vocabulary congruent with cus-
tomers’ level of knowledge. They were also supposed to adopt a tone
instilling customers/users with confidence, since the very fact of express-
ing a service demand often makes people feel disadvantaged and even
fearful. Josiane Boutet (2005) coined the term attenuation rhetoric in
reference to the linguistic ‘leveling’ that experts do to avoid customers
168   J.-P. Durand

feeling marginalised due to the gap between what they and their coun-
terparts know.
The service relationship’s linguistic dimension showed the key role of
information and communications along with service relationship’s and
within services themselves, such as mass media. Then, we cannot disso-
ciate analyses of service relationships from theories of communication:
for instance, we have to distinguish instrumental communication, with
exchanges of signs without interpretation of meaning and comprehensive
communication based on the meaning of signs. The former was found to
be easier to rationalise than the latter (Durand 2007). Hence the desire
to reduce wherever possible (call centres, Internet, etc.) service relation-
ships to an exchange of signs lacking any great meaning, enabling in
turn the use of robots or employees working on scripts designed to ena-
ble both sides to develop a quick understanding of what the service rela-
tionship entailed, thereby lowering its cost.
Starting with Goffmann’s studies of the relationship between care
providers and patients, work sciences interested in service activities
became largely dominated by the primacy of repair-related definitions.
One of the reasons is that repair services of the kind provided by doc-
tors, hairdressers, front counter sales staff, mechanics, priests were
thought to be rooted in immediate experience. Yet most services focus
on the future and a sense of anticipation. Insurance against different
risks, especially public healthcare or pensions, banking (project finance),
teaching in general, R&D services, engineering or design departments
and most business services—all respond to the imperative of anticipat-
ing the future. People want to limit the negative effects of foreseeable
catastrophes or processes (aging, illness, etc.) even as they build a happy
future as widely as possible, lowering all the while companies and pub-
lic administrations’ operational or production costs. This is the prime
function of today’s systematic outsourcing of low value-added activities
to new service companies that rationalise production processes and cut
costs.
Services would also be analysed in terms of their speed. Business ser-
vices were often portrayed as a way of accelerating creative processes,
especially because the specialisation they embody enhances people’s
control over a particular activity, thereby diminishing the time needed
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
169

to receive supplies or the frequency of a product offer renewal. This

convergence between speed and anticipation became even more appar-
ent when it involved the transportation of goods, people or informa-
tion and above all the processing of information. Indeed, anticipation
stopped being viewed as a speed consideration but instead as a desire to
increase speed, i.e. to accelerate (Rosa 2010). This was redolent of dis-
cussions about time relationships within a capitalist productive system
characterised by a permanent search for getting things done quickly.
Services were viewed as something essential to the acceleration of time
and productivity gains, and as one way of resolving the contradictions
of modern productive systems’ search for enhanced capital returns.3
Note, however, that this focus was entirely absent from interactionist
micro-sociology, whose analyses would concentrate on service relation-
ships alone.

A Brief Interactionism-Based Analysis

of the Service Sector

The primacy accorded to the service relationship converged with, or

was part of, a deep longstanding trend to prefer micro-sociological
approaches in work and organisation studies. The legitimisation of
micro-sociological approaches excluding other considerations, eco-
nomic, management, global stemmed, where service relationships were
involved, firstly from the fact that researchers could construct a clearly
circumscribed object featuring its own coherency without having to
refer to the environment. As interactions, service relationships found
their methodology or ‘natural’ approach in interactionism, which as
aforementioned was mainly Goffmanian in nature. This identity of this
vocabulary, the interaction between users and experts, justified the kind

3Itis regrettable that the excellent descriptions of different accelerations proposed by Hartmut
Rosa (2010) in relation to contemporary capitalism (so-called belated modernity) were not tied to
the current economic and financial crisis. The present book considers that the accelerations that
Rosa scrutinised constituted solutions to crises, accelerating (or deepening) all of them. At the
same time, they also offered a prospect of escape.
170   J.-P. Durand

of interactionism applied by Erving Goffman or Anselm Strauss (1992).

It also justified the application of ethno-methodology.
It is not at all certain, however, that an interactionist paradigm is
needed to analyse interactions. Nor is it certain that the interaction
between a user and an expert is the most fruitful topic of study when
looking at service activities. Micro-sociology and interactionism are not
necessarily good enough for accounting for the way that services func-
tion.4 Quite the contrary, questions need to be asked about this reliance
on an interactionist paradigm, in the broader sense of the term, within
the sociology of services. Similar lines of questioning include the episte-
mological meaning of service studies’ overwhelming reliance on interac-
tionism and ethnomethodology; and if this approach lasts, the scientific
implications as well as the political ones, insofar as scientific activity can
be deemed political.
Most authors researching service relationships (including Weller
1999; Hanique 2004; Jeantet 2001; Hubault 2002) considered that
understanding social and general phenomena meant analysing that
which is particular and that which is singular. This latter prism was sup-
posed to reveal sociality, create understanding of it, bring and crystallise
everything about it—starting with structures, because knowledge of the
singular was supposed to lead to knowledge of the social. According to
F. Hanique,

“The deeply sociological desire to attribute human meaning to human

social conduct is built on a particular ideological and epistemological
postulate, and on a scientific plan. The postulate was first formulated by
Marcel Mauss in 1950 when he said that, ‘It is by considering the whole
that we can perceive the essential’. What he posited was that the univer-
sal resides in the singular, and the general in the particular… It is in the
singularity of adaptive behaviours that can be found not only the shad-
ows that people cast but also the very materiality of the general social or
psychological processes that they are trying to decipher”. In other words,

4For a rigorous and in-depth critique of French-style interactionism, see chapter in Durand

(2007) entitled “The urgency of transcending interactionist vulgarisation”.

 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
171

analyses of work activities were supposed to focus on the subjectivity of

workers, or in this particular case, office employees or front counter staff.
(Hanique 2004, 20)

Of course, if institutions are embodied in the interactions that they

produce, then analysis of interactions is good enough in and of itself,
becoming a logical extension of the stance that Goffman specifically
expressed in his Asylums book. Many interactionist sociologists with an
interest in the field of work have tried to read the effects produced by
the immediate institutions shaping the interactions that they observed
bureaucratic rules, next-level management, material environment, and
son on, without seeking to analyse anything beyond the institutions
producing the behaviour they observed in the interaction. This may
have been the subtext of the position taken by J.-M. Weller (1999, 68)
who showed how office staff must “abandon the singularity of each indi-
vidual situation and recombine this conceptually in broader categories”.
Rising generality is an economic way for actors to respond to the diver-
sity of users and interactions. From a sociological perspective, it is a way
to shape these interactions, with analysis then enabling greater under-
standing of globalities.
These premises, often presented as presuppositions or postulates
underlying the presentation of scientific results, converged with the
oft-repeated affirmation that the micro-sociological treatment of social
reality, or understanding of individual motives and interactions between
two persons, suffice to understand the social sphere. Such approaches
shared the viewpoint that the only way forward was by analysing and
understanding individual motivations and/or the ensuing interactions.
This led to subjectivist positions that authors more or less acknowl-
edged. The question then became how to think of, or evaluate, the sci-
entific efficiency or relevance of these premises or postulates.
Today this means revisiting the nature of objects specified by
Goffman, that is to say, the interaction between patients and doctors
in an institution that is total, self-contained. The internal functioning
of an asylum as an interaction context is very different from what hap-
pens in private companies or public service administrations that exist
172   J.-P. Durand

specifically to be open to the outside world. In other words, the context

within which the contents and forms of interactions are described or
explained is in one case, according to Goffman), the institution itself. In
other cases, it is also mainly the reason for the existence of the company,
to turn a profit, or public administration, to provide a public service
and/or achieve social redistribution. In a certain way, this is the perspec-
tive that E. Goffman himself adopted in the conclusion to one of his
texts:

Treating social organisations as relatively closed systems means hypoth-

esizing that the relationship of one organisation to all the others consti-
tutes per se an object of study and opens the door to a new field, namely
institutional integration. (Goffman 1959, 226)

Saying that an object of analysis is relatively closed means excluding

a company and public administration that are basically open to the
outside world. First, by acting on their reason to exist and second, by
taking advantage of the fact that their customers and users are exter-
nal parties hence largely excluded from their internal operations lastly,
by observing interactions that specifically stem from the confrontation
between the internal and external spheres. Note that this is somewhat
different from Goffman’s own studies of organisations. As he himself
argued, patients stay institutionalised at night whereas doctors go home.
In short, interactions depend on social and economic facts operating in
concentric circles. The analytical environment is no longer the imme-
diate context of the interaction but, as with for example, the ‘butter-
fly effect’, a network of multidimensional forces whose effects are hard
to identify. Wanting to construct the object of a company or public
administration as relatively closed object then becomes an epistemolog-
ical choice relating more to the sociological approach that researchers
decided upon from the very outset than to the actual social reality they
faced.
Another way of criticising this reliance on interactionism in analyses
of companies or public administrations is to revisit the status Goffman
attributed to actors. Regarding the way in which daily life is staged,
Goffman wrote that,
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
173

Members of the public can discover here the manifestation of a generally

well-hidden basic equality. Whether the personality is represented as seri-
ous or frivolous or has high or modest social standing, the actors assum-
ing this role can be seen for what they are at a deeper level, namely lonely
stand-up comedians tormented by worries about how they are coming
across. (1959, 222)

The issue here is whether life is nothing more than a representation

of people’s character. The economic challenges associated with work
effectiveness, quality of results and of life at work, or even determin-
ing whether a person should keep their job, largely transcend the sphere
of representation, even if there is no good reason to exclude this from
the scope of analysis. Reducing actors’ concerns to their sole representa-
tions as solitary beings is one possible analytical approach. However, it
appears quite limited given that, as Goffman also noted, personalities
are collective and social products, whereas work activities are first and
foremost collective activities producing norms through social games
relating to the establishment of rules that go well beyond representation
alone.
The final and main criticism is that even if actors talk about being
equally solitary in terms of their personality’s representation, they
are not all equal in the representation itself since each has a different
level of resourcing that they bring to bear in performing their person-
ality. Moreover, the world of work is more than the mere representa-
tion thereof. Actors would appear to be very unequal in terms of the
cultural, social and economic capital at their disposal. In other words,
wanting to see equality between actors who are unequal both in the
ways they represent their character and in their social work relationships
undermines the usefulness of the interactionist approach in companies
and public administrations. The only way this can work is by limiting it
to a micro-field of work analysis, one that does not address the intensity
of work activities in a multi-dimensional context.
All of this makes it curious that observers became so enthused by
interactionism and willing to imprison themselves in a micro-psycho-
logical perspective. In the 1960s–1970s, entire generations of sociolo-
gists wanted to distance themselves from so-called deterministic theories
174   J.-P. Durand

and would often deform the results that came out of this approach.
French-style interactionism, a variant detached from all contextualis-
ation, became the main way of adapting an ascetic and even apolitical
approach that some conflated with “axiological neutrality” in sociol-
ogy. This meant few references being made to the fundamental causes
of social dysfunction, attributed either to other disciplines (so that soci-
ology no longer focused on them) or seen as something that sociology
could not alter, meaning there was no reason to do any further work on
it. Hence the urgency with which many analysts rushed into envelop
themselves in this micro-discipline and describe its contours, colours
and stirrings.
The same criticism applies to all micro-sociologies that avoid or scru-
pulously refuse to face an object of study’s context. Researchers who
intentionally limit and take the objects they construct from the outside
world may be trying to approximate natural scientists who create isolates
in some cases to analyse how they function, but the ongoing relevance
of this attitude, including in natural sciences, is questionable. Another
way of formulating the same criticism is to question the scientific use-
fulness of “fragmenting social structures into micro-structures and inter-
actions” (Weil 2006). The relationships between these levels are unclear,
as is the utility of working with frameworks that are quite vague.
Where contexts are limited to interactions themselves, the mean-
ing of an action becomes understandable. What is absent, however, are
the great social, historical and economic explanations, in attention the
symbolic explanations encountered all throughout the long history of
representations. This is a choice that some current adepts of interaction-
ism and ethnomethodology might wish to make. But it still needs to be
stated and made relevant to companies or public administrations driven
by a logic whose essence may be very different due to the immediacy of
the interaction.
This does not mean that interactions are not scientific objects.
It means it’s not the right way to analyse interactions Quite the con-
trary, with all of the games and adjustments they involve, they have a
full role to play in the sociology of work, as long as they are situated
socially. Interactions create meaning and can and should be viewed as
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
175

social games (see Chapter 2). What remains to be situated are the stra-
tegic challenges underpinning this game, both within the immediate
meaning of work, performing a role because this makes it possible to
progress, but also in the historical meaning (significance) of exploita-
tion and alienation, asking whether the game has been recognised,
ignored or denied, in which production relationships are being distorted
(Burawoy 2015). In this case, however, the interactionist approach dis-
places possible interpretations and relocates them in relation to three
leading factors extracted from this initial service relationship analy-
sis-based definition of service activities, namely the commercial relation-
ship, the employment relationship, and the back office.

Towards a Systemic Definition of Service Activities

Jean Gadrey’s definition depicting services as the transformation by

actor A of a reality C belonging to or depending on beneficiary B pro-
vides information about immediate services, especially domestic ones.
Having said that, the actors involved are usually employees of the com-
pany or public administration providing the service. In addition, the
contractual dimension of the service relationship generally entails a
commercial exchange that transcends it, one codified, priced and man-
aged through a contract designed by the company providing the service.
Lastly, most service activities require, upstream from the service itself
and from the associated service relationship, a more or less heavy mate-
rial and informational infrastructure usually referred to generically as
the back office.
Rigorous analysis of this initial triangular definition of services,
accounting for the conditions in which services are produced, situate
the service relationship in a way that focuss on the:

– Employment relationship between the company or public admin-

istration providing the service and the expert offering it to the cus-
tomer/user, whether this is a private party or another company or
public administration;
176   J.-P. Durand

A = Service provider (public or private,

individual or organisation). Employer of A’

Employment Commercial
relationship relationship B and A
A and A’

B = Recipient,
A’ = Expert customer, user (persons,
(A’s employee) companies, local authorities)

Forms of property or appropriation

Intervention by A (right of access) of C by B.
affecting C Possible intervention by B affecting C

In grey, back office

A’-B: service relationship
C = Reality modified or worked on
by expert A’ to benefit B

Fig. 5.2 Systemic representation of service activities (Source J. Gadrey, op. cit
and J.-P. Durand)

– Commercial relationship, or non-commercial one where a public

administration or institution is involved5 between the customer/user
and the entity providing the service;
– Back office infrastructure optimising the service, e.g. transportation,
IT, education, etc. This covers the employment and commercial rela-
tionship between the company or administration providing the ser-
vice and its suppliers and subcontractors.

A graphic representation of the complexity of and tension between these

social forces is (Fig. 5.2).
For simple domestic services starting with hairdressers, doctors,
mechanics, small retailers, for example, A and A’ coincide, so that the

5The objective here is not to revive the debate about how non-commercial services might become
a vehicle for a better understanding of service activities in general (Harribey 2013, 365). At pres-
ent both categories are relatively similar to what happens elsewhere, certainly in terms of their
dominant managerial logic, effects on working conditions or quality of the service relationship.
This is because nowadays state authorities or the other actors funding non-commercial services
tend—for macro-economic reasons relating to the dominance of the neo-liberal economic par-
adigm—to faced similar constraints with limited human resources and with work far too often
being considered as a cost instead of as something that creates value.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
177

service relationship means constructing, co-producing, the essential ser-

vice itself, including because there is almost no back office or because
it has been entirely incorporated into doctors or psychologists’ offices.
In today’s service society capitalism and in an era of access, these situa-
tions are increasingly rare, with most personal, business or administra-
tive services being promulgated by large public or private sector bodies
employing tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
The new challenges are in areas covered by services that cannot be
offshored, as exemplified by institutional catering, the care sector or
industrial cleaning. The 28 EU nation-states purchase, for instance,
more in services outsourced to the private sector than they pay in wages.
Nearly 50% of all jobs in these branches are bad jobs. More generally,
it seems that the current internationalisation process involves national
social models, or countries racing to the social bottom, by exporting
unqualified workers recruited in these sectors of activities. In indus-
trial cleaning, which employs more than 4 million persons in Europe,
major private or public sector institutional customers force their clean-
ing companies into a competition that is so violent that the latter must
seek protection from European regulation to assuage prime contractors,
involving in some cases support from employees who have hardly any
union membership themselves.6 Corporate customers exert ever-greater
influence over their suppliers’ work organisation and even management.
They express increasingly stringent demands that make cleaning activi-
ties more complex than ever. The result is a conflictual commercial rela-
tionship aggravated by industrial relations issues. The objective becomes
stabilising contracts between prime contractors and cleaning companies,
including by extending their durations (Holtgrewe et al. 2015).
Hence the need to ensure that the employment relationship is fit-
ting for the way in which services are being produced. Service quality,
in all of its dimensions, delays, customer or user satisfaction—which
is not absolute but associated with the kind of pleasure that is largely
determined by a co-production of services, mainly involves employees’
happiness at work, i.e. reflects the quality of their work, as discussed

6See www.walqing.eu/index.php?id=38.
178   J.-P. Durand

in the preceding chapter. Even without conducting a detailed review

of the employment relationship’s definition (Durand et al. 1998, 16),
it is worth recalling its four components, comprising a system whose
coherence determines the quality of the employment relationship: work
organisation; remuneration methods (recognition of competency); types
of industrial relations; and hierarchical (or command) system. At a time
when lean production principles dominate the entire productive sphere,
whether in the industrial or service sectors, to overcome the current cri-
sis of capital accumulation management must figure out the best way
of implementing these precepts in the service sector. The challenge is
greater here than in industry (Bélanger and Edwards 2013). Otherwise,
and with respect to the aforementioned double triangulation of the ser-
vice model, the lean production-driven search for lower costs looks to
rationalise at least three of these dimensions, aside from the commercial
relationships that the present book does not look at:

– A rationalised organisation of production and back office work,

largely conditioning the service quality on offer. The implementation
principles here are redolent of those found in industry, as the previ-
ous chapter discussed in relation to logistics workers;
– A rationalised exchange between novice customers and expert service
providers, characterised by less time being spent on pleasantries, the
quasi-disappearance of contract discussions and a desire to codify
corporate communications to transform them into an instrumental-
ised relationship emptied of meaning and which therefore takes less
time to interpret. The best illustration of these practices are big call
centres where workers read from rigid scripts and where phone con-
nections are controlled by powerful IT and management tools, with
workers having no time to breathe between conversations (Lechat
and Delaunay 2003; Amiech 2005; Tiffon 2013).
– A rationalised co-production of services that beyond the aforemen-
tioned codification of exchanges tries to simplify expert interventions
affecting reality C by reducing the time it takes to carry this out or
by giving responsibility for this action to beneficiaries who must then
undertake the repair or anticipation, work themselves.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
179

All of this can be readily observed in two case studies: SNCF French
national railway; and Pôle Emploi, the equivalent in France of the UK’s
JobsCentrePlus state employment agency. Other examples come from
the banking or graphic design sectors (Durand and Sebag 2011).

The Possibility of Non-quality Work in the

Service Sector
The present section offers detailed and front-line analysis of the renewal
of rationalisation efforts by looking at how lean management has
changed work. It then asks several concrete questions about the emer-
gence of new types of workers engaged in service activities.

SNCF French National Railway Tested by Competition

The financial capitalism that has driven many European leaders’ actions
over the past 30 years has transformed many public services into com-
mercial activities. Examples can be found in sectors ranging from energy
to water, telecoms, mail, healthcare and private transportation (planes
or trains). The European directives causing this change have opened all
areas of public service up to private sector competition. Transforming
a public service intended to satisfy public needs into a company has
forced these bodies to seek new income sources to replace lost funding.
In turn, this raises two closely related issues: the effect on service quality,
and how changes in service production affects a company’s work. The
first level of scrutiny here is the close link between a back office’s service
quality and the work of the customer contact staff. This is then followed
by analysis of changes in the competencies that SNCF requires to carry
out its own transformations.7

7The following results are from a study that the Centre Pierre Naville carried out on behalf of
SNCF’s Public Transportation Department: Evolution des métiers en contact avec la clientèle,
Université d’Evry-SNCF, 2007. With input from Frederik Mispelblom Beyer and Alain Pichon,
the research focuses on regional and intercity train lines. More broadly, it looks at the transforma-
tions that SNCF went through over the past 30 years.
180   J.-P. Durand

The service relationship that customer contact personnel has estab-

lished with the general public is part of a broader service that SNCF
sells today, namely the safe transportation of people and luggage. It dif-
fers from a simple service relationship like the one that psychotherapists
have with patients (E. Goffman) or that hairdressers have with their cus-
tomers. Beyond the service relationship between SNCF customers8 and
staff members, a large train and station back office complements the
actual rail network.
Although customers are globally satisfied with the service relation-
ship, with many considering that it has clearly improved, particularly
sales and on-train services, things are very different where train quality
is concerned. There are frequent criticisms of punctuality, often referred
to by SNCF as frequency, cancellations and comfort, with some trains
being overcrowded and/or simply too old. Trains can be late for many
reasons, including bad weather, human behaviour,9 staff shortages and
above all conflicts between the different entities using the same train-
lines (regional services, the TGV fast train, intercity routes, freight
trains, etc.). Some lines run on a single track, making things very dif-
ficult when more than one train is on the line, notably low priority
trains, with management sometimes taking staff members, especially
drivers, off these lines because there is more money to make on ad hoc
freight operations.
With another measurement of train quality being passengers’ likeli-
hood of getting a seat, the refusal to satisfy certain demands remains
incomprehensible to many customers and regional managers alike. TGV
fast trains or intercity trains often travel through France’s medium-sized
provincial cities almost empty, without stopping to pick up customers
travelling to the next regional centre. This is despite the fact that after
long and arduous negotiations, customers have finally earned the right

8Being a public service like this state-owned transport company that is broadly subsidised by

regional authorities, the term “user” is more applicable here than “customer”, which the present
book nevertheless maintains because it is the terminology that some companies actually apply
nowadays. These semantics attest to the transformations and changing purposes affecting the
company’s basic vision.
9The euphemism that SNCF and RATP use to describe suicide attempts.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
181

to travel on TGV fast services at night, being the best time for many
passengers. Above all, the TGV does not stop at every station so that
saves time as well. The deal only ran for about a year, however, with pas-
sengers often having to stand on uncomfortable crowded trains for trips
that were 30% longer than they used to be. Even if there was some logic
behind SNCF’s policy, the fact remains that it was not very helpful to
customers who receiver no clear explanation about why they could not
board TGV fast trains that had lots of empty seats. A provincial newspa-
per, Sud-Ouest, referred to this as a

“Permanent cock-up by France’s regional train system”, noting the can-

cellation of 905 services over the previous five weeks. “The materials that
SNCF uses, its staff members, social dialogue and organisation are simply
not good enough in terms of what the Regional Council aspires to. 305
additional services were launched in six years, meaning that frequencies
are up. But these railcars with their truck engines remain very fragile and
the number of people working for the railway has plummeted (loss of
25% of all jobs over the past 8 years)”.

The figure below recaps all the factors structuring this service relation-
ship. It also features customer contact staff’s professional identities and
shows why the service relationship should not be considered without
accounting for the quality of SNCF’s service, i.e. whether its trains are
on time and comfortable (Joulé and Jousse 2011). Lastly, by making
the determinants, that is the commercial and employment relationships
more visible, it illustrates staff members’ various reactions as they do
their daily work, plus users’ attitudes towards SNCF and its employees
(Fig. 5.3).
The service offer features in the shaded triangle at the centre of the
figure:

– One of the sides represents the employment relationship that con-

nects the employer (SNCF) to its employees. This includes the work
organisation, hierarchical relations, professional relationships and sys-
tems ensuring employees’ involvement in their work. The arrows are
of different length since notwithstanding union power, the employer
remains in a much stronger bargaining position;
182   J.-P. Durand

Fig. 5.3 A deeply embedded service relationship

– The other side of the triangle represents the commercial relation-

ship with, for example, a fares policy that varies throughout the day
largely dominated by the provider, with other transport modalities
being excluded from the figure to prevent it becoming too complex
given SNCF’s monopoly over rail traffic;
– The service relationship is the third side of the triangle. This involves
first of all SNCF staff and customers’ relationship regarding train ser-
vices, i.e., the service relationship covers an object that is relatively
autonomous of the interaction itself since the object exists inde-
pendently of, and pre-exists, the service provider and the customer,
i.e. if there were no trains, there would be no service relationship to
analyse. At the same time, in the absence of a service relationship,
information and sales desks, on-train controls and services, there
would be no rail network offering paid passengers comfortable and
socially equitable travel. Thus, the service relationship is contextual-
ised by the actual offer of train services (the back office) and encircled
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
183

by the large triangle on all three sides. It is also largely determined

by the way the service offer is funded (SNCF, regional councils,
French state).

To summarise, the service relationship that customer contact staff enter-

tain with the public is closely related to the back office, which deter-
mines the trains’ quality (punctuality, comfort) and even fares policy,
after comparing costs and regional councils’ contributions. This makes
the service relationship akin to a partially co-constructed service since
the train service existed before it did. It is embedded in the actual
train service, the thing that makes it possible. After all, it is difficult
to envisage empty passenger trains. The embedding also signifies that
the interaction between service personnel, sales staff, ticket control-
lers, information desk staff, and customers regarding train services is an
informal one closely related to the commercial offer (fares, quality) but
also the employment relationship influencing in turn how train services
are constructed. Lastly, the grey arrow pointing towards the inside of
the large triangle, and not towards the outside as is the case with most
theoretical figures until now, means that the service relationship is well
and truly oriented towards the train service. It is no longer a disembod-
ied service relationship but instead one supported by the material exist-
ence of a substantial service.
At the same time, the service relationship may only be effective
because customer contact staff are very familiar with the functioning of
the back office and possess a corporate culture that gives substance to
the inter-individual relationship they have with customers. Note that
this is the public service culture which most employees in this sector
share.

Invisible Competencies that Cost Too Much

Back office knowledge involves more or less implicit competencies

that are generally unknown and have therefore not been formalised.
Nowadays, they are threatened by a number of phenomena: a ration-
alised work organisation that de-subjectivises relationships with
184   J.-P. Durand

customers; the generalisation of vending machines; and the outsourcing

of online ticket sales. All these competencies, which are reviewed below,
affect the quality of the service relationship between the staff member
and customer, one crafted to serve the latter’s needs while respecting
SNCF’s clearly understood interests. In this sense, the competencies in
question are part of the service quality that materialises when the ticket
is purchased, through the customer service provided on the trains, and
not only on TGV fast trains, and with the reception and information
functions offered in stations. Because they are of no strictly economic
value to SNCF, with work being considered in the company as a cost
and not as a value-creating factor, these social and comfort-related com-
petencies are expected to disappear. Employees possessing them are
being slowly but surely replaced with online, or vending machine, ticket
sales. The projected replacement of on-train ticket control and support
functions, the subcontracting of non-staffed stations, for example, are
amongst other activities that are being displaced by automation.
Globally this signifies a service relationship of lesser quality, reflected
in train services that are deteriorating with delays, cancellations as well
as becoming less safe.10 Over the long run, the disappearance of these
competencies, analysed in further detail below, will certainly turn cus-
tomers off this mode of transport. Yet the partisans of financial capi-
talism do not really care since the only thing that concerns them is
short-term financial gain. The question here is not the dividend the
company produces but ensuring its financial equilibrium without wor-
rying about the colossal surcharge that rest of society pays for freight
hauled on the nation’s roads, or for the massive reliance on passenger
vehicles when people commute to work or go on holidays. One could

10These delays and cancellations, like many technical incidents and serious accidents (for e.g.
in Brétigny in 1993), can be explained by insufficient maintenance of tracks and signals,
especially since the 1997 creation of the Réseau Ferré de France (RFF) rail track company, which
has always been very under-capitalised. A study undertaken by a Swiss consultancy in 2003 pre-
dicted that 60% of all tracks would be unusable within 20 years. The train driver strike of 2014
focused on the mistakes made after the European Commission’s erroneous decision to separate
the ownership of tracks from the SNCF services operating on them, while opposing the trans-
fer of much of RFF’s debt to SNCF—thereby worsening the company’s situation and, above all,
causing a serious deterioration in employees’ working conditions.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
185

argue that this surcharge includes pollution, global warming, road acci-
dents and health consequences and time lost in traffic jams.
Perceptive competencies are a key factor in commercial employ-
ees’ efficiency and consist of judging demands quickly and reacting
appropriately to socially differentiated members of the general public.
It is a professionalisation focus that allows the public sector to cope
with greater complexity and to adapt resolutely to all of the different
individual or collective demands it faces. The public sector has had to
juggled the complexity of factors such as gender, sexuality and genera-
tional, socio-professional and cultural diversity. Customers today want
to be treated as singular beings. Against this backdrop, SNCF employ-
ees need better understanding of the different social groups with whom
they are in contact, knowledge enabling them to anticipate what they
must know and do to grasp the customer’s “nature” and imagine their
lifestyle and aspirations based on their demands, already a categorisation
tool, but also according to the way they dress, their hairstyle, how they
act and speak, etc.
Most sales employees use the downtime they experience when pro-
cessing checks or credit cards to take a quick look at the next customer
in the queue and gather information allowing them to anticipate what
kind of customer the person is and their likely request. Employees can
then adapt their sales pitches, upgrades, round-turn tickets, loyalty
packages, depending on how likely they think this is to improve their
chances of success. They might change their tone of voice to sound
more professional or distinguished, reflecting any differentiation that
might exist between employee and customer such as age and social
class. The sale is no longer based on affinities and empathy but on the
professionalism employees show by modulating their voices to speak
confidently.
The trick for ticket controllers is to scout out and recognise free riders
even before speaking with them. A multitude of hints are used towards
this end, be it on the train platform or the first time the controller walks
through the compartment to verify the doors are closed or count the
number of passengers. “Informed” in this way, the controller will then
approach the free rider in the same way as other customers, using the
same expressions and intonations. They will, however, have the hidden
186   J.-P. Durand

advantage of knowing how the interaction might go, putting them in

a stronger position during the actual engagement. This might involve,
for instance, adopting a firmer tone or different body language in case
a customer becomes agitated. All of which maximises the controller’s
chance of selling a penalty fare or getting the passenger to give correct
contact details if they cannot pay on the spot.
Anticipation competencies help employees to clearly formulate cus-
tomers’ demands before or at the same time as the customers them-
selves. This can be referred to as an aptitude for quickly constructing a
diagnostic, based on good perceptive competencies. Salespersons work
in masked time in the way that they pursue their lines of questioning,
interspersing machine-generated answers, schedules, fares, with cus-
tomer queries, travel periods, first and second class travel. At the same
time, the questions they ask are detached because they want to ascertain
whether customers qualify for any reductions. They will say nothing if
the person’s particular status means they pay a lower fare. While typing
away on their portable terminal they will observe the customer and ask
a number of unimportant questions to portray the service as being at a
higher level than it really is.
Persuasive competencies supplement anticipation competencies. After
determining customers’ characteristics, sales staff, who are increasingly
remunerated or promoted on the basis off their commercial output,
try to make a soft sale even as they fulfil the customer’s expectations.
The idea here is to convince the other person that is in their interest
to accept the recommendations made by sales personnel who present
themselves as rail transport professionals, with the notion of interest
being limited here to an economic interest or to a desire for comfort
and well-being. Experienced staff members’ competencies are all hid-
den ones revolving around persuasion. As soon as they apprehend the
customer’s “nature”, employees will adopt a tone that sparks interest to
ensure they are being followed all the way through the purchase phase,
whether this happens on the spot or in the future. The hooks are small
facts or hints obtained through a dialogue that is anything but disinter-
ested. Sales staff also use conversation to verify certain intuitions they
have, paving the way for product sales or offering arguments why this is
a good idea. Persuasive competencies are hard to formalise and even if
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
187

they involve “soft” sales, machines will never be able to replace humans
at this level.
All of these sales and control competencies are organised and bun-
dled in such as way as to increase employees’ effectiveness. These initial
categories of knowledge are sustained by the attentiveness and listening
competencies that employees mobilise during the initial phase of their
relationship with customers. The aim for both SNCF employees and
the company itself is for a quicker processing of customer demands.
Hence the design of relevant questions expressed in an ordered and ped-
agogical way leading to clear responses with a single meaning. In turn,
agents must operate at the same level of knowledge as the people they
are speaking with. They do this by applying an adaptation rhetoric that
enables this kind of anticipation work. The idea here is to guess or per-
ceive as quickly as possible what level of knowledge the customer pos-
sesses in order to optimise the ensuing dialogue. Adaptation rhetoric11
is a linguistic competency that salespersons use in many different ways
to ascertain the condition of the customer and adopt a similar pattern.
Rhetoric also attenuates distance, i.e. it precludes the kind of paternal-
ism, familiarity or compassion that might marginalise customers and
make them feel inferior. Instead, the aim is to raise the customer’s level
of knowledge so that it matches the expert’s. Adaptation competencies
seek linguistic efficiency through mutual comprehension and immediate
communication. The main goal is to gain time.
Attenuation rhetoric can help controllers checking tickets on the
train to change interactions and ensure passengers understand their
reasoning, especially where this is expected to lead to a favourable out-
come. To achieve this, controllers can modify their vocabulary and
adapt it to the person when explaining, for instance, the nature of the
fraud that has occurred and above all the risks faced. The interaction
often assumes the form of a dialogue in bad faith or a lack of under-
standing caused by the person having travelled without a ticket, with

11This term was suggested by J. Boutet (2005), who spoke about attenuation rhetoric in reference
to the linguistic upskilling of experts aimed at preventing customers’ marginalisation by widening
the gap between their level of knowledge and that of their counterparts.
188   J.-P. Durand

many customers trying very hard to explain that they are in fact behav-
ing rightfully and that it is not their fault if they are in an irregular sit-
uation, their obvious aim being not to have to pay the penalty are. This
means that controllers are no longer seeking to implement a persuasive
logic but instead their competency in getting the free rider to accept
that the interaction is not between equals. The free rider must under-
stand that they have been caught in the act. Despite their resistance,
the controller must enforce the sanction but should do this as gently
possible. Beyond the attenuation rhetoric but in the same register, the
controller must invent, open or suggest a halfway honourable outcome
that gets the passenger to agree to pay up. In this case, the attenuation
competency is there to help the controller maintain and even cultivate
the illegal traveller’s dignity.

The New Worker Coming to Grips

with Expected Changes

All of these related competencies provide SNCF with the means for
ensuring a quality public service that benefits passengers. The lat-
ter used to be viewed as users but are now described as customers. Yet
contrary to official policy, the service they are receiving from this state-
owned enterprise is less attentive than it used to be. The main reason for
this deterioration is that the EU dictate that rail transport be opened
to competition to cut operating costs. It is worth seeing how this will
affect the work of staff responsible for contact with the general public.
The accumulated effects of train delays or cancellations heavily
impact on working conditions12 by adding to employees’ physical work-
load and mental burden. The workers most exposed to these problems
are of course train controllers who must both inform the public of the
reasons for any travel disturbances (and the expected outcomes) and

12Delays and cancellations have had a not insignificant secondary effect on SNCF’s internal oper-

ations. Drivers or ticket controllers are often unable to return to their original stations, meaning
that other trains must be cancelled or delayed (since a train cannot leave without having the con-
troller to ensure safety on board).
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
189

help resolve any connection problems that arise as a result. Once cus-
tomers alight, information staff must work as quickly as possible to sat-
isfy a range of very different demands. They have few resources to fulfil
all these responsibilities, which include making public announcements
about late connections, information about upcoming services, handing
out free taxi or bus vouchers, etc. Note that sales personnel also inter-
vene to alter tickets whenever trains change.
Even worse, even as SNCF employees face a sharp increase in phys-
ical demands placed on them, there are fewer of them to handle the
stress. Workloads had been originally calculated to enable employees to
lead ordinary lives without further ado. Yet contrary to the great claims
made about the brave new world of technology, an illusion if ever there
was one, disturbances management has become the new normal for
certain stations or trains. Employees suffer mental overload reflecting
customer discontent, in particular when cancellations and delays occur
time and again. Controllers and information desk employees must both
repair the conditions imposed upon customers. By explaining the causes
of the disturbances, without ever possessing the means for preventing
their recurrence, an anticipate things in such a way as to be able to
devise immediate solutions. In many cases, alighting customers behave
very aggressively. Managers have ways to isolate the leaders of these
expression of discontent but very few front-line employees are trained
in group conflict resolution. Plus, there are too few to handle all the dis-
turbances that arise.
Above and beyond these cancellations and delays, the deterioration in
service and in the actual service relationship can be felt as far upstream
as the ticket sales function. In pressure situations such as when people
have to queue, the aforementioned set of competencies can help staff
to identify which customers have come to lodge a complaint and can
therefore be safely sent to the after-sales desk. These tend to be the peo-
ple who are the least well-equipped to air their problems and demands
publicly. What they then face is a gamut of torments and labyrinth of
questions that rarely culminate in their gaining satisfaction. The most
visible deterioration in service, however, is clearly passenger safety on
the trains. Having fewer controllers overall means that passengers on
190   J.-P. Durand

regional services often travel alone. Their safety, in terms of threats from
other passengers, is no longer something with which SNCF is con-
cerned. Nowadays the company focuses solely on rail safety and ticket
checking, or what might be termed revenue safeguarding. This explains
the ongoing transition to trains where drivers simply close the doors,
and where station names are automatically announced, with tickets
being mainly checked by sporadic group patrols in stations, a process
that costs less but is just as efficient. What remains is the problem of
personal safety. Since the press picked up on this, SNCF has felt the
need to reassure users by recruiting railway police, an inexorable shift
away from the social connectivity and sociability that used to be an
integral part of policing within trains’ confined spaces. Given the finan-
cial capitalist competition practiced by the European Commission, this
is highly rational behaviour. It also makes a basic contribution to the
de-humanisation of social relationships. Note that there is nothing para-
doxical about this formulation, which signifies a lost sense of common-
ality among actors driven by ideologies and beliefs that keep them at a
distance from human societies’ deeper nature. Only new workers struc-
tured as reeds can resist by dominating or mastering the dislocation or
divide imposed by a society that evokes hope even as it causes despair
through the promises it breaks.
From sales personnel’s perspective, the ongoing pressure of processing
long queues of people causes a gradual abandonment of the aforemen-
tioned complexity competencies. The time pressure-related simplifica-
tion of the processes in which they engage has transformed their work
into an activity that is Fordian in two ways. First tasks have become
increasingly fragmented, repetitive and monotonous. Second, they are
and they are sequenced so that workers do not have any more down-
time, given the never-ending queues of customers, all of whom are in a
rush. Employee remuneration increasingly reflects output revenue gen-
erated, number of cards sold and upgrades). It is worth noting two reac-
tions to this. First many employees reject the pressure to generate profits
and prefer a public service ethos based on user satisfaction because,
in the words of an employee (Bordeaux railway station, November
2006), “It is a long-term choice that increases customer loyalty to the
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
191

train network”. Many others refuse management-organised competi-

tions with other employees, based on their offering individual gratifi-
cations such as vouchers from bookstores or other outlets in town, to
top sales staff. In several stations, employees have pooled their rewards
and shared them equally, pursuing a solidarity principle in opposition
to the individualism and sense of competition that senior management
promotes in an attempt to get employees to forget the moral value of
public service.
Such solidarity is a way of addressing the conflict that employees
feel between their professional awareness of public service values and
management’s profitability imperatives. The ensuing standardisation
of thought is something to which Brussels has aspired for a very long
time. To tame people’s intelligence, senior management has asked man-
agers at all levels to brandish the threat of privatisation. Their argument
has been that if SNCF does not cut costs sufficiently and improve train
occupancy rates, other operators, such as Véolia or Deutsche Bahn,
will enter the French market and destroy SNCF, with all its employ-
ees losing their jobs. Now, stress and fear-driven management like this
can be quite effective. Certainly it has confused many employees, who
have started questioning their future and therefore began accepting the
new rules without any real resistance. The pressure is even greater in the
regional train network, with management teams here accepting what-
ever complaints regional councils have lodged against SNCF, accusing
it of not fulfilling its contractual obligations with regard to delays and
cancellations and intimating that they will negotiate with rivals when
contracts are up for renewal. Unions have vigorously denounced a
threat they take very seriously but by so doing are actually increasing
the danger. It suddenly seems more real than it is, giving senior man-
agement further latitude to intimidate staff, persuading them to eschew
industrial action and accept management demands, including those that
affect every aspect of workers’ daily activities.
All these reasons explain why SNCF has been unable to improve its
offer (quality of on-train service, quality of service relationship), why
industrial actions have recurred and why most employees feel a malaise
at work, including mid-level managers whose circonstances are beyond
192   J.-P. Durand

our concerns here. Employees who are not hamstrung by the conflict
between different values, who can handle users’ growing discontent and
who accommodate management’s increasingly stringent demands are all
part of this new worker category. They master or transcend the divide
that they face by either working around them, accepting them or resist-
ing them, even as they continue to loudly proclaim their attachment
to the principles of solidarity and the common good. Other employees
lack the social and/or individual resources to survive this new environ-
ment. These are the oak trees described in the Chapter 2, weaker indi-
viduals who break when under threat. In this one instance, they tend
to go AWOL, becoming peripheral to the institution and sometimes
simply resigning their job. Stuck between abandonment and reluctance
(Chapter 2), they struggle to accept the new conditions of work being
imposed upon them and no longer find space for themselves within the
organisation once management has enforced the new demands. General
corporate aims and promises feel foreign to them and the disconnect
between these objectives and what is really possible on a daily basis is
too great to make the situation anything other than untenable.
While the sociology of services has long featured debates about ser-
vice relationships the agenda has tended to be somewhat overly focussed
on this. Not only has it been necessary to add a back office concept to
identify the context within which service relationships unfold but even
more importantly, services theory has had to re-incorporate constructs
like employment or commercial relationships. Both have strongly
influenced how services are constructed and perceived by the people
benefiting from them. Highlighting the importance of employment
relationships refocuses attention on the role that production relation-
ships and capital return strategies play in services production.
Another case in point is France’s Pôle Emploi network of state-run
employment agencies. Local managers are constantly trying to cover the
wide variety of needs that staff encounter but are more or less doomed
to fail due to insufficient human resources. What this reveals in an
entity whose services involve little fixed capital, is that there are cases
where front and back office relationships are absolutely crucial to the
employment relationship.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
193

Pôle Emploi: Mission Impossible for Job Advisers

Born out of the 2008 merger between France’s ANPE government

employment offices and ASSEDIC work benefits scheme, Pôle Emploi
exercises two functions in theory: finding jobseekers a new job, and pay-
ing statutory benefits. Pôle Emploi (PE) has, however, had a relatively
negative image in France for three main reasons:

– PE cannot achieve miracles. There are approximatively 6 million

unemployed persons in France at present13 versus only 300,000 to
500,000 unfilled job offers.
– Benefits claimants are constantly complaining about calculation
errors and refusals to pay what they are due (PE almost always meets
the statutory 11-day deadline for starting to pay benefits, causing fre-
quent errors since this is too little time to process increasingly com-
plex cases),
– Successive French governments were unable to prevent rising unem-
ployment and tended to hide behind Pôle Emploi to mask their
failures. It is Pôle Emploi that publishes monthly unemployment sta-
tistics and it is the Pôle Emploi logo that appears systematically on
television screens, undermining the job broker’s own image.

This negative image is at odds with Pôle Emploi ethos, with employees
entirely devoted to public service and mobilised on its behalf—even if
92% have worked under a private sector employment contract since the

13Office figures in early 2016 showed that the whole of France (including overseas departments
and territories) had about 3.8 million unemployed. However, the number only included category
A jobseekers (individuals with no employment the month previous). On top of this, there were
another 1.7 million category B and C jobseekers (people working fewer than 70 hours the previ-
ous month) for a total of 5.5 million unemployed. Additionally, there were RSA Income Support
beneficiaries not registered at PE, often young persons who had not gone to the effort of signing
up (or elderly who fell out of the statistics). Finally, there were also people benefiting from all
kinds of training programmes, on top of those prescribed by PE, but not required to positively
seek employment. The total number of unemployed persons in France therefore ranges from 6 to
6.7 million at the time of writing.
194   J.-P. Durand

2008 merger. Because they lack the structural means, number of availa-
ble jobs in the labour market, or human resources to cope with the scale
of unemployment in France, Pôle Emploi is going through a dual crisis,
with lower service quality even as job advisers and managers suffer from
a rise in socio-psychic disorders.14

Deteriorating Working Conditions

Work has become particularly difficult at PE’s reception desks due to

the ever-lengthening queues of jobseekers. Job advisers rotate between
different positions, starting with first stage reception triage before going
on to information and diagnostics interviews (IDI) and ultimately to
back office case processing. They tend to view the reception function as
the most difficult physically and mentally:

It is exhausting spending four hours on the front desk, especially since

you rarely get any breaks. It is always a problem to leave just one person
there because things are so stressful. The long queues often cause sudden
clashes, which always takes a lot of time to forget. You also get a bunch of
aggressive behaviour, jobseekers can talk to us any way they like and never
suffer the consequences. The noise is also irritating, since people are gen-
erally much less patient here than, for instance, when they go shopping.
(a job adviser)

Examples of anti-social behaviour include insults, threats and verbal or

physical violence15: “After about four hours on duty you are completely

14Data and analysis which follows are derived from action-research undertaken with Joyce Sebag

for CHSCT (Comité d’Hygiène, de Sécurité et des Conditions de Travail) with support of the
Pôle Emploi (South-West of France). Because the people interviewed have been known by the
management, we have retained their anonymity.
15Including death threats or reprisals against the person’s family, something they never forget. The

traumas that interviewees described explain the fear that some consultants feel when performing
their professional duties. There is a special vocabulary used to refer to the most violent jobseekers
issuing threats against consultants and their families (for example: “I’m going to find out where
you live, bust it up and sort out your family”). Note that directors and senior managers tend not
to be on the receiving end of these threats. In other words, the risks in question here are specific
to frontline personnel (especially customer contact staff).
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
195

knackered”. “No one respects the front desk, you get no recognition”.
In the words of another job adviser, “It’s a place where you condition
people to defuse conflict slowly”.
The queues mean constant pressure because—with rare exceptions
in the smaller agencies—they tend to average anywhere from three to
five jobseekers (but can go as high as ten). This is a flux tendu organisa-
tion where workers have no downtime between jobseekers. It is a factor
of stress because it pits service quality against the imperative of shorter
queues—an impossible feat. The only solution is to bring other job
advisers from the back office to lend a hand. But because they cannot
get onto the computer terminal that the reception desk’s current occu-
pant is already using, all this does is change the nature of traffic jam,
i.e. it is not a solution. The presence of new job advisers will, however,
temporarily alleviate the pressure on front desk advisers and placate job-
seekers waiting in the queue.
It is particularly difficult to alleviate this tension given the require-
ment that Pôle Emploi not allow “reception staff to go into case details”,
with job advisers being told to spend no more than three minutes with
jobseekers during the initial contact. Most of the job advisers inter-
viewed for this book thought the order made no sense. “Once you start
listening to a jobseeker you get into their case, for instance when you
ask for ID to log the person into the system”. Similarly, “Seeing as the
jobseeker has come into the office, the least you can do is offer informa-
tion about possible solutions to their problem”. Indeed, given the long
queues they face, most wonder whether they should run the risk of try-
ing to solve a problem immediately without knowing how complex the
particular case is. This cognitive dissonance is accompanied by a con-
flict in values. Satisfying the jobseeker as much as possible (with the vast
majority of job advisers talking about a public service mission) is one
possibility. On the other hand, it can be tempting to kick things into
the long grass, ‘saving your skin’ by invoking the impossibility for the
institution, for administrative, organisational or simple timing reasons,
of expediting the case, in the hope that this will avoid an explosion of
anger from waiting jobseekers.
Another source of mental fatigue is the flux tendu characterising
totally dissociated sequences each lasting between two and five minutes
196   J.-P. Durand

without any downtime or breaks. This dispersion across a wide spec-

trum, ranging from placement benefits management to all kinds of
services, training and funding, on top of the associated regulatory
requirements, demands a mental agility that is exhausting. Note that
people do not necessarily feel fatigue while doing their jobs but often
afterwards. Most advisers interviewees said that they felt ‘wiped out’
after spending a morning or afternoon on the reception desk.
Beyond this, job advisers must interview all new jobseekers within a
few days after registering. This IDI concentrates two Pôle Emploi func-
tions: diagnosing the jobseeker’s professional situation to organise work-
force re-entry; and constructing file that can be used to calculate and
pay benefits.
As in any service relationship, the IDI has the aforementioned three
dimensions: pleasantries; contractual definition of the interview itself;
and functional part explaining why the meeting is taking place. Pôle
Emploi supplies a script minimising the first two aspects. Yet these
determine the quality of the interview, which is after all based on a rela-
tionship of trust. The point is to bring to the surface anything hidden,
often because jobseekers are relatively unaware of their own compe-
tencies. A good interview should surprise the jobseeker by revealing to
them for the first time their own potential. This then helps the consult-
ant to build a diagnosis and opens the door towards new job offers.
For productivity reasons, Pôle Emploi limits the initial interview to 50
minutes and requires job advisers to do four every half-day. This is men-
tally very tiring, with advisers concentrating a number of difficult tasks
within a very constrained time period:

– The singularity of jobseeker trajectories requires the same mental agil-

ity as is needed at the reception desk, accompanied by a sort of stub-
born guerrilla warfare waged against jobseekers to help them discover
themselves and the competencies, know-how and implicit knowledge
they possess. “Jobseekers are no longer what they once were. Most
will have had many different employers and experienced a multitude
of situations”. Hence the need for job advisers to engage in perma-
nent mental activity. The stories they hear are complex and involve
professional trajectories that have become increasingly complicated
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
197

and non-linear. This work against, and despite, the other involves
stressful cognitive approaches since the adviser has very little time
to scout out everything hidden below the surface. Having so little
time to apply intuitive thinking can really tire job advisers, especially
because they only really feel satisfied after achieving a positive.
– At the interview, advisers must find a tone and above all a vocabu-
lary enhancing communication. An attenuation rhetoric is present
in most service relationships since consultants have to bridge the
differences between their own language and knowledge and job-
seekers. The originality here is the fact that job advisers only have a
few minutes to convert their language into the one the jobseeker is
using. Even if this is a competency acquired through experience, it
is mentally very tiring whenever it has to be implemented. Ensuring
that jobseekers have fully understood questions often means repeat-
ing them with a different vocabulary without people ever feeling
devalued. It is no good trying to rationalise or reduce the adaptation
time both sides need to achieve mutual comprehension (communi-
cation). Time here is dictated by social realities, not machines. IDIs
operate under constrained time conditions where advisers constantly
ask themselves if they should maintain a given line of questioning
(hence ask the same questions differently) or move on to the next
topic. This dilemma—which can never be fully resolved—is a further
factor of fatigue. Certain competency examinations can be offered
to unqualified jobseekers, like the Répertoire Opérationnel des Métiers
(Operational Professional Inventory). These then reveal the extent to
which both sides do not understand one another and do not real-
ise this. Job advisers often find themselves with what seems like an
abstract list of sub-competencies associated with each profession. In
reality, these abstractions do not speak to the jobseeker who has come
to find employment and be paid benefits.
– Job advisers must deal with jobseekers’vulnerabilities, which remind
them of their own trajectories. Despite the professionalisation
agenda, it is specious to assume they can always separate private and
public lives. Quite the contrary, both are constantly intertwined.
Many recently recruited advisers were until recently on the other side
of the desk. “I don’t want to live through the same things again. Pôle
198   J.-P. Durand

Emploi can be the only social connection for de-socialised lonely peo-
ple suffering in silence. When you’re unemployed, you have fewer
friends. We try to break down barriers and explain how people can
progress, for instance, by ringing old colleagues”. Similarly, “We are
working with people here, it’s not a factory”. Or else, “To really lis-
ten to people you have to share their situation and feelings to some
extent”. The work is psychologically intense given the personal prob-
lems (economic, mental, emotional, etc.) that many jobseekers suffer.
Job advisers will at least partially attend to these torments, depending
on their own personal trajectories, personalities or length of service.
Remote managers may consider the area one that advisers should
control with no further ado. In reality, of course, things are much
more complicated.

Although half of all job advisers interviewed for the present book
viewed the standard of four 50-minute IDIs per half-day as acceptable,
more than one-third struggled to complete the interview in the time
allocated and felt that the whole session was really difficult. This kind of
intense intellectual and emotional mobilisation means that some con-
sultants were exempt from having to run IDIs whereas others only had
to do three every half-day. In short, despite being at the heart of what
Pôle Emploi does, IDIs remain a crucial part of the way that jobseek-
ers construct their image of the institution. Yet senior management still
thought it takes up too much time, raising the question of how possible
it is to find a satisfactory strategic solution to the conundrum of reduc-
ing operational time without harming efficiency.
The amount of invisible work has been constantly increasing every-
where in recent years, and it is no different at PE. This has added to
the workload of consultants, who occasionally refer to so-called invisible
activities as the floating part of their main job. Everyone, including at
all management levels, agrees fervently that there has been an increase in
invisible tasks but nobody is willing to list them and formalise the real
work a job adviser carries out. Calculating benefits, for instance, takes
more time nowadays since jobseekers’ situations are increasingly compli-
cated due to the overlap between different kinds of employment (fixed
term contracts, temporary contracts, part-time contracts, open-ended
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
199

contracts, self-employment, etc.). Regulations are also more com-

plex, affecting benefits but also the requisite conditions if a person is
to benefit from training, funding, accommodations or transport. This is
because of the growing number of funding bodies at all levels of govern-
ment, not to mention other entities. Yet consultants are given no time
to learn this. Problems when archiving the regulatory emails they create
or receive are supposedly solved by their inbox organisation but this is
often haphazard so it actually takes longer to find information hidden
among hundreds of others emails, and requiring search words that may
be hard to memorise. Consultants working face-to-face with jobseekers
might be viewed negatively if they take too long to find information.
This then becomes an additional factor of stress and self-doubt.
Advisers receive between 10 and 30 emails a day, including five to ten
from jobseekers. Much of this corresponds to information from on high
such as regulations and local events. The rest is from colleagues them-
selves seeking information. Responses to jobseeker emails usually gen-
erates other correspondence that must then be managed. Some advisers
protect themselves by not giving jobseekers their email, a practice that
does not enhance Pôle Emploi ’s image. Employer offers take longer
to process since, according to the advisers interviewed for the present
book, they require a modicum of realism to ensure the best fit between
job offers and available jobseekers’ profiles. “We often have to call the
employer back and try and get them to modify the job description” said
a job adviser.
This invisible work often occurs in the timeslots between constrained
activities like reception or mandatory interviews. People use this down-
time to ‘get ahead’, meaning that it becomes increasingly invisible. The
more invisible work there is, the more free moments are used during the
working day to do invisible tasks (Datchary 2012) and the less these are
considered real work. In short, this is yet another work intensification
process, more activity in the same period of time, and one whose invis-
ibility, including to the advisers themselves, makes it quite pernicious
since those who have fewer resources fail before anyone else because
they simple cannot cope. In this context, not coping means falling
behind in processing benefits files or not providing jobseekers in need
with the immediate information, forms or agreements, for an external
200   J.-P. Durand

service or training programme, they require. All these situations make

employees doubt their own competencies and lower self-esteem. They
often culminate in depressive down-spirals where employees suffer from
insomnia and respond by taking pharmaceutical drugs before, in some
cases, calling in sick.

Job Adviser’ Professional Ideal

A professional ideal is a norm or set of norms setting the ideal condi-

tions in which work activities associated with a given profession can be
exercised. There can be some deviance from the norm due to particu-
lar constraints, especially in a service sector that views people as users.
Other factors include employee’s trajectories and competencies. Norms
can be general, i.e. a host of national regulations for Pôle Emploi and/or
local, depending on the history of each agency, its work organisation,
type of management and audience.
A professional ideal can be established and constructed over the long-
term, and modified to match its implementation conditions, through
dialectic tensions between the desires expressed by professionals, opin-
ion makers, union leaders, and what managers think the ideal should
be. At Pôle Emploi these would be senior managers or politicians. In
short, a professional ideal is a set of norms incorporating management
objectives and what employees represent to themselves as their social
function in the job they hold or work they perform.16 It is also an early
source of destabilisation since unlike the past, especially in industrial
sectors where prescription carries more weight than autonomy, noth-
ing is certain anymore. In this kind of situation, management objectives
often upset professional ideals in whose construction employees have
invested so much of themselves.17

16This is distinct from Marie-Anne Dujarier’s approach (2012), which sees the work ideal as

something constructed relatively unequivocally by senior corporate (or public administration)

managers whose technical aptitudes are strengthened by the support they get from a multitude of
sources, including consultancies.
17Examples include librarians sharing deep thoughts online about how to construct their pro-

fessional ideals. See Bibliothécaires in prospectives: http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/culture/deps/2008/

pdf/tdp_bibliothecaires.pdf.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
201

Even so, having professional ideals can be a useful replacement for

other constructs such as professional identity,18 ethos or culture. These
variants are only used in specific contexts, or in insular schools of
thought, and only pertain to one part of the object covered by a pro-
fessional ideal, which combines all the different processes constructing
identity at work (Chapter 2). It also refers to what everyone thinks their
profession, at PE, as job advisers, should ideally become without forget-
ting that this construction is a collective undertaking that causes ten-
sion between employers’ aspirations and demands, on one hand, and
employees’ ethos and desires, on the other. A professional ideal is based
on rules that have been set and modified through collective action. The
process of constructing these rules is itself a social object (Osty 2010,
167; Durand 2007) that is part of the professional ideal and gives
meaning to work, at least for those who are engaged in reflecting upon
and debating what kinds of professions people are actually doing.
In short, the professional ideal emerges from the collective. The fact
that Thursday afternoon team meetings at Pôle Emploi became increas-
ingly closed and involved horizontal debates about the consultancy pro-
fession, epitomising a top-down circulation of information, impeded
collective work. This led to many advisers feeling isolated in their place
of work and not only in their dealings with jobseekers. Isolation can
weaken professional identity and lead to a loss of benchmarks, self-
doubt and worries about one’s personal activities. In turn, these create
the conditions for malaise at work, a problem whose amplitude would
often be revealed during later incidents involving a jobseeker or col-
league. This is very different from what F. Osty called “micro-collective
regulations”, where people help each other to face whatever extra work
they have, behaviour that supports professional ideal and solidarity.
Exchanging best practice is key to the professional ideal (Clot 2010).
Moments of sharing and having ways of letting off steam both regulate
the way an organisation functions. These exchanges are becoming more
rare, however. In one job advisers’ words,

18See tax officers’ construction of their professional identities, c.f. Florence Osty (2010, 118
and ss.) along with teachers, social workers, advisers, etc.—all akin to the activities carried out by
Pôle Emploi advisers.
202   J.-P. Durand

Professions are complex and there is no time during the workday for chat-
ting with other people, except when you pass them in the corridor. These
exchanges are not seen as part of your job (…) But we still have hope
since some companies are abandoning lean management. So will we one
day. Products, like industrial production rules, are not interchangeable
with humans.

This is especially true since the practices being exchanged often concern
ways of managing flows.

This happens much more than before, with jobseekers talking to you
more and more aggressively about their benefits. In the past we could
take a little time off afterwards, get a glass of water and calm down after
an argument. We could shake it off, let off some steam, but no more.
We just don’t have spare time to forget what happened. It’s the way that
everything has been accelerated. And in the end you don’t feel so good at
work anymore. (job adviser)

On top of this, there was feeling at PE of having lost certain

competencies.

“I can’t do the things I used to. For instance, it’s just impossible for me to
click on all of the 10,000 items I have to look at to get the information
I need for an interview. There have been several changes, many with an
immediate effect, for example when the government decides something
new. The risk is that we say things that are wrong, which can have some
negative effects on the jobseeker. I’m increasingly in a position where I
have to say that I’m not sure what I’m talking about”. Similarly, “In the
past it was easier to incorporate these changes by sharing best practices
with colleagues but we don’t have time for meetings anymore and all we
have is a non-stop top-down flow of information”. (ibid.)

As defined above, a professional ideal is clearly constructed using the

management objectives that the institution has been given. It is also an
aspect of hierarchical social control and of each adviser’s control over
their colleagues. Because this informal control is rules-based, it becomes
a condition of each adviser’s recognition at work, and the recognition
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
203

of their work, by peers, senior management and users (Dujarier 2012).

Social recognition is not only inherent to people respecting the rules
associated with a professional ideal but also a condition of well-being
at work. Without recognition from others, subjects lose their reason to
exist, including at work (see Chapter 2).
As the name indicates, job advisers’ professional ideal involves find-
ing work for jobseekers. Over the past ten years, however, PE employ-
ees have become more involved in intermediation activities, i.e. creating
networks between jobseekers and employers without senior manage-
ment being particulary concerned with the outcome. Similarly and
due to their employment situation, advisers are encouraged nowadays
to prescribe external services, meaning more or less strenuous training
like drafting CVs, making presentations, and so on. In the past these
programmes were done in-house but they have been systematically out-
sourced to private providers much more interested in profitability than
in placing jobseekers effectively. This has further damaged Pôle Emploi ’s
image and deeply irritated advisers.
All these changes in PE’s professional ideal seemed like a step back-
wards to many former and current job advisers, since public service
no longer meant finding people a job but managing unemployment
in social terms. Having said that, new recruits found it easier to follow
the new approach if they accepted its underlying neo-liberal ideology.
Note that many were not very aware of this aspect. Some saw PE’s mis-
sion as ensuring each jobseeker could seek work autonomously, “driving
their own return to the job market” in one adviser’s words. Sending job-
seekers to personal spaces created for them on the Pôle Emploi website
or prescribing an external service might then satisfy the adviser’s pro-
fessional ideal since it could be construed as helping jobseekers find a
way back into employment. This was particularly reassuring to advisers
because it fit institutional directives.
For most job advisers who saw their mission as getting a maximum
number of jobseekers back into employment, if possible with open-
ended contracts, the gap between their professional ideal and daily prac-
tice was so wide that it caused a deep malaise. Employees would often
attribute this sentiment to the lack of human resources they had to treat
the human disaster that is unemployment. The number of unemployed
204   J.-P. Durand

persons in France grew by around 25% between 2009 and 2015. At

Pôle Emploi on the other hand, including job losses at during the five
years when Nicolas Sarkozy was President and the subsequent creation
of 4000 jobs under François Hollande, staff numbers rose by less than
4%. Neither IT improvements nor the elimination of jobseekers’ man-
datory monthly interviews offset the way that the rise in staff numbers
had lagged behind the rise in unemployment.
The end result is that many advisers started to feel that they were
doing social work instead of job placement, with one stating the had
become “a social assistant” and another considering that Pôle Emploi ’s
main function was “social pacification” based on the grants, aids and
benefits it distributed. Many also saw the conditions in which they
exercised their profession as having been severely degraded, epitomised
by the closure of certain locations and fewer possibilities for “arguing”
(Clot 2010), which allows people to share doubts, failures and questions
in a way that nurtures collective responses that are coherent and adapted
to changing circumstances. In their view, this could be achieved by
eliminating “big meetings” meant to help them process the information
distilled from on top, replacing them with debates whose topics would
be independently defined by small groups of advisers.
The malaise may be proportionately even greater today among office
managers, assistant directors or team leaders. There are many examples
of cardiovascular problems or people burning out and/or losing the cog-
nitive abilities that help them to manage their staff and office. In situ-
ations where working conditions are deteriorating rapidly, mid-level
managers often suffer first since they try the impossible, which is to
keep things as they are despite the increasing demands put on them, and
without any extra resources. Their health problems are a real sign of the
general and systemic deterioration of institutional working conditions.
In short, the growing malaise at Pôle Emploi was not only caused
by the extra workload associated with the implementation of prin-
ciples such as flux tendu and kaizen (permanent improvement in the
productive system), all of which transformed the immediate working
conditions. There was also the growing distance between daily work-
ing conditions and advisers’ professional ideals. The more these work-
ing conditions differed from professional ideals, the more that new
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
205

worker-type characteristics appeared. In other words, workers restruc-

tured through their disconnect, with reeds finding it easier to accept
the new conditions, especially where an institution has eased its profes-
sional requirements, except that PE advisers were prescribing training
services instead of placing jobseekers. Functionally restructured advisers
were congruent with the new imperatives. They had been formatted or
standardised with respect to the new circumstances. Longer serving col-
leagues and/or those who refused and resisted the disconnect had to be
sufficiently strong to cope with the new situation. Otherwise they were
the first to fall victim to socio-psychic disorders.
To encourage the restructuring of subjects, a multitude of provi-
sions have been created to support employees in their daily activities.
Corporate executives and consultancies often present this as a prime
functionality, highlighting the need to monitor production outputs
(costs, delays, quality, etc.) and/or employees whose careers could be
optimised. Behind this façade, however, all these provisions perform a
very different role.

The Hidden Functions of Indicateurs

and Personal Appraisals
Tens of thousands of workers employed in large firms or public admin-
istrations are occupied using different tools to monitor the production
of goods and services and track professional trajectories. In France, for
instance, the number of individuals doing such roles has risen much
more quickly than national GDP. Hence the need to analyse their stra-
tegic functions, which must go well beyond the simple monitoring
role that the tools they wield are normally associated with. Tools play
a part in the re-construction of professional ideals, behavioural norms
and indeed the making of the new worker. The sections below will
successively dissect the mechanics and processes used to govern these
production purposes, as well as the many individuals who have them-
selves become types of management systems. They also look at the
use of quantophrenia bibliometrics and finally at employees’ personal
appraisals.
206   J.-P. Durand

As noted in Chapter 1, flux tendu principles essentially mobilise

employees because their responsibilities consist of keeping flows reg-
ular, that is preventing interruptions that penalise, first and foremost,
downstream colleagues. If this were to happen, the latter group would
have nothing to do and could no longer meet their targets. The per-
manent mobilisation of employees based on flux tendu, whether they
are material (factories, mass retail, logistics warehouses, etc.) or infor-
mational (administration, banking, general services) in nature, we have
termed constrained involvement. To cope more effectively with the risk
of interrupted flows, production and work organisers have spread the
practice of group work. This involves peers more than managers push-
ing employees to be (self )disciplined. Those who do not respect locally
established productive norms are marginalised and sooner or later
excluded.
But this is not enough to ensure employees’ total collaboration. It is
when these provisions come under pressure from flux tendu and peers
that they become systems. The goal is to ensure that employees both
engage and are effective. Hence the frenetic proliferation of physical
indicator-based work monitoring and control modalities over the past
30 years.

The Real Purpose of Management Indicators

The basic objective of management indicators, and the balanced score-

cards that use these indicators, is to offer a ‘true’ image of a company
or public administration to its executives. Enthusiasm for these indi-
cators goes back to theories that Michael Porter published in 1986 in
relation to corporate value chains. The advent of IT and telecoms with
all their upside has intensified this reliance on indicators. Where quan-
titative data used to be compiled every quarter or month, today this is
done weekly, daily, hourly and even in real-time. In addition, data no
longer refers to the unit producing the goods and services but analyses
on a even more detailed level. The end result over the past 30 years is
an exponential rise in the production of statistical data requiring pro-
cessing. The question then becomes to what end is this being done, and
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
207

whether the data produced and the quality of the images of reality con-
structed through this data are as useful as they are supposed to be.
In terms of concrete frontline realities, operatives, being the people
who produce value, always want positive indicators vis-à-vis the targets
they have been set. This is because indicators coming in below target are
likely to harm the individual, who then uses different means to ensure
that they are closer to the objectives than they really are. Everyone up
and down the hierarchy denies that these manipulations happen but
that means nothing. Attentive observation and in-depth interviews have
regularly revealed practice that is very different from what people say.
Furthermore, it often happens that n+1 tolerates and covers up inac-
curacies they know about because they do not want to be held respon-
sible for a failure to meet targets. For similar reasons, n + 2 then n +
3 and then the whole reporting line does the same, ultimately falsify-
ing the images of production and indeed the whole activity. Nobody
knows what the margin of error is but no one worries about it anymore.
Companies, or public administrations have become shadow theat-
ers where senior managers have an increasingly vague grasp of reality,
despite great tools (indicators and IT) theoretically enabling them to
know the truth. Some call this a structure of lies (Loquen 2003) whose
organisational modalities encourage employees to lie by “disconnecting
from reality those actors who create value” (Loquen 2003, 27). But far
from drawing the same conclusions as this author does about the need
to produce a “true” image of companies, it is worth considering whether
the whole effort is illusory19 since the distortion between image and
reality is rooted in the very nature of the employment relationship.
The new schizophrenia is based on two interconnected phenomena,
first the overt desire to cut costs, and second the associated verbosity
intimating that this is an infinite process. The permanent slashing of

19According to the author, another explanation is that the variances in question are caused by the
fact that,
Figures are inaccurate benchmarks, specifically because they are targets, i.e. they do not
take people’s perceptions into account. Companies prefer to rely on figures instead of sub-
jective (but very real) feedback information coming from customers, employees, share-
holders or suppliers. (Loquen 2003, 36)
208   J.-P. Durand

resources, essentially human ones, due to the implementation of lean

production, makes it increasingly hard if not impossible to reach tar-
gets. Everyone knows this yet pretends it is not so. The constant impov-
erishment of resources has become a management method and tool to
such an extent that not even senior managers expect anymore to hit tar-
gets. The question then becomes what kind and level of compromise
is acceptable at all hierarchical levels; and how to negotiate the failure
to reach targets, such as late productive segment deliveries, such as the
infamous double accounting benchmarks that have arisen in design
teams where engineers no longer have any hope of delivering their out-
put on time.
Nor is it possible to neglect the negative side effects produced by
these indicators. In hospitals, T2A activity-based management has led
many departments to drop several difficult, and not very lucrative, med-
ical acts in exchange for other more advantageous ones that are bet-
ter paid and easier to carry out. There is an insurance company whose
employees prioritise simple files and send anything slightly more com-
plex off to other departments. Even at Pôle Emploi, job advisers seeking
to satisfy the output demands placed in them spent more time on ‘high
potential’ jobseekers than on other less qualified ones who may have
had greater need. The battle against negative side effects has become
especially costly and ineffective given how easy it is to get around the
new performance measurement provisions, even as operatives are being
asked to spend more time on them, leading to a further loss of pro-
ductive time. PriceWatershouseCooper studies show that it becomes
increasingly hard to hit targets in a time of crisis (quoted by de Gaulejac
2011, 56) and that this has created more and more cases of ‘fraud’ by
people afraid of losing their jobs.

In the main, it is no longer employees who commit fraud but middle

managers and increasingly top executives (whose share rose from 26%
of all cases in 2007 to 46% in 2009). This is despite the fact that these
higher echelons are supposed to ensure that everybody else plays by the
rules. It is particularly poignant given that they themselves are in a posi-
tion to achieve things but have also been allocated untenable objectives.
(de Gaulejac 2011, 57)
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
209

Everyone observing, but also participating in, this vast quantification

effort asks sooner or later how much it costs to spend as much time
filling in all these indicator tables. According to the surveys conducted
for the present book in a number of offices and services, engineers, tech-
nicians and service heads spend up to 15–20% of their time compil-
ing statistics. Yet data, however realistic it may be, is rarely shared in
its raw form, especially where it shows under-performance, explaining
why employees spend up to 10% of their time inventing numbers that
are closer to their targets. The production of falsified data must be done
extremely carefully since its supposed veracity relies on its coherence.
This is redolent of the aforementioned invisible tasks, ones that are
untracked yet mandatory and which take up so much of office employ-
ees and managers’ general time. Paradoxically, anything between
one-quarter and one-third of staff members’ time tends to be spent on
unproductive tasks that see people monitoring their own output. In
terms of the economics of running a business, or public administration,
however, things are even worse. There are entire departments whose role
is to design and produce indicator tables and reports reflecting needs,
or methods, that are constantly changing. The ensuing data must then
be interpreted by even larger departments that are supposed to offer
recommendations and suggestions. It is not at all clear that this titanic
work actually occurs, including because management usually has pre-
suppositions that it attaches to these false images of reality. All of this
involves new rounds of cost-cutting including further reductions in
(human) resources and increasingly demanding targets without any
additional means to achieve them.
This justifies a closer look at the real functions that indicators or reports
perform. Some are manifest, whereas others are less so and merit scrutiny:

– The official function is clearly to monitor industrial or service pro-

duction and provide a progress report offering images of reality con-
structed to be as objective as possible. The goal is to coordinate the
activity of thousands of employees working in scores or even hun-
dreds of companies;
– Given the gaps described in the paragraphs above between these
images and reality, indicators are akin to trinkets that exist to reassure
210   J.-P. Durand

corporate executives. Numbers and complex mathematical mod-

els play almost the same role for these managers as Native American
chants did in getting rain to fall on cornfields. Beliefs are powerful
drivers of actions, in particular where cause and effect relationships
cannot be verified;
– A control function no longer focused on outputs but on group work
and above all on individuals becomes a way of using the appraisal
procedures discussed below to determined who are the best employ-
ees termed “high potential” managers;
– The final and less openly admitted function is to get people to inter-
nalise tacit norms. By accepting constraints that supposedly make it
easier to meet targets, workers are transforming themselves in such a
way as to enhance their chances of success and achieve self-esteem in
this way. These are all characteristics associated with new types of dis-
located workers who are supposed to invest themselves without get-
ting anything in return, since they rarely get a reward or promotion
afterwards. Instead they are driven by the fear of being disqualified if
they do not perform to the expected standard. It is the requirement
that people internalise certain quantified norms, as part of a wider
numbers cult, that affects their psyche and subjectivity, condemning
weaker ones to fall victim to a series of socio-psychic disorders.

In other words, an indicators’ strength is to communicate with indi-

viduals in isolation about a company’s collective problems. That is to
say, people must individualise work relationships and even the employ-
ment relationship itself. At one extreme, this only affects those indi-
viduals who are concerned by quantified outputs, whereas at the other
extreme, where relationships dominate, it is the company, and beyond
this, its capital, that dilutes responsibility through a series of reporting
lines and departments. On one hand, there is the individualisation of
the constraint that indicators be respected. On the other, management
is increasing impersonal. According to Roland Gori,

When numbers are used as modes of governance, they become a way of

getting people to be silent before acquiescing to their subjugation. (…)
This is a ‘generalised proletarisation of existence’. In the past, people
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
211

became proletarians as and when their knowledge and know-how was

confiscated by actual machines Today these machines are intangible and
consist of standardised protocols prescribing rules of good practice to
doctors, researchers, artists, Pôle Emploi consultants, judges, teachers - all
of whom therefore become modern-day proletarians. The worst thing is
that people are increasingly accepting these norms even though they find
them absurd. (…) Because it is easier to rebel against a boss than against
a system made out of a spider’s web of norms and controls. (Gori 2014)

Questions about quantophrenia and the indicator system’s cost still

remain, even though many hesitate before trying to calculate the returns
they get from these formidable calculating machine. The production of
tables and the compilation of data in compatible IT systems, necessar-
ily involving the adoption of integrated management software packages
like ERP Enterprise Resource Planning, is followed by an aggregation of
findings before culminating in the organisation of meetings where the
whole repertoire is commented upon. All of this occupies huge numbers
of employees, or is outsourced to specialist consultancies that cost just
as much. It might be hypothesized that these populations are a “criti-
cal mass” helping a senior management cohort that is increasingly cut
off from its base,20 i.e. they carry forth the good word and even more
importantly express their support for senior managers’ decisions in stra-
tegic places and at strategic times, wherever the distribution of human
and material resources is being discussed. Management controllers
and the management systems they use (Maugeri 2011; Maugeri and
Metzger 2014; Boussard 2001, 2008) mobilise hundreds of employees
who work together with front-line managers, or duplicate their activ-
ities if needed, to spread the new production and work norms21 born
out of the financialisation of the economy and the public debt that it
has caused (Chesnais 2011; Morin 2015). Indeed, the huge wage costs

20It is worth recalling that senior management is cut off from its base because middle managers,
for the aforementioned reasons, manifest a great deal of objective solidarity with operatives and
do not always keep their hierarchical superiors informed about what is happening in the front
lines.
21See issue 4 of Nouvelle Revue du Travail: “Financiarisation et travail”.
212   J.-P. Durand

of the new employees involved in management control and reporting

activities is never taken into account since the power and efficiency of
the social control they exercise over people’s work will always have a
greater effect than their cost.
Criticism of the dictatorship of numbers reached another dimension
in studies by Albert Ogien, who asserted that evaluations have lost their
initial meaning (the axiological dimension that consists of attributing a
moral value to a fact) and have been replaced by quantification, being
the second meaning of evaluating, in other word, applying arithmetic
and statistical procedures (Ogien 2013, 11). These have spread rapidly
thanks to IT, to such an extent that, “The obsessional quest for increas-
ingly exhaustive and detailed numbers about an activity for which sen-
ior managers are responsible now conflicts with another goal, namely
the need to take indisputably objective decisions” (ibid., 27). In other
words, the higher the volume of quantitative data, the less objective the
basis for a decision. This is because the growing multiplicity of crite-
ria and their increasingly subtle weighting in more and more complex
mathematical models has increased their internal opaqueness to the
point of masking the logic driving this phenomenon. Decisions that
influence or modify it will therefore depend more on a models’ internal
logic than on the laws governing the phenomenon itself.22
This “mathematisation of the social world” tries to portray itself as a
neutral and purely technical enterprise. However,

Although it is not impossible to qualify human activity, such efforts are

never entirely satisfying given how hard it is to accept the idea that any
description of an action that neglects its meaning and intentions can
account for its reality. This explains why the quantification of policy has
been inherently incapable of grasping the real meaning thereof. (ibid., 31)

What is surprising then is that the parties being evaluated thus do not
rebel. This poses the ancillary question of how long numbers will be

22This partially disqualifies modern economic science, with most publications today representing

orthodox schools of thought looking at internal criticisms of the models used in analyses of eco-
nomic phenomena instead of analysing and deconstructing said models themselves.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
213

able to maintain their aura of invincibility. On one hand, any employee

who looking to avoid quantification is immediately considered suspi-
cious or incompetent and accused of trying to mask his or her short-
coming. On the other, fascination with numbers that supposedly
objectify realities derives from an irrational vision of these numbers,
which are almost sanctified.

In our long rationalised societies, it is possible to pretend that everyone is

disposed to sanctify numbers given the consensus that what they express
cannot be doubted. (…) The sanctity of numbers is particularly hard
to deny seeing as quantification builds a foundation for objectification
approaches that, in the name of reason, specifically seek to eradicate the
submissive attitudes characterising blind respect for holy things. (ibid.,
75–76)

This reverse reasoning supports the use of numbers—portrayed as ram-

parts against obscurantism and irrational beliefs—and makes it difficult
and even impossible to contest the sanctification of everything quantita-
tive. Albert Ogien has called the phenomenon “violence of arithmetic”.
Nowadays it governs most all work evaluation modalities in companies
and public administrations. Its most extreme manifestation, however, is
in evaluations of university researchers’ work.

Bibliometry and Scientific Research, or the End

of Reason

Both public and private sector research policy managers have since the
late 1970s expressed the same desire to only fund actions that are recent
and ‘discover things’. That is research that is produces outcomes which
companies will be able to use rapidly. This may include new materi-
als, nano-technologies, molecules that can be turned into medication,
and so on. To achieve this, they need quantitative indicators to identify
which research labs engage in ‘useful discover’ hence merit the human
and financial resources they will need to compete in the great global
race to innovate, a cornerstone of economic war in the modern world.
The famous Shanghai ranking of world universities illustrates this best.
214   J.-P. Durand

Initially designed by China’s leaders as a way of deciding which are

best universities that Chinese students might attend abroad, it rapidly
became an almost unique tool for classifying universities, based on crite-
ria borrowed from the Anglo-American research world.
The first criterion that experts, generally mathematicians, use is the
number of publications by each researcher. Given the need to rank the
reviews where researchers publish, Eugene Garfield23 suggested calculat-
ing an impact factor for each, being the frequency with which it is cited
in the scientific world. This is then applied to each researcher, hence
each laboratory comprised of researchers, so that the impact factor for
any one researcher corresponds to the number of articles published dur-
ing a finite period of time, generally two years, weighted by the ‘value’
of the reviews (classified between A and D, for instance). The total
number of article citations, as identified using Internet search engines, is
then aggregated.
The first criticism at this level is that an impact factor does not meas-
ure the value of a researcher but only the visibility. For instance, despite
his total ineptitude, the Soviet geneticist Lyssenko was once classified as
world champion in terms of his impact factor. Similarly, research by one
Jacques Benveniste into the memory of water sparked great controversy
leading to countless citations that had nothing to do with the scientific
value of his ‘discovery’. Indeed, given how few publications Einstein
produced when alive, he would not even have been classified as a ‘pub-
lishing’ researcher using this system.

In short, the impact factor does not necessarily assess scientific innova-
tion but the ability to value this at a given moment in time. One exam-
ple is the discovery of the genetic code. “Dounce presented this seminal
notion in molecular biology (the idea of a genetic code) for the first time
in a 1952 article that received a mere two citations. Not only did Dounce

23Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information in 1960. Today this belongs to

Thomson Reuteurs, one of the world’s biggest information agencies (specialising in finance and
science), which also publishes Journal Citation Reports, a compilation of information about scien-
tific reviews worldwide.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
215

discover this valuable concept (Watson and Crick only identified the
structure of DNA in 1953), but his article suggested ideas about protein
biosynthesis that were at least ten years ahead of what his peers knew
at the time. 1964-1969 was the actual era when real knowledge began
to spread about the genetic code. Not one of the experimental articles
that advanced humankind’s understanding of this code ever referred to
Dounce” (Ninio 2008, 41). Conversely, Watson and Crick’s 1953 article
in Nature magazine was cited 195 times.

Other criticisms relate to the illusion of mathematical magic. In 2007,

the International Mathematics Union stated that,

The evolution towards greater transparency and responsibility in the aca-

demic world has created a ‘culture of numbers’, with institutions and
individuals believing that correct decisions can be made thanks to an
algorithmic evalution of statistical data. Without knowing how to meas-
ure quality (which remains the ultimate goal), decision-makers have
replaced it with numbers that [in their opinion] are capable of measuring
everything. The current trend is to seek input from people whose profes-
sional ‘business is numbers’, to wit, mathematicians and statisticians.

It is because of this difficulty in assessing qualitative phenomena using

quantification tools that Luc Miller, a mathematician at the Université
de Paris Ouest—Nanterre asked,

What is the value of a citation? How can you assume the scientific qual-
ity of a citation from what has been cited? There are good reasons to cite
article but they vary greatly from one discipline to another (…) People
manufacture ‘impact indices’ based on number of citations irrespective of
whether the real impact is positive or negative. After all, even if a text is
being demolished, it gets cited. Not to mention the fact that some cita-
tions are rhetorical, mentioned in exhaustive inventories of articles on a
topic even if they have no value. (Miller 2008)

Questions pertaining to the value of qualitative output are particularly

poignant in social sciences or humanities, as noted by Albert Ogien in
reference to politics which, by essence, are not something that can be
216   J.-P. Durand

quantified. According to Clotilde Leguil, a philosopher at Université de

Paris VIII,

Something is changing in civilisation when knowledgeable people ration-

alise technical gestures by inventing instruments of measurement that will
then modify how humans relate to the times they live in. The substitution
of measured time (timed time) for experienced time will translate over the
long run into a new kind of world, one from which imprecision, general
impressions and leeway will progressively disappear. (Leguil 2008)

Trying to quantify the mental, emotional and psychological world, even

if it is only to account for the phenomenological form that it assumes,
materialising in each author’s number of publications or citations, is a
coup that even the founder of AERES (which in 2014 became the Haut
Conseil de l’Évaluation de la Recherche and et de l’Enseignement Supérieur)

“High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education” has
described as “the formalised introduction of bibliometrics, which could
have extremely beneficial effects but also deleterious ones. We should
therefore preserve qualitative approaches. The more elements of objec-
tivity we have, the more it will be necessary to develop them. After all,
the greatest scientific innovations are not necessarily born in the paradig-
matically most productive structures, so that just adding just a few more
variables ends up justifying new publications. In a certain number of dis-
ciplines, it can take a long time to publish an article and this too must be
taken into account. To protect innovation and creation, it is indispensable
to not only focus on quantitative dimensions but also qualitative ones.
This is going to be a very difficult task for the institutions involved but
also for central government (which provides public funding) and even for
private investors”.24

24Interview with Jacques-Alain Miller in Le Nouvel Âne, n° 8, February 2008. This special issue

tries to mobilise the psychoanalyst community against partisans of cognitive-behaviouralist psy-

chology, over-represented in the national ministry responsible for this area of activity and likely to
undermine teaching of psychoanalysis and any university research associated with this.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
217

Yet despite these problems, national management research organisa-

tions continue to be enamoured of quantification. Most institutional,
often university, management teams allocate subsidies and researcher
positions based on bibliometric results, if only because this is the easi-
est tool to use since it functions transversally and unifies measurement
despite critical differences between disciplines. In the words of Philippe
Meirieu,

In the name of quality and stringency, people are calling for quantifia-
ble results subject to strictly formal criteria. I defend, on the other hand,
the idea that research has always benefited from very different forms of
writing, contrasting relationships within the academic community and
linkages to social actors - all of which makes it possible to ‘test’ findings
elsewhere than in one’s own small epistemological circles.25

Many major scientific discoveries have arisen, apparently randomly, as

part of research projects that had a whole other focus. In short, invest-
ments, like quantified evaluations, often have very little to do with
the quality or potential of findings. Hence a recurring joke in many
research labs that the discovery of electricity did not come investing in
candle improvement research.
Another basic criticism of quantitative assessments of researcher out-
put is the negative side effects that they inevitably produce. The first
undesired and counterproductive effect is an inflation of publications,
particularly in social sciences and humanities. Lindsay Waters, former
head of Harvard University Press, has criticised these mountains of arti-
cles and books that no one has the time to read, calling on

University professionals to take the necessary measures to defend and

protect the independence of their activities, how books and articles are
written, remembering how they used to be seen before markets started
smothering us and the value of our books began degrading. (Waters
2008, 10)

25Le Nouvel Âne, February 2008, Issue 8, p. 55.

218   J.-P. Durand

The world may already be at this point, given the dozens of texts that
appear every month, ones whose existence many researchers often dis-
cover only accidentally when marking student papers. Bibliometrics rein-
forces this inflation. Unlike Fahrenheit 451, totalitarianism does not win
by burning books but by drowning readers in information overload. The
digitalisation of the publishing world has sparked an exponential growth
in the number of scientific reviews, soon to be followed by e-books. It is
so crucial that applicants for jobs or promotions publish, a competition
where the people seeking a position often have a thicker file than the jury
members judging them, that they no longer do this to advance knowledge
but to build up their CVs. In this way, the impact factor strays from its
initial function of objectifying scientific progress to become a benchmark
lacking real meaning. Hence the reaction of many scientists advocating a
more reasoned slow science (http://slow-science.org) plus renewed focus
on publications’ scientific interest instead of their sheer numbers.
This race for greater visibility, measured by the number of citations,
has another negative side effect, being the creation of research networks
that self-cite and sometimes write articles jointly. The number of signa-
tories for a given article is two to four times higher in natural sciences
compared to human sciences. Moreover, authors doing this often cite
their own publications. IT struggles to detect practices that have totally
undermined the principle of quantitative evaluation, a deviation that
was predictable because endemic to the methodology applied.
Despite criticisms of impact factors’ deficiencies, they remain pow-
erful tools in research rankings and are therefore used as decision-mak-
ing aids in France and abroad. The same argument is constantly used
to undermine those who criticise impact factors, namely that it is hard
to think of any replacement that is as easy to use when ranking labo-
ratories and researchers. Indeed, it is worth exploring in further detail
whether it is in the collective interest to evaluate investments at all, and
if so whether consideration should be given to other more qualitative
aspects of research, such as its valuation and vulgarisation, aspects that
quantification inevitably overlooks.
Many politicians and research managers mistakenly believe that they
can use this approach to steer research efforts efficiently and improve
return on investment. Researchers tend to be fatalistic and feel trapped
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
219

by an infernal machine where any refusal to obey the rules creates a risk
of marginalisation that makes it hard to get a new job or promotion.
Once possible forums for debating evaluation criteria have been elimi-
nated and replaced by all-conquering bibliometrics (despite all the afore-
mentioned pitfalls), this becomes the only factor deciding who wins. At
that point, researchers subjected to the bibliometric principle start per-
ceived power as something impersonal, reflecting decisions and rules
that are impossible to get around or change. Quantified evaluations are
seen as a given without any hope of modifying them or their substance.
Resignation, fatalism and docility becomes the responses that cost least
in terms of allowing researchers to continue. New dislocated workers
give themselves body and soul to research and publish more and more.
But his horizon (recruitment, promotion), as for the walker, recedes as
he advances. They are forced to restructure themselves in an aggressive
environment that is driven and instituted by quantified evaluations. By
its very nature, competition isolates them from other persons. Those who
are psychologically strong can survive. Others give up and seek other
functions. This claustration of researchers explains the limited success of
social movements organised to “save research”26 since the quantifying law
that tests researcher-subjects by individualising them carries within it a
logic of collective inaction.
Moreover, the quantophrenia management systems in the public or
private sector are not the only things to undermine organised collective
action. Systematic individual appraisals, another 1980s Japanese import,
also construct the new worker in their own way.

The Real Functions of Personal Appraisals

Rationally, employees’ individual appraisals belong to a compe-

tency model that is an essential part of implementing lean produc-
tion, itself the culmination of a ‘Provisional Management of Jobs and

26See Sauvons la recherche or Sauvons l’université, which had only a relative and temporary success,
with the slow science movement resonating only slightly in France.
220   J.-P. Durand

Competencies approach (see Chapter 1). The idea here is to get employ-
ees who correspond to public and private sector job descriptions.
Appraisals address their work outcomes and ‘how to behave’. In the
words of, Jet Tours’ MD, “Our employees are judged on three types of
objectives: quantitative, qualitative and behavioural… recruitment pro-
cedures are complex and interviews are just one of several measures we
use to measure personalities”.27 This language (personality measurement
or behavioural evaluation) masks a desire to ‘gauge’ (a popular term in
HRM circles) employee loyalty to management and turns, as discussed
in Chapter 1, into assessment grid criteria.
This is akin to the line in the sand that certain individuals draw when
judging others on moral grounds. Indeed, a slew of senior corporate
managers have been fined for illegally compiling files tracking union
employees’ opinions and character. Among the individual appraisal
matrices used for the present book, it was edifying to find the following:

– Availability: Those who “offer their service before being asked” get
five points. “Those who show no initiative work and wait passively
for orders” get one point.
– Sociability: Those who say nothing negative about their hierarchi-
cal superiors and behave well towards them, “who are very nice with
them”, get five points. Those who “manifest irritation towards their
hierarchical superiors, colleagues and departmental personnel” (i.e.
staff working in executive functions) get mediocre marks.

There are many examples showing that appraisals focus less and less on
employees’ work and more on their loyalty to a company’s executives
and managers. It is no surprise therefore that employees increasingly
pretend to simulate expected behaviour while maintaining their own
vision of a situation, their work and management itself. They cannot
say this to peers, however, for fear of revealing their feelings. The result
is that appraisal procedures often achieve their aims, which is to silence
criticisms and subjugate most employees.

27Les Echos, October 2005, p. 57.

 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
221

The main thesis here is that the first function of individual appraisal
systems is not to analyse promotions or distribute individual brownie
points. Indeed, the links between appraisal timelines and procedures,
one hand, and promotions, on the other hand, are very loose. Quite
often, it is managers from different departments who are responsible for
each of these aspects (Durand 2011). It would be rational for individual
appraisals to offer objective promotion criteria but this rarely happens
because they have a much more central function of getting everyone to
conform to a disciplinary model, engaging fully to achieve a company’s
goals internalising its objectives without questioning them.
Individual appraisals’ immediate functions are therefore to subjugate
and dominate. The process itself institutes hierarchical asymmetry and
makes this central to social relationships at work. Think of a more or
less blank piece of paper containing five or six open questions that peo-
ple are supposed to fill in using no more than a half-page for an annual
appraisal. The document cannot be returned without something writ-
ten on it since this would be construed as a sign of employees’ impo-
tence vis-à-vis their future. Nor can it be filled in haphazardly since this
would be more or less projected as employees admitting to their defi-
ciencies at work; their inappropriate aspirations; or even worse, their
not being suited for the position or function in question. All of which
explains why so many people write more or less collective answers, often
working together with their family, in a way they think will satisfy their
next-level managers’ expectations. This is wrong for at least two reasons.
First, most people do not want to feel empathy with their immediate
boss. Second, the process forces employees to select a desirable attitude
out of the many different ones that are possible, even if they are unfa-
miliar with the ins and outs of each. It is therefore an unwelcome return
to vague and arbitrary management, an approach many find highly con-
fusing (see Chapter 2). This is a pretty violent power relationship, one
that might be called abyssal given the desperate imbalance at its heart.
On one side, some employees lack resources to “fill in the document
properly”. On the other, the hierarchical superior has an infinity of
possibilities to appraise, or judge, a person’s qualities and evolutions in
many different fields.
222   J.-P. Durand

As such, individual appraisals epitomise the kind of power relation-

ships that were worked on by the French sociologist Michel Crozier
(1963). Having said that and even if it is true that no actor is totally
lacking in the kinds of resources needed to construct the zones of uncer-
tainty that will enable them to respond to decisions made by others, it
remains that employees undergoing appraisals seem much poorer than
the persons doing the appraisal. The way that the latter cultivate this
uncertainty gives them the means to enforce a total and lasting domina-
tion over their subordinated counterpart. It is truly difficult to find an
accurate epithet for this violence through, and/or of, uncertainty. This is
an unpredictable form that offers no real insight into the imbalances at
the heart of institutionalised personal appraisals.
Violence through uncertainty is truly symbolic in Bourdieu’s sense of
the term, stemming from a “power that succeeds in imposing meanings
deemed legitimate by hiding the power relationships that are the basis
of its force” (Bourdieu 1972, 18). Such dissimulation occurs through
the “naturalisation” of work constraints associated with flux tendu, and
through the forced legitimisation of the meaning of work, a quantum
supplied by the company’s objectives. The singularity of the symbolic
violence merits further analysis as well, especially for its operational
modes.
This is because the processes used to produce goods and services have
become so fragile due to ongoing cost-cutting that these very same
goods and services will only be provided when employees truly engage
in their work. Hence the need to look at a mix of constraints and causes
of satisfaction encouraging engagement at work. What requires verifi-
cation is each employee’s ongoing mobilisation. This is the basis of per-
sonal appraisals of behaviour, with mobilisation being analysed in light
of concrete local norms reflecting the work groups’ operations, which
are themselves the results and translations of more general manage-
ment norms (Durand 2011, 206–208). In short, the processes described
above serve to assess whether an institution’s norms are respected. This
justifies replacing the concept of symbolic violence with normative
violence. The latter construct encompasses the process by means of
which individuals’, and ultimately, subjects’, behaviour is normalised.
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
223

The construction of local work norms should be taken seriously. That

is because they resemble the “professional genres” that populate Yves
Clot’s theoretical framework (2010, Clot and Gollac 2014) and which
describe, for instance, certain collective modes of individual activities
as “good work”. These local work norms result from impositions (tar-
gets, power relationships, symbolic violence) and specific adaptations
derived from digesting and transformating local modes of resistance to
(or acceptance of ) objective. Local norms of this kind are unavoidable,
very real and cannot be transgressed without the risk of being excluded
not by the boss but by peers. This is worse since peers affect an indi-
vidual’s sense of self more than would any more external subordination
relationship they find themselves in. Because domination relationships
that must be hidden and legitimised involve norms that have been
‘freely consented’ by group members, the violence that peers do to peers
is not only symbolic but normative. It also encompasses the kinds of
violence that occur daily, not only to get people to respect norms but
also to determine the rules creating them. It is a meta-rule-based social
game that costs more in individual energy than other games since it is
based on permanent uncertainty and volatile power relationships that
shift as alliances change. It is regrettable that sociology has not pursued
analysis initiated by D. Roy and M. Burawoy pertaining to these efforts
to construct local work activity norms, since this normation violence
remains an essential locus for understanding “how things work” at work
(Burawoy 2015; Roy 2006).28
The concept is redolent of theses put forward by Michel Foucault,
with normative violence being based on respect for norms and on asso-
ciated disciplines that address individuals’ normalisation. The idea here
is not to punish but to “put people to work”, something very different
that approximates processes which Foucault described as relating to the
establishment of (and respect for) work norms:

28D. Roy’s article is a fantastic text about normative and normation violence. The author, a fac-
tory worker, tried to modify local representations of the profession performed by George’s son-
in-law, featuring a cessation of all the social games that accompany work (in particular, what he
refers to as “banana time”).
224   J.-P. Durand

“The art of punishing [meaning here putting people to work] is imple-

mented through five very distinctive operations:

– Connect acts, performance and singular conduct to a larger whole that

is a field of comparison, space of differentiation and principle of a rule
to be followed;
– Differentiate individuals based on this overall rule, using it as a kind
of minimal threshold, average to be respected or optimum to aspire to;
– Measure and rank people’s capabilities, level and ‘nature’
quantitatively;
– Mobilise the conformity constraint by means of a ‘value-adding’
measurement;
– Define differences with all other differences, hence the outer limits of
abnormality”. (Foucault 1975, 185)

The extraordinary aspect of this text is that it does not only describe the
disciplinary power regime’s normalisation and punishment effects but
also how norms are constructed within a work group by the group itself,
under pressure due to management’s output demands (first two points);
since everyone is assessed by peers (point 3); because of the requirement
that norms be adhered to (point 4) and that the norm being imple-
mented stipulates its own borders (point 5) before normative violence
can be exercised and exert its exclusionary effects.
The usefulness of this approach is that it both highlights individu-
als’ homogenised membership in a group as well as their differentiation,
helping to establish a norm (the average normal, i.e. the one that defines
what is normal). This is before excluding anyone whose difference
is too great to still be considered normal, leading to their subsequent
exclusion.

“In a sense, the power of normalisation is that it forces homogeneity. But

it also individualises by making it possible to measure deviance, deter-
mine levels, establish specialties and make differences useful by adjusting
them to one another. The power of the norm (called normation violence
here) works well within a system characterised by formal equality since
within the homogeneity that is the rule (called the work group here), it
introduces - as a useful imperative but also as the result of a measurement
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
225

- everything that has been degraded due to individual differences”

(Foucault 1975, 186). All of which can lead to exclusion from the group,
something witnessed on a daily basis in the workspace.29

Normative violence and normalisation evoke a kind of compliance, with

norms, that can be seen in the way that business journalists or sociol-
ogists apply Pierre Bourdieu’s vision o individual appraisals. Analysing
this in terms of the internalisation of norms pushes the concept to an
extreme by incorporating the host company’s codes and norms and/or
translating them into physical attitudes like clothing choices.

It is not outputs that are constantly assessed but their compliance with
the company’s explicit and implicit culture, the feeling that no one is
playing the game or, conversely, that everyone is disobeying a basic rule…
Subliminal commands are just as meaningful to the people who disobey
them. How often do you find companies who approve of people coming
to work in trainers? (Les Echos, October 2005, 68–70)

Describing the norms in a large American IT company with operations

in France, Gabrielle Balazs and Jean-Pierre Faguer wrote that,

There is a moral dimension to physical work. Attempts to control some-

one’s body or emotions all express a desire to climb socially. The clothes
people wear - which are often supposed to be “relaxed” - how they carry
themselves, how “cool” they are, all this relates to the imperative that they
be healthy and enjoy nature and healthy leisure activities so they are in
sync with the representation and advertising images that management
likes to portray of people’s bodies. (1996, 71)

Informal evaluations are being discussed here in terms of the “total”

institutional control that management has over subordinates. In the

29At the same time, there are some groups (despite being less affinity-based and more “artificial”
as a result of systematic interventions by management) where normative violence is not unequiv-
ocal. Conflicts of norms arise and the traditional values like solidarity, which are at the origin of
these norms (c.f. H. Becker, op. cit), continue to dominate. New research should be able to clar-
ify why this happens.
226   J.-P. Durand

words of one manager (J. L.), “I have sensors everywhere checking

people’s emails or phone conversations” (Les Echos, October 2005).
Individual appraisals are used to get people to subconsciously inter-
nalise conformity with the norms in the “tribal code”. The rituals that
new recruits face on arrival to akin to learning this code. Even the way
appraisals are done involves coded procedures akin to the kinds of
membership rites that ethnologists have described in other situations.
They include the way appointments are made, the assessor’s intentional
tardiness, the self-confidence that n+1 is supposed to show and the obe-
dient demeanour that the assessee must manifest. In others words, a
ritual behaviour indicates that the subject is willing to become a mem-
ber of the company or public administration. Subjugation becomes a
precondition for a positive evaluation.
In the words of Roland Gori, “Appraisals are used to engineer a freely
consented social submission, also called voluntary enslavement” (Gori
2014, 19) or the generalised proletarisation of existence.

In the past, people became proletarian as and when theory knowledge and
know-how was confiscated by real machines. Nowadays, these machines
are intangible standardised protocols prescribing rules of good practice
to doctors, researchers, artists, Pôle Emploi consultants, judges, t­eachers -
all of whom therefore become modern-day proletarians. The worst thing
is that people increasingly accept these norms even if they find them
absurd… after all, it is easier to rebel against a boss than against a system
comprised of a spider’s web of norms and controls. (ibid.)

Despite these criticisms of appraisals such as they are practiced nowa-

days, they could still be useful if they only cover work outcomes and
not people’s behaviour. The strength of an evaluation is that it targets
certain subjects even though they are members of communities facing
issues that are themselves part of a broader process. They individualise
work and employment relationships even though the real connection is
a social one between work and capital, or between work and the state in
the public sector.
***
 5 The New Worker in Service Activities    
227

Beyond the destruction of work groups that have become simple addi-
tions or collections of individuals in companies or administrations which
have become total institutions, every subject operating under this kind of
mobilisation regime is asked nowadays to believe in it and commit to it
body and soul. The plethora of management indicators, the quantophre-
nia driving this (epitomised by the role that bibliometrics has come to
play in scientific research) and individual appraisals all show how the per-
manent monitoring of employees, and the instruments created to control
their activities, weigh upon them. Heteronomous systems of this kind
primarily function as mediations for norms that are increasingly inter-
nalised. Their strength is such that they are rarely contested, although
everyone tries to get around them, at least individually. The systems help
to construct the professional ideal’s management dimension, something
non-negotiable (heteronomous) but also pernicious. They do not appear
directly as command acts despite being associated with this. Often
applied without direct human intervention, they combine all attributes
of objectivity and neutrality, especially through their massive reliance on
numbers and mathematical models. As an abstract form of management,
they seek to naturalise senior management and shareholders’ imperatives.
New workers are also living a dislocation stemming from their sub-
jective involuntary subjugation. They no longer believe soothing nar-
ratives about their corporate function, realising that this is a trap. Yet
they must continue to pretend that they believe in the company’s rights
and myths. They still play at filling in scorecards and other games like
bibliometrics and appraisals but no longer believe in the game itself or
its rules.30 Players are generally supposed to believe in a game’s rules
since these are the conditions of their participation. Yet in the situation
described here, players believe less and less in the game or rules and only
simulate their participation. What then happens is that weaker subjects
can no longer cope with the great divide that these systems force upon
them. And subjects who cannot suffer this imposed disrupture, nor its

30As mentioned previously and in other texts (Durand 2007), this does not prevent social games
from existing at work in the interstices between imposed constraints or rules. Social games make
work acceptable. Having said that, the constrained games associated with appraisals (because they
cause clever adjustments) differ from the kinds of social games that give immediate partial mean-
ing to work.
228   J.-P. Durand

refraction in their own internal dislocation, necessarily break down and

suffer the aforementioned socio-psychic disorders.
In short, subject employees become dependent on the total insti-
tutions that employ them and must show, or simulate, a belief in the
processes that are forced upon them. This means that they give into
the institution’s imperatives. Such conformity with ostensibly expected
behaviour, despite people’s lack of faith therein, exemplifies the disloca-
tion between workers’ expectations and the reality of work. It also shows
how free enterprise structures new types of workers’ lives. Reshaping
new workers, clearly subconsciously, in a way that divides them becomes
a condition of their survival and further good health. New workers fol-
low the institution’s prescriptions to avoid being excluded from it.

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 6
The Impossible Rationalisation
of Service Activities

The present chapter has been given a provocative title to underline the
immense efforts that senior managers have made to rationalise services
in the public and private sectors alike. This is paradoxical since service
relationships are supposed to be something unique in the service sector,
dedicated as they are to a single user, consumer or customer, including
companies or other institutions. It is therefore worth noting, above and
beyond the impossible rationalisation of services, the enormous chal-
lenges facing the rationalisation of work in the service sector. Senior
management’s desire to industrialise services has run into a number of
obstacles due to different nature of services as opposed to industrial
activities.
Several decades ago, the idea of industrialising services referred
to decision-makers’ desire to import a Fordo-Taylorian industrial
model. When the two activities are compared point by point (Gadrey
1996, 303–342), all that remains of this effort is the tangible nature
of industrial goods as opposed to services. Moreover, this distinc-
tion is also questionable, given the growing role that service activities
play in industry (see Chapter 3), with services-oriented back offices
long functioning as kinds of workshops in sectors such as public

© The Author(s) 2019 231

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_6
232   J.-P. Durand

transportation, logistics or fast food. Everyone agrees that the two sec-
tors, including primary sectors such as agriculture, livestock breeding
and fishing, have converged and that modernisation involves the same
profitability/commoditisation logic for both. This does not much
mean so much an industrialisation of services but instead a rational-
ised organisation of production and work in the service sector. The
only good reason to observe how work is done on factory floors is
to break down the processes comprising the activities (Durand and
Hatzfeld 2003) that developed their own model long before the ser-
vice sector reached maturity.
When analysing the rationalisation of services, and given the absence
of an absolute definition for this activity, the following guidelines might
be useful:

– Service-based activities involving a serial production of tangible

goods will only be of peripheral concern here. Examples include
making hamburgers, procurement logistics in the mass retail sector
and biomedical analyses in hospitals. The success of rationalising
activities mainly depends, as in industry, on the ability to repro-
duce with predictable effects the physical gestures that workers use
when handling materials, in which case they can be relatively easily
replaced by machines, except in a few situations involving the assem-
bly of complex units or in the luxury sector. All in all, these discus-
sions are not very relevant to the topic at hand;
– The main focus here is on activities that remain largely uncertain.
This does not mean that there is no uncertainty associated with
industrial activities manufacturing tangible goods. After all, much
of what today’s engineers and work organisers do at this level is to
try and reduce the uncertainty caused by breakdowns or output
volatility. It remains that these kinds of uncertainty are greater in
magnitude and frequency in situations where services are being pro-
duced. At the same time, there is no reason not to try and ‘seri-
alise’ the way such problems are handled by categorising responses
according to the situation in which they arise. Formulating the
transition from an industrial society based on the ownership of
durable goods to a service society is one way of illustrating changes
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
233

in the uncertainty scale, since the reality C that the service is going
to transform (see previous chapter) not only involves goods but also
people’s bodies (health, beauty, mobility and comfort, for example)
and minds (enjoyment, culture, knowledge, training, psychological
state and well-being).

The thesis defended here highlights the difficulty of rationalising ser-

vices. This relates to the nature of service activities contending with
rapid and unpredictable changes in demand while managing an inde-
terminate number of uncertain service production transactions. Given
these constraints, many of today’s solutions are found wanting by cus-
tomers/users, company managers or public institutions subjected to
the increasing imperative of economic efficiency. After demonstrating
why service-related solutions are incapable of overcoming the dual
challenge of satisfying customer demands and raising productivity,
analysis will look at the different ways of getting around the problem
by focusing on customer/user requirement and capitalist economic
imperatives.

Factors Preventing the Rationalisation

of Service Activities
As discussed in the previous chapter, current theory holds that service
relationships and services themselves must be dissociated when they
are no longer rooted in inter-individual relationships between users/
customers and experts working on their behalf. Where the entity sup-
plying the service is an institution, attention must be paid both to the
commercial relationship between users and institutions and also to the
expert and the institution’s employment relationship. Even where there
is a co-production of service, this dissociation must be maintained to
analyse the quality of the service provided or the beneficiary’s degree of
satisfaction. Based on this distinction between service relationships and
services per se, it becomes possible to ascertain impediments to the ser-
vice sector’s rationalisation.
234   J.-P. Durand

Service Relationships Under Stress

Understanding the nature of service relationships means distinguish-

ing between instrumental and comprehensive communications. The
former refers to an exchange of information between machines but can
also be applied to automatic exchanges between humans and machines
or between humans. In this case, humans are not thinking but reacting
reflexively to information or a situation. Comprehensive communica-
tion, on the other hand, sees counterparts focusing on the meaning of
the information conveyed through the exchange (Durand 2007). It is
by capturing meaning that specialists (experts) and end-users (novices)
co-construct the service. One example is IT repairs over the phone. The
category also covers specialist interventions, for instance when a service
is purchased, for example, buying a tyre, safety training, taking a medi-
cal exam, filling a prescription, buying a discount train ticket).
Service relationships that lead to the purchasing and consumption of
a service take up a lot of time and are therefore expensive for the service
provider. The creation of meaning and construction of a shared world
can be achieved by using attenuation rhetoric based on a series of recip-
rocal adaptations that the service company will seek to rationalise by
shortening their duration. Employers tend not to view the time spent
on this part of the service relationship as producing value and will there-
fore seek to minimise it.
Out of Erving Goffman’s three components, the one that can be
shortened is the time spent exchanging pleasantries: firstly, if an expert
conducts the interview (even where users start by saying why they
visited or rang the store); and secondly, if the expert follows a writ-
ten script that gets straight to the point. This takes all the social con-
tent out of otherwise polite exchanges and turns them into something
totally formalised. They may still resemble a social interaction but
what is being signified becomes so codified that it loses any deeper
meaning (Amiech 2005). Dialogue is no longer intended to bring peo-
ple closer together but instead becomes a slew of impoverished words
instrumentalised to focus as quickly as possible on the user’s problem.
A typical application of this process involves the creation and ongoing
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
235

improvement of call centres. Initially invented to rationalise complaints

processing by handing the function over to experts capable of reassur-
ing consumers dissatisfied with the IT equipment they bought, or their
Internet or telephone services, they are now used to avoid customers
bothering professionals working in banking or insurance, or to make
it easier for public administrations not to organise as many face-to-face
interactions with users. Having said that, there are limits to this ration-
alisation drive, with some brands starting to refer to the quality of their
telephone service as a commercial argument. In other words, reducing
the amount of time spent on pleasantries and replacing them with for-
mal exchanges of words emptied of any real meaning is no longer being
portrayed as a good way to cut costs. There has been a shift towards
more efficient processes. These are studied in further detail below.
A similar conclusion might be reached as regards Goffman’ second
service relationship component, the contractual dimension that is stead-
ily disappearing from the scene. From the very outset, customers find
themselves forced to accept exchange conditions that one determined
by the expert they are speaking with, or else by their employer. The
company or public administration fielding the request must construct
a response mediating their good brand image, to create an oligopolistic
situation limiting competition, or their functionality. Users addressing
these institutions are a captive audience and can no longer question the
contract or social conventions surrounding the service relationship. In
many cases, users become distressed because they are being dominated
through a service relationship that is solely to the advantage of the
expert, company or public administration. It is an extraordinary rever-
sal from the idea that the customer is always right. Rather than this,
customers today are supposed to be happy simply because their counter-
part has agreed to review their demand. What this shows, in part, is the
extension of dominant capitalist production relationships into the con-
sumption sphere. Contracts are slowly but surely being transformed in a
way that minimises the relevance of uncertainty or rationalisation given
absence of any reference to the service contract and service relationship.
In turn, this affects the nature and quality of the service being provided,
something that is also further analysed below.
236   J.-P. Durand

The Growing Uncertainty of Service Activities

The technical dimension of the service relationship as suggested by

Goffman refers directly to the actual service, and often to the back
office enabling the service if not the product (i.e., public transporta-
tion). Cost-cutting in the service sector—and beyond this, improving
capitalist returns—is at odds with the wide range of constraints found
in different sectors of activity and/or which depend on the nature
of the service being provided. Without offering an exhaustive overview
or rigorous classification, it is still possible to distinguish several types of
situations that share the same foundations and face the same hyper-ra-
tionalisation difficulties, despite this generally being viewed as the main
if not only way of cutting costs.

Mass Services: Technical and Human Limits

in a Competitive World

It is in the mass service sector that rationalisation principles—based on

the fragmentation and simplification of work, executed by a relatively
unskilled workforce, or on a division of labour between organisers and
operatives, has advanced the most. Although it is always possible to
push back the limits of this kind of rationalisation by increasing work
rates and by using automation to minimise the porosity of paid hours at
work, the room to maneuver today is relatively small compared to what
it was between the 1970s and 1990s. Examples include banking, where
earnings stem more from market speculation than from traditional
deposits and loans. Things are similar in the public transportation sec-
tor, as exemplified by the rationalisation problems that SNCF has had
(for air transport, see Durand 2007; Brugière 2016).
In the mass retail sector, store margins are shrinking with prof-
its increasingly coming from commercial manipulations of subsidiar-
ies’ procurement actions or from property operations. In the fast food
business, manufacturing and delivery processes have long been indus-
trialised, with the main upside today seen as the move to get custom-
ers themselves to take responsibility for orders. Call centres have also
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
237

reached the limits of service relationship rationalisation. Segmenting

queries and calls by degree of complexity, with handling tasks allocated
to employees remunerated according to their level of expertise, was a
temporary solution for which no alternative has been found. Otherwise,
logistics, on delivery platforms or on the road, are also looking for a
second wind, with the voice recognition systems that govern pickers’
work (see Chapter 3) competing with new automated systems meant
to replace expensive handling operations but which are not yet entirely
reliable. Professionals looking to raise overall productivity in this sector
are therefore hoping for more from technical innovations such as RFID
(Radio-Frequency IDentification) than they expect from the rationalisa-
tion of work.

Engineering and Business Consulting:

The Price of Innovation

In the engineering and software industries, uncertainty does not only

come from the service relationship, something that is already fairly
complicated where it involves different companies or divisions in
the same company, but above all from its reason to exist, namely to
use recent scientific discoveries to create an event or new products or
services. The nature of innovation is always uncertain from a techni-
cal perspective, if only because it is unclear whether the new product
will work. On top of this, there are questions about applicability and
marketability, namely the new product or service’s social acceptability.
Cost pressures, which are largely human resource-related,1 have inten-
sified, especially with employees whom shareholders in big groups
consider overpaid. Solutions tend to involve segmenting remunerated
activities by their degree of complexity; implementing flux tendu; gen-
erally simplifying work by fragmenting tasks; reinforcing the division

1Some correctly called these human costs ‘resources’. The more entrepreneurial term is used here
since the present book applies a capitalist logic that explains the problems that the system faces in
achieving significant productivity gains which, according to its own experts, might enable a way
out of the crisis.
238   J.-P. Durand

of labour by bringing in design work organisers and subcontractors,

including in countries where labour is cheap; launching sub-projects
or batches. These processes are incomplete in the sense that they are
far from having reached their limits. The extra costs currently observed
with outsourcing to Russia, China or India tend to be viewed by
executives as necessary learning costs that will have a positive effect
in the not too distant future. Nobody says anything about delivering
know-how and strategic knowledge to emerging countries destined
to become economic and financial powerhouses within a few dec-
ades, and who will therefore certainly overwhelm any and all impru-
dent rivals. The only thing that concerns industrial financial strategists
today is the short-term. Their outlook never extends beyond their own
careers.
The main challenge in business consultancies, and nowadays also
public administration, hospitals, etc. also involves innovation in areas
like strategy, organisation, management and HRM. Competition here
is ferocious and consultants are constantly inventing models allowing
them to keep customers or get new ones. In reality, the models epito-
mise rationalisation. They exist to help customers lower production and
distribution costs, hence to rationalise them and the work they do. Lean
production is one of the most frightening inventions that private or
public sector employees have ever faced. Each model is a kind of men-
tal framework that can be applied across all different departments or
workshops, irrespective of the sector of activity. Well-known tools like
benchmarking or re-engineering exemplify the fact that rationalising
change processes means formalising a few principles distilled by the new
mercenaries (Belorgey 2014), aided by local managers and sometimes
the employees themselves, being the modern version of participative
management.

Public Service: Greater Demands and Fewer Resources

In Europe and particularly in France, public services are almost com-

pletely dispensed by public institutions, whether or not they involve an
administration or a state-owned enterprise. This includes public sector
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
239

hospitals, education, from kindergarten to university, benefits systems,

employability assistance, social security schemes, policing, defense, and
so forth. Public transport (trains, planes, buses, etc.) can be added to
this list, having already been referred to by the present book as mass
services focusing more on mass mobility then on individuals’ sin-
gular characteristics, as is the case in other areas such as education or
healthcare.
It may well be in the public domain that rationalisation has had
the least success. This is despite powerful efforts made to implement
it through practices such as New Public Management or the kinds of
constraints that France faces today following the enactment of laws
seen as LOLF Loi organique relative aux lois de finances and RGPP
Révision générale des politiques publiques, legislative frameworks limiting
the state’s financial commitment to the entities responsible for imple-
menting its policies. The desire to reduce public service activities’ role
as engines of solidarity has become a veritable ideological fashion born
out of thinking formulated by American neo-conservatives and fans
of Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. The priority in this ideology is to
cut state spending and lower taxes to ease the way for market forces.
Despite the 2008 crisis, the same orientation continues to be portrayed
as a necessity and indeed as an absolute economic constraint. The IMF/
World Bank/European Commission troika has becomes its main cheer-
leader, advocating everywhere a return to balanced budgets and a qua-
si-elimination of public debt. The result has been a dramatic reduction
in ministerial budgets and grants to public or para-public bodies. In
turn, this has made it increasingly difficult for the state to offer quality
services. At the very time when resources are diminishing, growing pau-
perisation affecting a rising proportion of the population, with 9 mil-
lion French persons representing 14% of the country’s population living
below the poverty threshold, has meant rising demand for public ser-
vices. Alongside this, all these rationalisation efforts have clearly had a
negative effect on working conditions in the public and para-public sec-
tors, leading to a rise in socio-psychic disorders, narcotics use and even
suicides, particularly in the security services (police, Highway Patrol and
prison guards amongst others).
240   J.-P. Durand

In social services, benefits recipients receive less support today

(also explaining the welfare cheating criticised by journalists who
do not always go to the effort of highlighting the real causes of such
behaviour). Similarly, economic and social regeneration policies
have become less effective. Social workers are increasingly organis-
ing themselves to process files with the flux tendu principles. They are
losing their specialisation and becoming interchangeable in response
to managers’ growing requirement that they be able to intervene at
any moment on any file. This loss of competency comes with the
increased stress of not being able to resolve the social problems they
face. The same constraints hamper their processing of jobseekers.
Unemployment has risen by approximatively 25% since 2009 but
the number of employees working for Pôle Emploi has risen by less
than 4%. Yet the only solutions that senior management has found
is to cut the benefits offered to jobseekers and increase pressure on
employees.
The security services, notably the police, have experienced ongo-
ing rationalisation measures, mainly involving IT. The goal of mak-
ing things easier for employees has been accompanied here by a policy
of greater supervision of their activities, not only to control them as
might be naïvely believed but to improve the organisation of preventive
actions using supposedly exhaustive front-line knowledge. The result
is that where police officers used to be free to inventory objects that
had been declared as stolen, today they must compile a very detailed
database, brand, type, year, colour, etc., that they themselves find con-
fusing. The outcome is more and more officers try to get through this
work by “fooling” the computer and simply inputting generic objects.
Not only are their statements less precise but they make more mistakes
despite officers spending more time on this. As for the more general job
of maintaining public order, police work suffers from rising uncertainty.
The more complex society becomes, particularly due to ICT advances,
the more law breaker’s have tools they can use and the more security
professionals must invent complex responses requiring new human and
computer resources. In other words, given society’s increasingly fra-
gilised form today, caused by greater complexity based in no small part
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
241

on people’s added mobility, security cannot help but deteriorate2 or cul-

minate in the advent of a police state.
The 1980s saw attempts at hyper-rationalising hospital work involv-
ing, for instance, orderlies being asked to make patients’ beds, tasks
broken down ergonomically into tenths of minutes as if they involved
automotive assembly line workers. This de-humanisation of work,
and above all of the service relationship, was immediately rejected by
the parties affected, leading to the initiative being abandoned. The
same approach then re-appeared in the PMSI Programme de médical-
isation des systems d’information (“Information System Medicalisation
Programme”), followed by the T2A “Activity-based tariffs” scheme
that allocated human and material investments depending on depart-
ments’ level of efficiency.3 In turn, this involved applying a flux tendu
logic to medical examinations and actual medical acts. It meant the
rationalisation of everything, especially once hospitals began employ-
ing fewer people. In short, the healthcare system was fragilised due to
the requirement that all activities be synchronised, with all remaining
employees having to be constantly attentive and accelerate their work
rate to satisfy patient needs. Working under pressure, and for as long
as 36 hours non-stop if no replacement came, most healthcare pro-
fessionals crumbled, with many nurses deciding to drop out of this
infernal circle and either work for themselves (a new illusion!) or find
a sector less exposed to the constant flows of patients. Clearly the ser-
vice relationship, especially hospitals’ accommodation capacity, which
patients are very sensitive to, has been slowly deteriorating. In terms of
medical staff, cost-cutting meant underpaying internists forced to do
extremely long shifts. It also meant hiring cheaper foreign doctors. On
top of this began the kind of subcontracting already witnessed in the

2Delinquents’ social re-integration should also be mentioned to avoid the impression that security
is the only thing that matters. This is a very complex policy area, especially if it is purely thought
of in cost terms. It remains the prism through which most governments view the issue.
3For a critical and synthetic analysis of T2A and its devastating effects on work and service rela-

tionships, see Gheorghiu and Moatty (2013, Chapter 2) and Belorgey (2010, 2011).
242   J.-P. Durand

United States and Portugal, with clinics sending digitalised medical

images to Brazil where they are interpreted by lower paid less skilled
personnel working when it was night-time in Lisbon (Venco 2014).
The combined, and interlinked, effect of all these trends has dam-
aged service quality and tended to segment hospitals into a two-speed
medical system, divided between those who can pay for good care and
those who cannot.
The same thing has been happening for a long time in education, as
witnessed by rapidly deteriorating levels of achievement, resulting from
learners being discouraged or prematurely kicked out of the system.
The ensuing conditions have made the teaching profession impossible
in certain locales. Global academic inequalities continue to rise (see
December 2013 OECD Pisa report) while working conditions deteri-
orate. On top of this vicious circle that some learning institutions are
experiencing, experts now consider it impossible to find a solution
compatible with the European requirement that public deficits be cur-
tailed. The only possible way out at present consists of getting families
to pay for an increasing share of education costs, forcing more children
into private schools. Yet there is no guarantee that service quality will
improve. The new segmentation between private schools depends on
whether they include students who were previously excluded. The dif-
ferential is no longer based on scholastic and cultural capital but on stu-
dents’ economic capital.
This is particularly true in higher education where private business or
engineering schools tend to choose the best applicants. Faced with this
growing hierarchy in the quality of training programmes, the French
state, desperate for ideas, has started listening to a few naïve visionaries
who see distance learning as a panacea for under-funded state-owned
universities. This forgets the fact that mass open online courses are only
useful to students whose university trajectories have already progressed
substantially. In other words, to succeed at this level, students must pos-
sess significant intellectual resources and support networks. Yet these
assets can only be cultivated by attending face-to-face lectures and sem-
inars. The only thing that prevents more than half of all students from
dropping out of university in the first year is the individualised and
physical care they receive. Instead of this human investment, however,
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
243

the new magicians have created tools that will have to be extremely
expensive to be any good at all, and which only a small elite know how
to use.
In Jean Gadrey’s view, education, healthcare, security, engineering,
and business consultancy are all professional services sectors in the sense
that they can be accessed through specific training and recognition sys-
tems (1996, 336). The more complex the services are and the more they
are based on skilled work requiring rare or cutting-edge competencies,
the more the professionals involved possess resources allow them to
resist but also defend themselves. In this situation, however, senior man-
agement’s strategy consists of constantly looking for new ways of sim-
plifying work to recruit less competent employees available in greater
numbers in the labour market.
For the other services analysed above, ones that are easier to industri-
alise since they rationalise work by implementing traditional Taylorian
and Fordian methods, the limits are already being reached. Given the
problems in rationalising service-related production and work, exec-
utives in both the public and private sectors are coming up with new
solutions to satisfy their profitability imperatives and shareholders or
senior civil servants’ desire for effective decision-making. The solutions
mainly lie outside of the realm of service rationalisation. This is because
of the need to invent new ways of achieving capital returns, ones differ-
ent from the kinds of approaches that have traditionally been pursued
when an industry rationalises its employees’ work. The idea today is to
get users or customers to do the work that service sector employees used
to do themselves, or to bring in new and often highly qualified actors to
do the same at a much lower cost.
It remains that none of these transformations suffices to ensure the
viability of service activities if, at the same time, their quality does not
diminish rapidly in response to economic and financial decision-mak-
ers’ cost-cutting aspirations. They also will not suffice if new ­workers,
the reconfigured employees scrutinised above, do not accept the inev-
itability of a lesser service quality, forcing them to do a not insub-
stantial share of the work for which the service provider used to be
responsible.
244   J.-P. Durand

When Work Is Done by Users and Customers4

The vocabulary applied in today’s public service sector seems an
appropriate indicator of the way management methods and ulti-
mately financial capitalism have permeated the zeitgeist. Users of
French national electricity company EDF’s services are now called
customers. SNCF no longer carries passengers but users (according
to employees) or customers (according to management). Hospitals
still treat patients but these are also slowly becoming users; and uni-
versities are losing students but gaining users who will soon become
customers. Of course, private sector customers have long been amal-
gamated with consumers. All of these terms are important from a
management perspective but especially to the majority of employ-
ees who are very attached to a public sector ethos. References to
passengers, patients or students translate employees’ resistance to
the imperatives and roles they are being assigned under New Public
Management. In this section looking at the work that users do, rel-
atively little attention will be paid to semantics, even if certain
nuances are noted.
With most analysts agreeing that today’s users are also responsible
for the activity, the more interesting topics are the reasons why this has
happened and whether it is necessary for the co-production of services,
in which case customers might be seen as working for themselves. One
possibility is that services production has to some extent reached the
limits of its rationalisation, especially where work is concerned, given
services’ specificities vis-à-vis industrial activities. Of course, this raises
the question of who users work for (themselves or the service provider);
whether the work is remunerated; if it represents a whole new type of
spoliation and/or exploitation; why users might be prepared to work for
free; and whether certain remunerations exist that are non-pecuniary yet
lead to the production of value.

4The present section looks at business services alone since services to individual customers are

very different from mass consumption—a topic dealt with in the next section.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
245

Outsourcing Production Costs:

The Self-service Model

One example of this move towards externalisation starts with the efforts
currently being made to adjust the amount of time needed for face-to-
face or telephone encounters between experts and beneficiaries. There
are countless situations where this can happen but in general they
involve the service provider organising the meeting, which is not con-
sidered productive time, in such a way as to ensure that the user is the
one who has to wait, if need be. Guillaume Tiffon (2013, Chapter 2)
has analysed a host of situations, one of which involved people undress-
ing for physiotherapy sessions and then putting their clothes back on
while the therapist worked with the next patient. Another looked at
customer queues in mass retail and fast food outlets, organised to take
maximum advantage of employees’ availability, to the detriment of con-
sumers forced to wait more or less patiently. A further example was a
France Télécom call centre where senior management would decide
how many operators to have on duty depending on the hour of the day
and day of the week, to ensure that no more than 85% of all queries
were handled at any one point in time. The preference being to have
a few disgruntled customers instead of underused staff (ibid.). In Pôle
Emploi studies conducted for the present book, the most visited agen-
cies were ones run by local teams that regularly overbooked jobseekers’
appointments with consultants. An absentee rate of 20% was predicted
for the former group, meaning that up to 125% of consultants’ personal
capacities were being booked. This obviously caused employees to over-
load whenever there were fewer absentees than predicted. It also meant
longer queuing times for jobseekers, potentially sparking anti-social
behaviour. In all of these cases, the goal was to get customers or users
to agree to what Tiffon called their “penalisation”. That is, it was up to
them to adapt to the conditions under which the company or provider
was offering the service.
A second category involves outsourcing costs by applying a sliding
scale that gradually gets users to do work that the service provider’s
246   J.-P. Durand

expert employees once did.5 Examples include ticket machines at train

stations or cash points at banks. These are major investments that
companies make in their own resources, ultimately because they want
to replace the employees who were once responsible for these tasks. In
both cases, customers ‘converse’ with machines that are, however, inca-
pable of doing all of the tasks that humans employees used to under-
take. On the other hand, the automatic checkout counters found
in many mass retail outlets today do enable customers to do almost
everything that staff members used to. Customers can scan their own
items and make payments all by themselves, using machines that are
much less sophisticated than the vending machines used to sell tick-
ets and train stations or the printers distributing boarding passes in
airports. The problem is the increased likelihood of shoplifting, which is
one reason why retailers still have a few staff members hovering around
automated checkout counters,6 the other being that many customers
still need to be taught how to use the new machines (Bernard 2012,
2014).
With the Internet, new mass retail methods and automatic travel
ticket or holiday package sales, it is the management of individual
bank accounts that has been totally revolutionised. Almost all of the
work that used to be done by service providers’ front office staff has
been nowadays outsourced to customers asked to construct the service

5Guillaume Tiffon (2013, 146–150) noted that even if sociologists have only recently become

interested in the work that customers or consumers do, service marketing (especially in the
Anglo-American world) started studying this in the 1980s and maybe even earlier. There is a
plentiful early corpus in this field, making frequent references to specific marketing strategies.
One example is the advice that Pierre Eiglier (2004, 39) gave companies to “get customers to
do some of the work that used to be done by staff members [because this will allow them to]
markedly increase a system’s measured productivity in real terms, irrespective of the number of
services being performed or the number of customers being served hourly… Mobilising customer
participation is more or less the only way of substantially increasing productivity in the service
sector”, at least in the front office. This is supposed to “lower unit costs’ structure and create real
competitive advantage” (ibid.).
6A long-standing opinion is that inserting RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) chips into

every item would spell the end of checkout staff. Ultimately, between the cost of chips and the
need for a human presence at the checkout counter, it is clear that this kind of substitution will
be partial at best. Innovation has tended instead to go off in an entirely new direction, one exem-
plified by drive-ins.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
247

themselves, with the stage at which they get involved depending on

what they want and expect. Process outsourcing has also affected invest-
ments in materials with Internet users buying their own computers, and
ancillary equipment including printers, so they can operate online. In
this self-service model, customers or users tend to try and construct the
service they want without any help from the experts whom the service
provider employs. This isolates customers, who must then scour FAQ
sections (frequently asked questions), an experience they often find dis-
appointing. As a concept, self-service is associated with customers and
users’ autonomous choice of services, operators and service details, but
also with any unhappiness they may feel due to the solitary nature the
choices they are making. Hence the risks they are incurring. Examples
of the kinds of questions that people in this situation may ask them-
selves include whether they are choosing a hotel that is too close to a
motorway or airport; whether the pictures of rooms they are looking at
were taken before or after a recent renovation, etc. The self-service con-
cept also includes service self-production processes, or “relationship-free
service offers” (Dujarier 2014). This is because customers are making
their own services within a range of choices that is kept relatively nar-
row so they do not get lost or need human assistance, which would be
costly to the service provider. Note that the idea of self-service is a rela-
tively old one, with companies having long tried to get service custom-
ers to do some of the work involved in creating the services that they
consume (Tiffon 2013, 126).
In this process characterised by the rising power of the self-service
model, the Internet has sparked a veritable revolution by proposing
specialist online offers that are easy to access—at least for those social
classes that commercial professionals target. What firms want over time
is to cut production costs by ending any and all face-to-face or tele-
phone interactions. The field of application is immense and already
starting to transform sales of everything from tangible goods, for exam-
ple clothing that can be bought without being touched or worn, to lei-
sure and social amenities. As witnessed in the banking sector during the
1990s or at France Télécom during the 2000s, having a smaller front
office staff is often accompanied by employees’ re-allocation to increas-
ingly complex commercial functions seen as creating more value for
248   J.-P. Durand

their employer. The end result can be an increasingly confusing prod-

uct offer and indeed one that has become more opaque, as exemplified
by most mobile telephone or Internet subscription packages. The new
competitive aggressiveness means customers lose their bearings, which
is especially problematic since there are no longer any experts they can
turn to for information about relative advantages of different prod-
uct offers. This creates further blind dependency on service providers,
requiring new investment or work by customers trying to make if not
the best choice than at least the least bad one. Of course, the many
employees freed from their front office responsibilities can now attend
to all the different functions that arise elsewhere and either evaluate or
track the actions of employees still working in the back office or else
monitor, assess and maximise customers loyalty.
This outsourcing of core back-office functions in the service relation-
ship has different effects on different social classes or age brackets. Not
only is Internet access socially selective but above all, it is not enough
that someone enjoys a connection for them to know how to get online
and access the services they want. Commercial companies may be able
to adapt to most of their solvent targets but things are different in pub-
lic bodies that must also minimise service relationship costs. This has
caused a fall in public service quality, especially affecting those citizens
who are the least equipped in economic, academic or cultural capital
terms.
At Pôle Emploi nowadays, jobseekers’ registration files must be filled
in by the interested parties themselves, with files being emailed to
them just a few days before their consultant appointment. This effort is
largely in vain with only 10–15% of jobseekers arriving with forms that
have been filled in and printed, and a similar percentage having only
filled in part of their forms. In other words, up to one-third of all job-
seekers misuse the Internet when preparing their Pôle Emploi meeting.
Yet consultants operating under management pressure are still being
told to emphasize online interactions as opposed to other communica-
tions methods, again to cut service costs. Jobseekers are asked to upload
their CVs online and use the personal space that Pôle Emploi has created
for them to track job offers and communicate with potential employ-
ers. All of which illustrates how vocabulary has changed over the past
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
249

decade, characterised by the shift from jobseekers’ placement mission to

one where they support people in their job searches. Hence the unhap-
piness of many consultants feeling estranged from their profession and
attributing deteriorating service offer to over-reliance on the Internet.
The dearth of material, intellectual and social resources made available
to most jobseekers, with big differences between employment offices
reflecting the wide variety of regional socioeconomic fabrics, increases
disparities and makes it even harder for the most disadvantaged to get
back into the labour market.
The digital divide has not impeded the ongoing drive to implement
this self-service model. There are two reasons for this. First, learning
theory teaches that whether at the individual or societal level, customers
and users always end up adapting to the new conditions under which
services are provided, especially because soon they no longer have the
choice. In second, Internet and text messaging continues to spread
throughout the social fabric, with almost all young people being fully
familiar with these tools after playing with them for so long on their
mobile phones. Secondly, those who do not master the new tools or
lack the academics and cultural levels to optimise them are of no inter-
est to private sector firms since they are barely if at all solvent. It is
regrettable that the public sector does not focus more on people’s une-
qual ability to access services. It is as if the growing marginalisation of
the most disadvantaged in society is economically, socially and even
politically less expensive than maintaining a service offer adapted to
their capabilities (see the previous chapter).
For other social classes and social segments, accounting for nearly
three-quarters of the total French population, self-service offers all the
advantages associated with lower service production costs and, above all,
with a quasi-eliminated service relationship. This is very beneficial to
the companies or public bodies offering such services. The tools driving
this outsourcing mode, in particular, the Internet, must match custom-
ers’ ability to use them. On top of this, service providers also have to
‘professionalise’ their customers (Dondeyne 2002) and users by training
them, without saying so, in the routines that experts have created for
them. The process is illustrated by Carrefour’s entry into the Chinese
market, where middle-class households had to be incentivised to
250   J.-P. Durand

abandon their age-old habit of shopping at small grocers offering certain

services and re-oriented towards the much broader product choice they
could get in supermarkets, albeit one delivered on a self-service basis.
A great deal of thought was given to designing procedures reflecting
Chinese food culture and perceptions, the goal being to create a new
and lasting relationship to the act of grocery shopping and encouraging
consumers to appreciate the idea of choice.7 The incentives were similar
to the ones used to get Western Internet to fill in administrative forms
online (like visa applications) or to order items on sales websites. The
goal was to bring users or customers’ thinking in line with the insti-
tution’s. There was no real concern for consumers’ mental comfort,
however.
To get customers or users to do this work, however, service pro-
viders must try to ensure that they carry the new procedures through
to the end. This kind of involvement has many different sources and
modalities. Customers are often not given a choice or else offered a
simple cost-benefit calculation about how to best manage their time
when purchasing a particular service, such a as traveling on major
SNCF train routes or buying airline tickets online instead of over the
phone. Even if the system is not very ergonomic and far too clumsy
in terms of different options’ ease of use, it gives people time to think
and seemingly helps to optimise choices. As such—and despite all its
shortcomings and the ensuing uncertainty and problems, online pur-
chases tend to be perceived as “more practical” and “quicker” (Tiffon
2013, 167–169). Virtual sales also have the benefit of operating 24/7,
in line with the dramatic de-synchronisation of social time over the
past 30 years.
The magnitude of choices that Westerners have become accustomed
to also motivates them to check the websites that pop up so abruptly
in consumers’ inboxes. The variety and abundance that these sites offer

7See inter alia studies by Dominique Desjeux demonstrating Carrefour’s adaptation of its prod-

uct offer but also, reading between the lines, of how housewives are being “trained”: http://www.
argonautes.fr/2009-11-d-desjeux-la-construction-interculturelle-de-la-rencontre-entre-loffre-et-
la-demande-en-chine-guangzhou-le-cas-de-carrefour/ and http://www.argonautes.fr/2009-d-
desjeux-video-carrefour-canton/.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
251

hold a great deal of promise for customers used to de-materialised pres-

entations of durable goods. In the past, customers had to touch, feel,
smell, see and taste products, applying all their senses. Nowadays, all
they have is their sight, meaning that the other senses cannot be mobi-
lised when their choice is made. This may well be an anthropological
mutation, with the confusion of choices, and primacy of quantitative
thinking, definitively overtaking peoples’ senses and preference for qual-
itative analysis. Having said that, vehicles such as catalogue sales have
long prepared customers for this change, with the pleasure sparked by
the opulence of ab online offer partially offsetting the lost enjoyment of
shopping in a brick-and-mortar outlet.
Clearly, however, the best way for service providers to get custom-
ers online is to give them a sensation of creating their own customised
product or service. According to Dujarier (2014, 177), “People’s rela-
tionships to contents have been individualised in terms how things are
used, but standardised in terms of their basic composition”. One exam-
ple is provided by self-guided museum tours, where visitors choose
the language they want to listen to and turn the machine on and off
depending how quickly they advance through the various exhibits.
Modern-day tourists are also able to devise their own itineraries by
booking a variety of different hotels, car rentals and so forth that are
themselves relatively standardised. The co-production of services has
succeeded in achieving the age-old dream of industrialists longing for
deferred differentiation and/or dynamic flexibility (Cohendet and
Llerena 1989), based on their manufacturing of personalised durable
goods using totally standardised components, produced in large series
to cut costs. The customisation of services by customers assembling
the components of their own final products is clearly the best way of
motivating customers to work for the service provider since they get an
impression of working for themselves.
The great strength of the self-service model is that its liberates to the
point of almost eliminating, the employees of the company or pub-
lic body offering a particular service, with users being very happy to
self-produce in many cases. There are other ways, however, to get cus-
tomers or users to do this work.
252   J.-P. Durand

The Customer–Supervisor Model

In most situations where service relationships subsist in face-to-face or

telephone interactions, employers fight against the porosity of employ-
ees’ working times by organising breaks between lunch and dinner rush
hours that have become a regular feature in fast food or mass retails out-
lets, and indeed at airports. Employers increasingly use sophisticated
software for such calculations. Examples include the optimal number
of operators in a call centre at a particular time of the day; how many
checkout staff members should be working at a given time in a super-
market, or the size of a McDonald’s shift. A further example involves
France’s Pôle Emploi, Caisse nationale d’assurances familiales (family
benefits regime) or public hospital payment services, where users are
systematically given appointments at times and on days when manage-
ment can calculate how many employees they need to staff the recep-
tion function to ensure that workers are always busy. It is in the private
sector, however, that the calculation is done most rigorously, given the
widespread desire to keep queues to a minimum of three, with an opti-
mum of five. The risk is that customers will be unhappy to stand for so
long and decide not to wait for their meal in a fast food outlet or aban-
don their caddy full of groceries in a supermarket, a double risk for the
store when cold or frozen products are involved.
The calculated existence of queues of this length adds to the pressure
on employees who must hurry to complete the tasks and alleviate the
pressure they feel. More experienced employees who are more adept at
managing this pressure suffer but know how to internalise this. In other
words, the queue fulfills a management function, reducing the number
of checkout supervisors needed to address customers’ specific demands
(reimbursements, exchanges, etc.). It is not rare nowadays to see shop-
pers ask checkout staff to work faster, or to see McDonald’s customers
remind staff that they work in a fast food restaurant and must hurry
up. Hence, the construct of flux tendu pressé formulated by Guillaume
Tiffon (2013, 55) to characterise specific situations in which a general
flow is driven by downstream activities. These include the pressure of
waiting customers standing in line for the delivery of their big Mac. The
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
253

customer that is to say is now assuming the role that next-level manag-
ers used to play in minimising checkout employees’ downtime.

There is no doubt that the queue adds to the pressure on us. When rush
hour comes and you see it build up steadily, you start to accelerate. It’s a
race against time since you have more and more people arriving and your
aim is to ensure the queue doesn’t get too long so people don’t have to
wait too much. (quoted by Tiffon, ibid.)

The same flux tendu pressé construct also explains why users at the back
of the queue pressure the people at the front who have just got to the
checkout point and spend time looking in their purse for change, or,
in fast food outlets, hesitate before deciding what meal deal they want
(Durand 2007). Getting customers to control what other customers are
doing in the queue is the height of the customer–supervisor model since
consumers no longer only manage employees’ time but also the time of
people who are totally outside the company and with whom their only
relationship is the fact they are standing next to one another. Guillaume
Tiffon refers to this as “learning by embarrassment” (2013, 104–113)
with customers forcing themselves to see “the queue as a productive
principle” (ibid.). It is particularly effective and very much in line with
the deadly competition that financial capitalism creates between indi-
viduals irrespective of who they are or their relationship, to the point
of sparking anti-social behaviour, which is unsurprisingly spreading very
quickly nowadays. The figure of the new type of workers as it has been
developed in the present book corresponds precisely to this situation.
Forced to accept waiting times and pressured by other customers, these
workers are miles away from the kind of enjoyment and relaxation that
the store or fast food outlet promised. They experience in their con-
sumption spaces the same disappointments as they do at work and must
restructure themselves psychologically in the wake of this dislocation. If
they fail to do so, they will feel marginalised and indeed be reprimanded
if they mention the store’s deficient organisation.
The sense of embarrassment that customers feels towards their less
sensitive peers clearly motivates them to advance more quickly, meaning
254   J.-P. Durand

they are being instrumentalised by the company offering the service,

which creates discipline in this way. Getting customers to be controlled
by their neighbours in a queue and getting them to control employ-
ees or users epitomises the customer–supervisor model. It also shows
how effective the model can be, since motivations here are intrinsically
linked to interventions whose only purpose is to push everyone into
more intensive activities. All analyses of this type of service relationship
have highlighted the variations in economic, social and cultural capital
that put customers in a dominant position vis-à-vis the service provider
they have in front of them. In other situations where users acknowledge
the service an expert is providing, for instance, a patient at a hospital
or a customer in a post office, what they are doing is “helping to give
meaning to work and by so doing driving front office experts’ sense of
engagement” (Tiffon 2013, 84). Yet it is management that is supposed
to be organising service quality. After all, positive feedback is part of the
virtuous circle linking the employment relationship to customer loyalty.
Unfortunately, cost-cutting seems to have become more important than
quality.

The Crowdsourcing Model

The final category of work undertaken by customers or consumers, and

more rarely by public service users, invokes the creativity and intelli-
gence of the very large crowd of persons who use the Internet or some
other telecom vehicle to perform, for little or no cost, certain tasks
that used to be done by a company’s employees or subcontractors. The
role that consumers play in the crowdsourcing model8 comes in two
forms, depending on whether this is being done voluntarily or not. For
instance, purchasing goods and services with a credit card familiarises

8Translating the term crowdsourcing into French is difficult. The official translation collaborate
gives very little information about “collaborative co-production” activities (Dujarier 2014). It also
seems like an oxymoron and pays insufficient notice to users’ massive participation. Terms like
créativité de masse or captation de masse say little about the process or its aims. Profilage de masse
only represents a small part of the activity, albeit one that is closer to the basic reality. Captation
de créativité populaire is heavy-handed and means little. Hence in French the English term is used.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
255

operators with the cardholder’s tastes and preferences and provides

information on their travel patterns. Google or text links are also inex-
haustible sources of knowledge concerning the owners of the comput-
ers or mobile phones in question. This makes it easy to reconstruct the
profiles of the consumers and Internet users to whom the goods and
services are being offered, the aim being to fit these profiles as closely
as possible and increase the chances of a successful sale. In such situa-
tions, consumers are not working per se but simply pursuing normal
daily activities. The only difference is that today’s technologies allow
firms with an interest in consumers’ bank accounts to produce informa-
tion they can subsequently put to good use. The bank therefore does the
work, meaning there is no reason for consumers to be remunerated for
it. At least not at first, since the probable application of rent theories at
this level means that consumers might one day demand a share in the
value that others have created through this process, not in the name of
work they do but simply because they have produced information of
indisputable benefit to an operator taking advantage of its oligopolis-
tic position, online, based on credit card use or as the telecoms service
provider.
Nowadays there is less talk about the remuneration of these activi-
ties leading indirectly to the production of value, and more about the
dangers created by this profiling industry in terms of civil liberties or
privacy rights. Total transparency is frightening, even to people deeply
attached to principles like democracy and personal freedom. Clearly
the ability to have knowledge about other people, such as engaging in
profiling, is deeply asymmetrical, akin to certain ‘total’, if not totali-
tarian social, economic and political regimes. The question is whether
knowledge is then used in a way that respects the principles of (formal
Western) democracy—and if its current economic use offers sufficient
guarantees for the future.
The other form of the crowdsourcing model is where consumers or
Internet users participate actively and voluntarily in games, filling in
so-called consumer satisfaction surveys, taking part in polls and sit-
ting tests that feed immense databases, or are created through com-
petition-based advertising urging people to develop the best ideas or
adverts. Some companies create brand clubs where fans collaborate
256   J.-P. Durand

actively to formalise trends by taking part in questionnaires or debates

and specialist platforms. In more technical fields, software, motorcycles,
cars, photography and video for example, technicians monitor forms
closely, as do marketing professionals. Indeed, they are often drafted by
the company itself, which is also in a position to control the opinions
it publicises insofar as it serves as website moderator. Thus, consumers
become one of the more innovative forces improving current products
or services, or creating new ones, through the catchy advertisements
they imagine or new ideas they come up with, all for free. Modern con-
sumers have become a real source of new thinking and a real productive
force, in Marx’s sense of socialised forces of production. The capturing
of innovative ideas, if possible for no remuneration, has been gradually
industrialised with those economic actors who are in the best position to
create value from this action being the quickest to appropriate knowl-
edge without any real opposition. Of course, once again the issue here
is what might motivate consumers to contribute to their own spoliation.
Financial inducements are random and small, or non-existent, in
many competitions. Some activities that are closely related to market-
ing, like filling in questionnaires or customer satisfaction surveys, might
get tiny remuneration, with the person’s curiosity or enjoyment in the
information they receive being just as important as money. Bonuses or
rewards associated with various competitions, particularly advertising
ones, represent a tiny share of the cost of advertising agencies’ budg-
ets. In short, economic remuneration is very rarely the main reason why
consumers take part in these corporate initiatives.
The real reasons are varied and quite diffuse. The first is customers’
pleasure in being part of a collective phenomenon that defines at least
some part of their social identity. This motivation resembles a “voter’s par-
adox” (Pizzorno 1986) where citizens are very aware that their voices will
not change the course of history yet vote in order to join others who think
like them, thereby affirming their sense of belonging to the same identity
group, one that might be based on social class, religious beliefs, social and/
or ethnic trajectory. The motivation is anything but utilitarian and relies
first and foremost on a sense of belonging to a community, even a vir-
tual one. For the contribution to last any length of time, the conditions in
which the person is hosted must be both enjoyable and valuable.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
257

Co-producers work together under one condition, namely that they are
satisfied by the work organisation. One example is professionals taking a
lot of time to participate in voluntary collective actions. They sense that
they are doing something good or maybe that they can publicise certain
ideas online without having to go through an incompetent boss. People
who have been deprived of a job tend to see this as a way of being allowed
to work despite everything else. The subjective and social value of being
able to ‘finally’ work in good conditions is the main driver of collabora-
tive coproduction. (Dujarier 2014, 119)

Hence the specialist sites being set up by Internet operators,

bio-informatics labs or programming companies, not to mention less
secure fablabs, which offer scientific resources drawn from the sharing
economy but often siphoned off by a few Californian companies turn-
ing a profit from them.
Beyond the pleasure of working in conditions that are often better
than the job for which they are paid, customers seek social recognition
for the quality of their contributions. Such recognition no longer comes
top-down but tends to be offered more freely, hence subjectively more
valuably, by experts working for the firm organising the promotional
action, and by the newly created peer community. At the same time,
recognition of this kind, which is closely associated with the satisfaction
of taking part in collective work, might be described as ‘cold’ since all
the social interactions it involves are mediated by IT tools or phones.
This is unlike ‘warm’ recognitions like gatherings with one’s family or
friends after an exam success, promotion or new job. In other words,
customers happy with ‘cold’ recognition are often socially isolated
individuals imprisoned in their current status. The unspoken driver
behind crowdsourcing in most of the fields where it exists today is the
desire to recruit unremarkable consumers rather than highly original
personalities.9

9Consider as well activist crowdsourcing when Internet users get together to develop, for instance,
free software or to organise volunteers seeking a scientific argument against certain industrial pro-
cesses or technologies. These applications of crowdsourcing, despite converging with the moral
and political orientations pursued in the present book, set off in a different direction.
258   J.-P. Durand

Spoliation When Customers Do the Work

The three models analysed here refer to a form of work done by users or
customers for no pay in general, but where the person often engages to
a greater extent than with remunerated work due to the mental advan-
tages they derive: a self-produced service; less time lost waiting; per-
sonal satisfaction; and social recognition through shared creation. A few
sociologists have contested this approach, considering it to be based on
overly restrictive definition of work (Cochoy and Lachèze 2011), one
associated with struggle and effort. They base this on the etymology of
the term tripalium and assert that work does not exist when collabora-
tion is voluntary and when games and co-production create enjoyment
and satisfaction. The more difficult question, however, is not whether
this situation constitutes work but if the customer/user is producing
value and, if so, who benefits.
Two situations should be distinguished at this level. In one, custom-
ers get other customers to take part in the customer–supervisor model.
In the other, customers are themselves working in the self-service and
crowdsourcing models. In the former, they are working in the sense
that pressed flux tendu makes them part of management’s function
controlling employees. Through their presence in the queue calculated
at just the right length, they pressure checkout staff, Pôle Emploi con-
sultants or McDonald’s employees. By so doing, they help to increase
employee productivity without adding any value to the service. Clearly,
the service provider would never consider sharing these productiv-
ity gains with employees or customers/users. To some extent, the only
remuneration that the employer expects is a shorter queue that accel-
erates front office employees’ work rates, which is paradoxical since the
reason for this expectation is the existence of a queue whose function is
not to satisfy customers but to enhance employee supervision through a
rational planning of queue lengths.
In the self-service and crowdsourcing models, the work done by cus-
tomers or users is desired/forced upon them and organised by senior
managers in the institutions offering the services. The work in question
partially if not totally replaces the employees who used to be responsible
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
259

for the front office service relationship, or for developing new products
or marketing ideas. Because customers/users replace employees, and
even where work is still referred to as co-produced services, the fact is it
does creates value. Yet with few exceptions, this does not lead to lower
prices for services or goods, something verifiable at self-service petrol
stations or with online travel tickets or grocery sales. Prices have fallen
in some cases (like electronic/IT equipment or household appliances)
but the main reason is the elimination of brick-and-mortar outlets and
lower product inventory costs. Since substituting non-remunerated
customers for employees does not decrease prices, due to the fact that
employees do not benefit proportionately from customers’ value crea-
tion, it is worth taking a closer look at what actually happens with this
value.
To analyse how service providers capture this value, one useful tool
to revive is Marx’s theory of the creation of extra surplus-value theory.
Most readers are familiar with Marx’s exploitation theory based on the
production of absolute and relative surplus-value, a thesis derived from
Ricardo’s labour theory of value.10 On the other hand, his complemen-
tary extra surplus-value theory (Marx 1976, LI, t1) is less well-known.
The principle is that entrepreneurs all seek productive innovations,
organisation of production or work, technological innovations, enabling
them to produce more cheaply than the average market price. In turn,
they have little interest in major investments (increase in constant cap-
ital) but instead in slight innovations increasing employees’ work rates
or, using a more modern example, the work customers do. The idea is
that the entrepreneur (or state body) will not want to increase the total
wage bill due to the innovation so as to be able to monopolise the eco-
nomic advantage that it generates.
Together with Marx, we assume that under ordinary working condi-
tions twice as many services are delivered (i.e., thanks to work done by
customers or users) in enterprise (or public administration) B vs. A. The

10It is worth recalling this by re-reading Sociologie de Marx, La Découverte, 2016, simplified here.
260   J.-P. Durand

value of an element processed in B will be reduced by the same amount

in comparison with the ordinary situation in A. If this element is sold
at the market price, the entrepreneur will capture further surplus-value.
The differential is due to the improved productivity that Marx calls
extra surplus-value, and which some authors refer to as differential
surplus-value (Bidet 2004) (Table 6.1).
The two companies in the above table pay the same day the wages
of $16 but innovative company B handles twelve service elements
daily versus eight for ordinary company A. Thus, in company B,
where innovation resides in customers’ work, the value of each ele-
ment condenses the wage share (v) and equipment depreciation (c) to
a value of $4.33, whereas in ordinary company A the same element is
valued at $5. If company B sells at market price it has an advantage of
$0.67 (or 13.4% better than its rivals). As Marx wrote, “Capital has
an unceasing and constant preference for increasing the productive
force of labour to lower the price of goods, hence of workers11” (Marx
1976, 13).
What this analysis reveals is that customers are not being
exploited here, nor are they producing “neo-surplus-value” (Tiffon
2013, 159). Instead of this, the real innovation is that custom-
ers and users’ work leads to the production of extra surplus-value
by the employees that the entrepreneur then appropriates. To be pre-
cise, customers are not being exploited here since the service pro-
vider did not hire them. Theoretically, it is the innovation lowering

11Here Marx alludes to the production of relative surplus-value, the process by means of which

prices for the goods comprising a labour force fall for several reasons, with the reproduction
cost also declining and wages falling in turn. Clearly the actual phenomenon is more complex
since it includes, for instance, inflation that causes wages to rise less quickly than prices. In
Marx’s reasoning, work done by customers tends to lower prices over time, with services then
reproducing the labour force since all service providers take advantage of the innovation to cap-
ture extra surplus-value. This disappears “once the new mode of production spreads and the
differences abate between the individual value (company B in the present example) and the
social value of goods produced at a lesser cost” (Marx 1976, 12). This also means that there is
a permanent race to use customers’ work to lower the value of the service, and that ultimately
companies (or public administrations) never stop playing games with customers and users to get
them to work more.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
261

Table 6.1 Creation of extra surplus-value

Number Share of Element Sales Extra sur-
of service work value value price of plus-value:
elements (v+pl) crystal- (c+v+pl) service market price
processed lised in each element minus ele-
everyday element ment value
Ordinary 8 $16/8 = $2 $3 + $2 = $5 $5 NA
company A
Innovative 12 $16/12 $3 + $1.33 $5 $5–4. $33
company B = $1.33 = $4.33 = $0.67

It is important to note that the datas used here is obviously arbitrary. C (share
of constant capital: buildings, IT systems, etc.) corresponds to the infrastructure
depreciation allocated to each service element during its lifespan, equal in the
present example to allocating $3 to each element.

the service valuation that leads to the production of the extra sur-
plus-value. The conclusion that customers are being exploited can-
not be deduced from the simple fact that they are the parties doing
the work. The only real driver behind employees’ production of
extra surplus-value benefiting employers is innovation, or in the present
example, work done by customers.
This recourse to the theory of extra surplus-value has the merit of
demonstrating that even if customers work, they are not being exploited
in the strict sense of the term. Nor are they subordinate to the provider,
who offers them no wages. Yet it is also true that they do not control
the outcomes of the work they do as customers or users. This makes it
possible to talk about the service provider’s spoliating or capturing value
created by customers/users.
The efficiency of this process, or more specifically this social rela-
tionship, to wit, the co-production of service, is that it gets custom-
ers to work more freely and with greater devotion than employees
who know that they too are free but that the different work resources
made available to them (infrastructure, wages, etc.) are decided inde-
pendently and imprison them in their wage-earner status. In short,
consumers possess a relative freedom but for different reasons than
employees. One example might be an Internet or mobile telephone
262   J.-P. Durand

hotline using an operating system that rejects certain apps. The free-
dom gained with this kind of system may be greater than what an
employee enjoys but it is totally bound by a tightly structured con-
sumption relationship that makes customers highly dependent on
service providers, in what is often referred to nowadays as ensuring
customer loyalty.
Having service providers capture the outcomes of, and value created
by, customers’ labour is an economic response to the aforementioned
structural impossibility for a company of increasing service productiv-
ity in-house. Outsourcing tasks, that is self-service mass retail outlets,
whether how this was done in the 1960s or online shopping today
and for which customers or users take responsibility constitutes an
infinite reserve of productivity that is very beneficial to service provid-
ers. In fact, this approach potentially has much greater possibilities than
what might be expected from employees’ own work.12 The concept of
a co-producing service, within a service relationship, is key for under-
standing how customers or users mobilise to obtain satisfaction. They
are particularly motivated when they work for themselves and have
generally already paid to enjoy a service13 that might otherwise not be
very satisfying. At the same time, accessing the service might be very
challenging, and even nightmarish, if it no longer involves a traditional
purchase but instead a specific demand, trade or complaint. Because

12This might also be equated with a formal submission of (customers’) labour to capital, some-

thing that Marx saw in nineteenth century artisans (or domestic workers) to whom capitalist sup-
plied raw materials that would then have to be processed. Workers were free to organise their
work and time in exchange for pecuniary remuneration. The submission became real when they
began being employed by capitalists, entertaining a subordination relationship that generally
played out in locales belonging to the employer (i.e., factories). See K. Marx, Un chapitre inédit
du Capital, Paris, Editions 10/18, 1971. Nowadays customers work to produce (surplus-) value
that they are not paid for and which is therefore no longer crystallised in the objects that belong
to the capitalist, as was the case during the earlier proto-capitalist era. Instead the focus is on
reality C (c.f. Gadrey model detailed in Chapter 4) that belongs to customers, who pay a higher
value for the service than it really deserves because they are forced to do this. One example is the
process of oligopolisation (i.e., self-service petrol stations) revolving around customer loyalty and
commercial captivity (see Apple IT system).
13Expectations may be similar in form in the public sector but will play out on another register,

with users working (and building a service relationship) because they want to get a reward they
feel they have a right to.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
263

consumers do not have a choice in these situations, they find themselves

in the same situation as employees trapped in a what has described by
Tiffon as pressed flux tendu organisation (Chapters 1 and 2) and perse-
vering under a constrained involvement regime. Working in jobs where
targets all always just beyond reach, new worker must fight to ensure
that promises about the service offer are kept (see section at the end of
the present chapter on deteriorating service quality). Because there is no
other choice than to fight to co-produce the service, new workers end
up very motivated and engage all their competencies and subjectivity to
achieve their goal. In this sense, the self-service model is akin to a major
economic-organisational upheaval. Not only do customers not harvest
the benefits of their own labour but because they work more, the prom-
ises made to them in the name of the service offer seem increasingly
improbable and lead to ever-greater personal engagement.
The customer–supervisor model may have less upside in terms of ser-
vice providers’ future productivity gains, if only because queues are only
a tiny part of all the activities in which customers/users engage when
taking advantage of the services they expect. Of course, if this man-
agement function is expanded to include participation in the organi-
sation of work and production of services, the process will face a new
hurdle, namely customers’ insufficient professionalisation. This keeps
them from adapting their production in a way that benefits the service
provider, who will then focus more than ever on enhancing customers/
users’ knowledge as cheaply as possible. That is by promoting self-learn-
ing, for instance through trial and error.
On the other hand, the crowdsourcing model offers customers an
infinite upside. It raises the productivity of service-providing com-
pany employees; and it enables an at least partial replacement of people
working in the field of creative services. Sociologists with no particular
interest in either consumption or ICT studies tend to neglect crowd-
sourcing, yet it is a revolution in the way that it enables service provid-
ers to appropriate value created by consumers. Even when the work is
playful it can still be very useful, leading to the invention of advertis-
ing messages, development of new services and improvement of existing
ones. As such, it is well and truly a new business model created on the
264   J.-P. Durand

margins of modern capitalism, one whose efficiency not only mobilises

customers’ subjectivity but also penetrates and instrumentalises their
deepest intimacy.
The fact of getting customers/users to work, and above all, the value
capture systems that they then create, has spawned a historically unprec-
edented situation. Because service providers whose services cannot be
offshored have no choice and must constantly increase return on equity
to satisfy shareholders, they tend to be very inventive. Acting upon cus-
tomers’ willingness to be creative and do it for no pay exemplifies this
drive.
The same applies to business services, albeit with a few variations
since the issue is different here. Companies that are customers of service
providers will have no intention of working for free. Quite the contrary,
they will try to take advantage of the services bought from providers, all
of whom have a different situation and status.
There is, however, one huge, and rapidly expanding, sector that
has seen business services develop in a number of very novel ways.
Multimedia bundles, including TV and Internet, is a business whose
production tools have fallen in price and become increasingly mobile.
The big players in this sector have been redesigning their business model
to get independent workers to do their bidding. The main objective
here is to be able to offer services more cheaply by lowering production
costs in what has been a very labour-intensive activity.

Inventing Piece-Workers in the Service Sector

Defining and Counting “Individual Workers”

Individual workers, self-employed or assimilated, provide services to

prime contractors or ‘customers’ without entering the kind of subordi-
nate relationship that traditionally characterises salaried employment.
Nor do they usually sign a bona fide commercial contract, except tem-
porarily on a few occasions. They tend instead to prefer private con-
tracts specifying service quality (images, texts, films or other intellectual
output), delivery times and pecuniary arrangements. Individual workers
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
265

can and often do service different customers to smooth out their order
patterns and future revenues.
Individual workers are mainly motivated by the idea of finding remu-
neration in sectors where full-time work based on open-ended employ-
ment contracts has become increasingly rare, or else where the potential
employee decides that salaried work would be too restrictive and there-
fore seeks alternatives. The most popular solution in the world today
is to be self-employed. This status, officialised in France in 2008 under
President Sarkozy, maximises flexibility without employers having to
assume any financial or legal liabilities in return. It is also the most acces-
sible form for workers forced to work part-time for different employers.
The text below will look beyond self-employment at other statuses where
licensed professionals or salaried employees find themselves in similar sit-
uations as their self-employed counterparts: personally developing and
designing their own workload; and being remunerated based on their
output and often therefore demanding the freedom to choose the condi-
tions under which they are employed and work.
In many companies, and sometimes public administrations,
cost-cutting is an explicit goal, with sub-contracting generally appear-
ing more efficient than salaried work, irrespective of an individual’s sta-
tus. Contracts there are open-ended, fixed term, interim and part-time).
The prime contractor tends to be a large company or cultural institution
where the business involves intellectual and creative activities. On occa-
sion, however, the same thing happens with very small companies or
even independent firms of licensed professionals (architects, city plan-
ners) bringing in individual workers as needs arise.
Under these conditions, the legal status applied to independ-
ent workers, in France at any rate, since every country in Europe has
its own labour law, is akin to the self-employed regime14 or variants

14Every discipline uses a specific vocabulary in reference to this growing phenomenon.

Economists, for instance, prefer talking about self-employment (see upcoming special issue of
Économies et Sociétés ) whereas sociologists talk about individual jobs or workers. Note that the
present chapter excludes entrepreneurs who want to grow their business by hiring employees.
Similarly, employees and pensioners who are self-employed but view this as a (very) secondary
activity are not part of this theoretical discussion since they only participate to a limited extent in
the economic model that is being analysed here.
266   J.-P. Durand

thereof, such as single person companies and licensed professionals.

Now, a self-employed status is always more expensive for the person
concerned, in terms of the amount of national insurance they pay, and
this despite the fact that their coverage, notably for pensions, is about
the same. Note that the present book focuses neither on traditional
licensed professionals (for example doctors or lawyers) nor on artisans
working in sectors like construction, transportation or personal services.
Under certain conditions, individual workers who are not self-employed
might be affiliated to guilds like France’s Maison des Artistes, which
ensures that graphic designers are paid royalties instead of fees. Others
can opt for copyright and pay, for instance, into the AGESSA authors’
Social Security fund if they qualify and earn enough to avoid the very
high complementary national insurance taxes that go with this.
With respect to situations where individual workers describe them-
selves as independent, we can add employment regimes where work-
ers suffer from the uncertainty of not knowing how much work they
will have yet are responsible for finding some. These arrangements have
come to be known in the UK as ‘zero hour contracts’. In France they
are known as contrats d’usage where the Code of Work article D121-2
talks about “the ongoing custom of not drafting an open-ended con-
tract due to the nature of the activity being exercised and the tem-
porary nature of the jobs in question”. One example is where people
working for pollsters or market research companies. Another involves
French state-subsidised entertainers who perform irregularly and there-
fore struggle to satisfy the conditions qualifying them for unemploy-
ment benefit. These situations are fairly similar in employment and
work terms to the ones that the self-employed face. It is important also
to note that companies have started to expand the notion of what con-
stitutes a show to the extent that supermarket promotions are often
referred to nowadays as artistic activities, enabling a company to classify
employees as a state-subsidised entertainers.
In addition to the aforementioned employment statuses, individual
workers have a whole other vocabulary to define and value themselves,
including independent workers, freelancers, and piece-workers. None
of these terms corresponds to a specific legal status. For instance, the
self-definition of an ‘independent’ worker is very different to a licensed
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
267

professional. Individual workers’ main attribute is not to be recognised

by professionals or their organisations. For instance, freelance journal-
ists seldom have press accreditations and are rarely employed by profes-
sional corporate communications bodies. This explains why the present
book focuses less on legalities and more on the pragmatic and concrete
situations shaping individual workers’ employment.
It is impossible to devise an exhaustive list of such professions.
Examples range from webpage designers and editors to website creators
and technicians; columnists and image makers producing communica-
tions for public or private sector institutions; unaccredited journalists
or photographers; visual identity creators; PR specialists; events organ-
isers; consultants, experts and advisors of all kinds; analysts, pollsters
and market study professionals; coaches; sound and image profession-
als working for television stations or advertising and communications
firms; sounds and image engineers; graphics designers and 3D image
creators.
The question then becomes how many individual workers thus
defined, exist in a country such as France. The answer is necessarily
vague given that the INSEE French National Statistics Office does not
use the same definition of individual workers when referring to entre-
preneurial company founders, licensed professionals or state-sponsored
entertainers. Instead, it tends to look at sectors of activity, company cre-
ators’ motives and the situations they find themselves in after two or
three years of operations. Clearly this limits the kinds of statistics that
can be utilised with confidence.
Out of the one million self-employed in France, around 50% do
not engage in any other activity. Four years ago this figure was 30%.
This is a clear sign of the current economic crisis and how people
are starting to view self-employment as a remedy for unemployment
(Vivant 2014a; Abdelnour 2014). Many self-employed businesses
are dormant and although around half declare profits, it is difficult
to ascertain how much people really earn in this way. According to
INSEE, the vast majority of self-employed companies involve the
kinds of intellectual and creative sectors being discussed in the pres-
ent book. In France, this amounts to between 60,000 and 100,000
individuals, mainly young people who have yet to recruit further
268   J.-P. Durand

staff after three years of operations, meaning that these are truly
self-employed individuals with no real interest in further entrepre-
neurial development. The reasons the numbers range so widely is
because of the uncertain overlap between INSEE definitions and the
ones adopted here. Note on top of this that something like 20,000
graphic designers use the status they have been granted by the Maison
des Artistes guild (Durand and Sebag 2011, 49) to work for prime
contractors in the culture and multimedia sectors, doing things like
designing websites or infographics. Otherwise, fewer than 10% of
France’s 106,000 state-sponsored entertainers can be categorised as
individual workers employed specifically in multimedia, television
and advertising activities, since they officially depend on being hired
through private contracts before subsequently signing employment
contracts qualifying them for unemployment benefits. The system
ensures that state-sponsored entertainers receive income during times
of unemployment but is still very distressing for them whenever they
have a period where no one requires their services or offers them a
job, making it hard for them to complete the 507 hours of work they
must do every ten months to receive benefits. On top of this, there
are all the under-the-table “arrangements” that some employers force
on workers, like not declaring overtime pay or promising to tweak
records if the worker consents to abnormally long hours. Not to for-
get that alongside these 10,000 state-sponsored entertainers, there are
at least as many technicians or artists who would like to be classified
similarly and work in the same sectors.
Lastly, there are zero hour contract employees working, for instance,
for polling or marketing companies, helping to organise live shows and
so forth. There is a real lack of data on this category of worker, which
can be estimated at between 8000 and 10,000 persons in France.
All in all, the total number of individual workers as defined above,
responding to the demand for lower service production costs but also
reflecting workers’ personal choices, can be estimated at between 90,000
and 140,000 persons in France. This is less than 1% of the active pop-
ulation, a number to be measured alongside the figures for so-called
atypical jobs (11% of the active population) such as interim work, fixed
term contracts or unwilling part-time work.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
269

The most interesting thing here is the emergence of a new model of

employment and work that both companies and workers prefer, espe-
cially young people in creative sectors. What remains to be seen is the
new model’s future prospects, whether it is reserved for the happy few
and if it will keep its promises to all parties on all sides of the equation.

From Rejection of Big Business to Libertarian Discourse:

The Effects on Income

Individual workers can be divided into two main categories: those who
have chosen their status freely and those who adapted it by necessity
because it is more widespread in a given branch, especially people com-
pleting their schooling or vocational training. The narrative here tends
to highlight the freedom of being one’s own boss and having control
over work schedules and ‘free time’ (Caveng 2010). Participants are also
delighted to no longer have little chieftains riding them and also have
the time to pursue their personal aspirations. Whether or not they have
experienced the reality of a medium or large-sized company, it is this
notion of semi-freedom that regularly arose in the interviews carried
out for the present book. The idea was that self-employment enables
individual fulfillment because people can select which proposals they
accept and which they refuse, design their own schedules, choose their
colleagues, subcontractors or other self-employed persons, and place of
work, at home or in premises chosen with particular colleagues, etc. In
short, working for oneself is supposed to make it possible to do some-
thing interesting and be invested in a particular task or activity.
This can be seen in combination with the growing unhappiness and
malaise felt in creative service industries. One case in point is the plight
of advertising agency employees, including designers who, despite
receiving top pay increasingly complain about boring work and repet-
itive campaigns where customers allow them almost no room for cre-
ativity. The same applies in audiovisual companies, and even in the
press, including magazines, with employees being increasingly told
not to deviate from editing or creative norms portrayed by market-
ing managers as the only way of maintaining an audience. So-called
270   J.-P. Durand

‘communicational imperatives’ and audience ratings have become more

important than contents, and the more the media becomes a mass oper-
ation, the harder it is to be creative.
What is being rejected is a whole host of work situations: salaried
employment replete with intrusive managers; repetitive daily lives staged
in claustrophobically closed spaces; and constant management pressure
forcing operatives to complete their tasks more quickly. None of this
is particularly attractive to young graduates, often with a BA and even
MA degree, especially those who wager they can find the resources to
build an alternative to these corporate shackles. The growing disenchant-
ment with salaried work converges with the aforementioned damaging
aftermath of lean management’s implementation, that is the spread of
socio-psychic disorders. Young graduates working in areas where they
can control their own competencies increasingly consider that the quick-
est way of escaping malaise at work is to abandon the world of large and
medium-sized companies and set out on their own, including by work-
ing for their former boss who then becomes a customer. One example is
GK,15 who used to be project manager in one of France’s biggest adver-
tising agencies. Although he found work with this prestigious firm inter-
esting, he ended up “rejecting the idea of working non-stop for little pay
and with little hope of progression”, an impression that was confirmed
after leaving given the continued stagnation in former colleagues’ pay.
Another example is the offer that the management of a private TV
station made to DK—formerly responsible for producing sounds
and images for evening news programmes—to shift to an open-ended
employment contract. DK refused both because the wages were low
and because he feared a loss of independence. He wondered, for
instance, where he would find the time to attend to his personal cine-
matographic ambitions if the day job had him working 60 hours a week.
In addition, there is the example of IR, who after earning an MA in
Communications and HRM began working at Orange before moving to

15The initials have been modified and correspond to interviews conducted with 15 young grad-

uates who left secure employment for more uncertain situations because they wanted to pursue
their personal aspirations, generally creating cultural goods and services relating to top-of-the-
range and luxury consumption.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
271

a consulting firm with fewer than 50 employees. After being promoted

to senior consultant, he began to find his workload, including travelling,
immensely fatiguing and was also getting bored by the expertised work
required of him. Even after negotiating a schedule allowing him to work
from home half of the time, he was still expected to criss-cross France for
the rest of the week. And even though his wages were increased, he still
felt unhappy at the prospect of spending 30 years at the consultancy and
worried this would keep him from fulfilling his dream of writing and
producing plays. In the end, he negotiated his departure from the firm.

IQ “was not happy at work”. Despite being a highly professional multi-

media journalist, she was exhausted by the fact of having to justify every
detail of her work to a mid-level manager who was less competent than
she was, and had been promoted through nepotism. The work organi-
sation was lamentable “and the working day poorly structured, with an
hour off at noon really being a waste of time since it meant that most of
us couldn’t leave the office until after 6 PM … The sudden changes in
scheduling, the emergencies, the constant need to redo and change tasks
due to the lack of clear directives, all of this added to our workload. It was
high time for me to get out of this work atmosphere”.

It is interesting to examine how these interviewees, all in their mid-

30s and highly resourceful, who decided to leave their employer and/
or refused an open-ended employment contract, reacted to their new
conditions. It is also worth seeing where they derived their income
from, the form this took, whether they were better or worse paid
and lastly, whether the changes helped them to achieve their personal
goals.
IQ discovered that working for two customers, a web broadcaster
and a corporate communications agency, increased his average net
income by anywhere between 30 and 70%, reflecting the wide varia-
tions in his workload. Alongside this, he discovered that being self-em-
ployed also hit his benefits, including healthcare, housing, sick leave
or holiday pay and of course retirement. At the same time, he stayed
hopeful of one day being able to launch his own corporate communi-
cations company. As for graduate architect DB, he wanted to be able
272   J.-P. Durand

to sell his 3D perspectives service directly to professionals instead of

going through agencies. Having joined the Maison des Artistes guild,
his monthly income varied between €1500 and 3500. After refusing
an open-ended employment contract, video engineer DK transitioned
from a state-sponsored entertainer status to self-employment when he
signed such a big contract with a large communications and polling
agency that he found himself having to recruit former colleagues. Note
that after completing these contracts, DK reverted to state-sponsored
entertainer status for the TV production work he then began doing.
The hours were long but he also made good money. EA was another
video engineer who after graduating from one of France’s top engi-
neering schools worked for three TV stations under a state-sponsored
entertainer regime. With monthly wages of around €3000 or 3500 for
a three-quarters full-time job, and without drawing down unemploy-
ment benefits, he felt things were going well. JK left a major advertis-
ing agency to start a company producing wallpaper on demand. He is
classified today as a self-employed builder of websites or visual identities
but continues to invest as much time as possible on his wallpaper cre-
ation-marketing plans. Lastly, IR, abandoned organisational consulting
to work as a state state-sponsored entertainer writing plays and acting.
For the moment, much of his income comes from occupations that are
fairly distant from his aspirations, management coaching, theatre work-
shops in primary school, and writing scenarios for an insurance compa-
ny’s web series.
Although workers’ incomes have generally risen, what companies pay
for these services has fallen by at least 20% when the price paid to the
self-employed person is compared to the full cost of having an employee
(direct wages plus payroll taxes). In addition, since employers are now
only paying for tasks once they are completed, in others words only for
the amount of working time spent producing value, they are no longer
paying for breaks, meals or holidays, nor for the time spent waiting for
the inputs used to produce the service, the time spent in training, and
the consequent cost, nor of course for national insurance and associated
payroll taxes.
All of the persons interviewed here abandoned their jobs or refused
more or less well-paid and stable positions either because they were
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
273

hoping to earn more as individual workers or else because they were

trying to free up time to carry out their creative personal projects.
Financially speaking, most were relatively successful and improved or
maintained their income level, essentially through the miscellaneous
extra work they did, particularly involving lucrative market niches,
given young creative individuals’ ability to satisfy customers. On occa-
sion, they would receive help in the form of unemployment benefits,
immediately on leaving their companies, or from the bank of Mum
and Dad, for example, when purchasing housing. What has yet to be
determined, however, is the actual amount of time they spent at work in
their new lives, split between their new jobs, work ‘putting food on the
table’, on the one hand, and the time they freed up to attend to their
pet projects, on the other.

From Remuneration of Working Time to Time Actually

Spent Working

Interviewees found themselves in a wide variety of situations and organ-

ised themselves along a spectrum ranging from video engineers who
were more or less successful at freeing up time to others devoured by the
work they had to do to put food on the table and by the need to spend
time seeking new customers. For this latter category, generally involving
people entering a new profession, and who sometimes needed a while to
penetrate it, the battle against an uncertain future was a serious worry
that took up much of their day.
Working for his two customers, IQ averaged eight hours a day with-
out any breaks. He did this seven days a week for about three weeks a
month. This big workload was a reflection of his demanding custom-
ers and the difficulties he faced in getting the information or interviews
needed to write his articles. Being a ‘hostage to fortune’ would be a
good way of describing his working conditions at the time. Moreover,
it was never certain that things would become easier the fourth week
of the month since new emergencies could always arise, something
that made it hard for IQ to plan family trips during school holidays.
“I have to work really hard organising my schedule with customers”.
274   J.-P. Durand

The inability to plan ahead is even worse in sectors like polling where
zero hour contracts have spread due to some companies’ expanded
interpretation of certain clauses in the French Code of Work (Caveng
2014). Because contracts rarely exceed one week and given that opera-
tions are expected to be very short in duration,

Individual contractors have very little vision of their future schedules, to

the extent that some really are living from day to day. This is quantitative
and qualitative flexibility at a level that is rarely witnessed elsewhere…
Although having said that, the requirement that the individuals involved
be available at any and all times is tantamount to penalising them since
they are not guaranteed sufficient work. (Caveng 2010)

Permanent availability is seen both as guaranteeing the work flexibility

that companies or customers generally require and also as a way that
workers can protect themselves against the uncertainty of not hav-
ing enough work hence income. At the same time, it limits workers’
autonomy while also adding to their time at work for rewards that are
barely worth mentioning, given the many cases where customers express
unhappiness with the service provided and require additional adjust-
ments, thus further hours of work, before paying. This applies to jour-
nalists and even more so to graphic designers. Some parties ordering
posters or visual identities are constantly modifying specifications, with
many designers complaining about customers’ lack of knowledge in this
field. One of our interviewees said,

Relationships between graphic designers and customers are necessarily

difficult, especially due to basic differences in the way each sees the other’s
role. Graphic designers need autonomy (which is not the same thing as
independence) whereas paying customers are usually more or less trying
to show that they alone are in charge. (Durand and Sebag 2011)
A second graphic designer went even further, “Professional designers
get respect for finding a visual solution to a given problem. Of course,
their counterpart is free not to agree – it’s up to them! Take the exam-
ple of chefs who can be very precise when specifying quantities, cooking
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
275

time, proportions, rare flavours, contrasts, spices, ingredients, budgets

and menu prices. Their tools are pots, pans and knives, And they deserve
great respect. Now imagine a restaurant customer hanging around the
kitchen and suggesting to the chef that a bit more garlic be added to the
aubergine, that redder raspberries be used, that the logo have a different
shade of blue (or green) to signal ‘sustainability’ - if not yellow to signify
‘regional sunshine’, irrespective of what the sales manager thinks of the
colour yellow blah blah blah… It’s impossible to imagine. And the same
applies to us. We deserve respect. What people need to do is simply share
and value our passion. That’s all”.16

Misunderstandings keep piling up with the arrival in cultural insti-

tutions of communication and marketing specialists who create a
screen between the actual customer, the theatre or dance director, and
the graphic designers. The work that these new players do is more
event-focused, meaning in turn the creative work that graphic design-
ers do receives less consideration (Durand and Sebag 2011, 70–80).
Endless discussion partially caused by cultural institutions’ more com-
plex decision-making processes has markedly increased graphic design-
ers’ workloads. They must not only revisit their creations but also take
part in endless negotiations—both non-remunerated activities that eat
up enormous amounts of time. Nowadays it is estimated that graphic
designers spend no more than 20% of their time at work on actual
creation, with the rest being spent on negotiations or administrative
tasks.
DB, an architect producing 3D images for agencies run by fel-
low professionals, ran into the same problem regularly. In addition to
lengthy negotiations, a complaint for most service-providing individual
workers, he also had to spend a great deal of unpaid time responding to
modification requests. His choice was between invoicing the extra time,
incurring the risk that the customer would go elsewhere, or doing the
modifications for free, something that significantly increased his work-
load and meant him spending longer days at work. Since each situation

16Etienne Robial, Grand Journal Manifeste, Galerie Anatome, Paris, September 2009.
276   J.-P. Durand

was different, it was impossible to set general rules for when orders
came in. As an individual worker, any problems would be his responsi-
bility alone.
Before conducting negotiations that can be very difficult, individ-
ual workers also engage in another activity that takes up a great, and
often under-estimated, amount of time, namely the need to find new
customers17 while developing and maintaining existing networks. When
crisis hit the architecture sector in the 2010s, DB contacted hundreds
of agencies, sometimes using original methods like sending postcards,
calling them repeatedly to try and pick up new orders. All the while he
was working hard on improving his website to cope with rising compe-
tition. He was having to offer increasingly sophisticated services but at
the same rates. The results were mediocre at best with only a few agen-
cies responding. In a crisis it is not unusual for workers to spend two-
thirds of their time, nearly 50 hours weekly, prospecting.
Networking is hard, as witnessed by the practices of young graphic
designers running two types of networks. The first is a professional
one with people sharing a similar vision of the business, aesthetics and
how to handle orders or customer relationships, etc.—all values shared
during their time in training. Second, the customer network that all
graphic designers must develop, something newcomers struggle with
when entering this already saturated market. This explains why they
generally spend several years working for an agency to learn negotiation
tricks and familiarise themselves with a market that is relatively diffuse
in nature. For IR, who went from organisational consulting to writing
plays, success was predicated on visibility leading to recognition. He
therefore took part in a number of castings in the hope that he would
be picked up for an advertising spot. He also wrote poems on an online
current affairs blog, explaining that people “must spend time being
seen”.

17Note a few exceptions like DK or EA, video engineers who would refuse poorly paid work.

Even so, EA emphasized the need for solid networks if a professional wants to be able to exit a
market for two or three months (in his case, to make a film) and hope to get work upon their
return. Note that French TV companies’ restructuring since 2015 has driven down demand and
prices.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
277

Rémy Caveng has shown how temporary staff working for poll-
ing companies must not only be available much of the time but also
demonstrate mental flexibility and satisfy customers’ productivity and
presentation requirements, or what is generally referred to as relational
competencies.

Since employment relationships are extremely individualised and because

access to missions is based on personal interactions with the managers
responsible for building teams, independent contractors must ensure
they are seen as priority recruits before anyone else. To do this, they must
always be pleasant, available, enthusiastic, happy to work and friendly. In
short, the relationship these independent service providers offer custom-
ers is a commercial one. They must know how to sell themselves to get
the work, an activity that takes up a great deal of time yet is not counted
as working. This undermines the general view that they control their own
time. (Caveng 2010)

These are the conditions that independent contractors face in situations

characterised by constant staff turnover and uncertainty. They have
no choice if they want to consolidate their position, at least over the
medium-term.

Intensification of Work and Mobilisation

of Individual Workers

The individual workers who are the furthest from salaried positions,
which is not the case for individual contractors working for polling
companies or state-sponsored entertainers, all said they acted “as if they
were working for themselves”. Some saw an overlap between the outside
work they did on-demand and their personal projects. All referred con-
stantly to the new freedom that came with their new status, meaning
the ability to control and organise their schedules and to do work that
was both interesting and useful.
Yet beyond this narrative and at a more personal level, what they
said about controlling their schedules came with certain subtexts that
278   J.-P. Durand

were increasingly apparent as interviewees started enumerating all of

the other constraints they now face and which almost never apply in
traditional salaried employment. Most individual workers would go
eight or nine hours a day without stopping. The porosity marking sal-
aried working time, coffee breaks, discussions with colleagues, wait-
ing for colleagues to provide information or data for example, did not
apply anymore. In working ‘for oneself ’, the only porosity remaining
was the confusion between working and private time, materialising
in longer working days or weeks where this was needed to finish an
order on time with the kind of quality that would ensure repeat busi-
ness. The intensification of work-related activities resulted from a con-
vergence between customers’ deadlines, less of a factor for employees
due to managers’ well-known collective inertia, and people’s sense of
working for themselves, making them swallow conditions they might
otherwise refuse. Graphic designers complained about intensification,
which they experienced through an acceleration of deliverables, with
customers viewing computerisation as a way of shortening the graphic
design value chain by eliminating retakes and accelerating exchanges
between value chain actors. They did not, however, agree that time
spent on intuition, reflection and trial or error, that is on actual crea-
tion, was the same as in the past. For customers, IT offers an oppor-
tunity to demand, for less cost and in less time, a wider variety of
proposals from graphic designers, some of whom rejected this under-
standing, if only because they want to retain control over the profes-
sion. All these factors added to designers’ workload and forced them
to work harder. For graphic designers getting fewer orders, the situa-
tion was even worse since instead of their work being intensified they
had to work longer hours for the same income, with many earning a
net hourly rate below €10.
In other situations, it is individual workers who are suffering the
consequences of volatile work volumes. Journalist IQ, for instance,
had two customers simultaneously asking for an article, orders he
could only satisfy by working harder and longer. This was neither
sustainable nor something that could be repeated too often given
the fatigue it caused and the risk of writer’s block, which would be
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
279

immensely damaging to a self-employed person’s customer relationships

and professional situation.
Elsewhere, video engineers also had to intensify their work, with TV
stations often calling them up as soon as they got images that operatives
and journalists wanted to send out as news reports. Because engineers’
intervention only happened at the end of the information chain, they
were always under pressure to finish quickly. This was another situation
where work flexibility required complete availability. If an engineer was
unavailable, another would be called in at the last minute, since images
of current affairs only stay relevant if broadcast right away and if possi-
ble before anyone else. Otherwise there was a risk of losing audience.
One case in point was DB, a perspectives architect intervening
towards the end of his branch’s value chain. Once other architect firms
finished their design work and showed it to customers, they generally
felt a need nowadays to spruce up otherwise austere plans with realis-
tically colourful images. Even when DB planned his interventions to
match architect sketches’ state of advancement, the process still forced
him to work harder and spend long days and nights preparing 3D
images that had to be produced on time. The earlier he started, in order
to get ahead and avoid a last-minute rush, the more changes he had to
do and the greater his total workload, for no extra pay. In short, it was
mainly because “he worked for himself ” that he accepted the need to
work under extremely volatile conditions.
To perform in today’s extremely competitive world, most indi-
vidual workers must also be au fait with the latest technology and
software. Not only do they have to use their own money to acquire
these tools, something that never happens to a company employee,
but they must also train so they can use them, eating further into
their working time. This new burden varies from one profession to
another but in the case of perspectives architects, this is a profession
that must tay cutting-edge, forcing DB to visit on a daily basis web-
sites run by his competitors, or by the parties providing the materials
and software he needed, to keep apace in the “performance compe-
tition”. These invisible activities usually go un-noticed by individual
workers, because they constitute technological and informational
280   J.-P. Durand

watch activities that can be easily confused with the simple reality of
working for oneself, which signifies here increasing one’s knowledge
to gain personal fulfilment.
The sum total of forms and statuses that individual workers expe-
rience constitutes an ideal mobilisation regime where they accept not
to be paid for time spent working but instead for the tasks they com-
plete. Hence the concept of new piece-workers who are flexible both
because they are totally available, meaning they often have no idea
how much time they must spend on future activities, and because they
agree to accelerated working patterns to meet customer deadlines they
have agreed. On top of this, they are responsible, therefore not paid,
for their own training, which generally requires them to stay up-to-
date. In many situations, they also buy their own work materials with
their own funds. Lastly, they say that they very much enjoy an inde-
pendent status because they have a sense of working for themselves.
Hence their willingness to agree most everything a customer wants,
because they enjoy the work but also because severe competition with
other individual workers lowers the prices for the services they provide
and empowers customers to be more demanding than ever.18

Realities and Fictions of Individual Employment:

Self-employment vs. Salaried Work

Most of the individual workers interviewed for the present book had
two aims one of which was to avoid salaried work in large companies,
while the second was to fulfil their personal aspirations. The extent to
which they achieved this was unclear, however, as was the amount of

18This was noted by Elsa Vivant in her discussion of the extent to which the situation was con-

sidered satisfactory by these “converts to independence” (being one of the three types of self-em-
ployed in her classification, alongside independent employees and unemployed entrepreneurs).
“The absence of a formal hierarchy gives them a sense of freedom and autonomy expressed - in
a parallel narrative that discredits salaried employment - through comments about the freedoms
they enjoy in terms of scheduling, methods, missions and colleagues. On top of this, there was
the possibility of affirming their own visions of the profession and suggesting new ideas. In the
words of city planner Sylvie, ‘We bear our own messages and convictions … it is really cool to be
able to use the language you really want’” (Vivant 2014b).
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
281

time they freed up compared to the constraints of salaried work. Some

situations are hard to analyse in this way, creation of customised wallpa-
per, opening a business communications agency, to whereas others do
lend themselves to critical analysis.
In most of the situations that the present book covers, the main
exception being a highly productive video engineer who subsequently
abandoned this path, individual workers would talk about how hard
they found it to pursue the professional aspirations that had caused
many to reject salaried work in the first place. Some blamed an obsta-
cle, the crisis of architecture, impeding the realisation of interesting col-
laborative projects, whereas others blamed factors undermining the new
products they wanted to create, for example, referring to the difficulty
of broadcasting short films or video art. Almost all felt that the ‘work
needed to put food on the table’ took up too much time either because
it disturbed their work-life balance or due to the significant commercial
prospecting or technological training efforts it required. In most cases,
the time spent working directly but also on the invisible work needed
to put food on the table was what kept the individual from spending as
much time as they wanted on their creative personal project.
Interviewees were necessarily ambivalent about their circumstances,
especially given the ongoing struggles they faced in terms of advancing
their personal projects. Some refused to acknowledge this frustration,
strongly defending the possibilities opened up by their work to put food
on the table, when combined with their status as individual workers. It
may be because individual workers strongly defend the freedoms they say
they enjoy in their new status that they are so engaged in the work they do
for customers, producing the desired levels of quality and above all meet-
ing ever tighter deadlines. Because they defend an idea (freedom) that is
closely related to a status (individual work), they feel they are more apt to
give themselves 100% to the tasks and services they are asked to fulfil. It is
this paradox that underpins the rising success of individual employment,
namely the clear contentment of some workers engaged in this process,
alongside the economic satisfaction of some of their customers.
Interviews conducted with individual workers for the purposes of the
present book discovered a kind of opinion poll revolving around three
axes. One opposed a preference for salaried work, secure employment
282   J.-P. Durand

despite monotonous work, vs. self-employment, uncertain income but

control over one’s time. Unsurprisingly, all the individual workers inter-
viewed here opted for self-employment, only varying in terms of the
extent to which they disliked working for large companies. For this gen-
eration, mainly drawn from upper middle social classes hence involv-
ing graduate workers enjoying greater intellectual resources and higher
social capital, income volatility was not deemed a real problem since
they had parents who could help support their young family if neces-
sary. The uncertainty accompanying their ability to control how much
time they worked on their creative project was largely preferred to the
security of working in salaried employment, with all the associated con-
straints. Working for oneself was a leitmotiv for this new population,
which enjoys taking risks while seeking personal fulfillment. Having
said that, most had spouses earning decent wages.
The second axis revolved around how interested respondents
were in their job depending on whether they were salaried or in self-em-
ployment. As expected, individual workers were very focused on their
new status, although they also issued slight criticisms of large compa-
nies, unlike their statements during the non-directive interviews. This
enthusiasm for their current situation was largely due to the way they
confused the work they do to put food on the table and their profes-
sional aspirations. Since the main goal in changing their status was to
create things themselves, and even if this did not happen as quickly
as they would have liked, the means for achieving this goal remained
much more agreeable to them than not having any aspirations all, as
they saw salaried employees. Whatever work they had to do to put
food on the table was no longer an end in and of itself as when they
were employees but something they had to do to achieve another goal.
Moreover, some independent workers found that tasks they did simply
to get money for food could also be intellectually enriching, one exam-
ple being when IR coached managers, trained young actors or cast an
advertising spot, all of which allowed him to write scenarios and get a
foothold in the acting profession.
The third axis involved individual workers reflecting on whether they
or their customers had got the best deal out of the new status. Findings
here were unexpectedly mixed. In terms of personal enjoyment, IR
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
283

(theater), EA (video engineer) or JK (wallpaper maker) clearly thought

they had come out on top. But many others had not forgotten what
they lost in job security and income terms, although in this lat-
ter respect IQ did see a clear advantage in working for two customers
instead of a single employer. At the same time, some individual work-
ers’ situation remained ambiguous since as creatives they had to rely on
other self-employed persons. They still preferred their new status to any
other, and were very aware of the advantages of playing a customer’s role
for once. In short, individual workers saw themselves as having bene-
fited from the change, even if their customers did as well.
All that then remains is to conceptualise the destabilisation of the tra-
ditional salaried status, open-ended employment contracts, as a product
of atypical employment and the enthusiasm for self-employment, which
are diametrically opposed along the employment spectrum. Over the past
30 years, so-called atypical, interim, fixed term contracts and involun-
tary part-time jobs, have slowly risen from 6% of all jobs to more than
11% of full-time equivalent employment. The trend is worrying, if only
because nearly 90% of jobs today are traditional in the sense of involving
open-ended employment contracts. Self-employment, in the way that it
is construed here, actually applies to less than 1% of France’s active work-
ing population, raising questions about its real significance. In reality, the
work innovations associated with this new status have helped to destabi-
lise the employment system, in France and across Europe, with the some-
times fervent support of former employees themselves.
The novelty is not only the diverse nature of employment statuses
today, given employers’ well-known ability to find loopholes in labour
law, nor people’s commitment but how many new categories of work-
ers and types of activity are affected. Most are more or less high val-
ue-added services that are almost impossible to rationalise. Examples
include intrinsic creations, customised alterations of signs and images,
intellectual and artistic activities translating into new and unique prod-
ucts. The traditional means used to rationalise work no longer apply,
as witnessed in engineering or pharmaceutical research where increased
productivity of labour is still predicated on lowering the cost of the
labour invested to achieve a given outcome. The wage reductions that
creatives are suffering or the intensification of creative employees’ work
284   J.-P. Durand

has already reached its limits, so that the only remedy is inventing new
forms of work uses that are less well-paid and even less efficient. Against
this backdrop, self-employment seems a panacea since it organises both
price and quality competitions between parties offering highly quali-
fied work. In other words, hitherto scarcely regulated commercial rela-
tionships or private contracts covering high value added services have
started to replace the employment relationships codified in labour law.
More succinctly, two main situations are worthy of identifying along
a spectrum of realities. At one end are large and medium-sized compa-
nies that rely an individual workers to cut production costs and cope
with the difficulties inherent to a traditional rationalisation of work.
Using Marx’s categorisation, this mainly involves producing extra sur-
plus-value through a competitive advantage derived from the use of
self-employment, construed here as an innovation. At the other extreme
are micro-enterprises that also rely on self-employment, firstly to
survive as is so often the case for urban planners working in the con-
struction industry (Vivant 2014b) or else for perspectives architects.
Micro-enterprises’ use of self-employment is grounded in an arrange-
ment between equals, the net effect of which is not to produce extra sur-
plus-value but to lower the final cost of the services provided. This then
lowers general prices, organising what Marx called the production of
relative surplus-value through a medium-term reduction in the cost of
labour force production generally19 and, more specifically in the present
case, organising the middle classes that used to work for large companies
in intellectual and creative activities but who are now self-employed.
Forms of employment are less important at this level. They range
from self-employment to particular statuses such as those associated
with copyright law or attributed by creative guilds like France’s Maison

19In this way, the emergence of piece-workers employed by an independent structure or a

micro-enterprise, architectural firm run by a licensed professional; theatre or dance troupe, etc.,
has lowered high value-added services’ production cost. This has a similar effect as the mass
import of industrial products from emerging countries, products made by poorly paid work-
force lacking any social protection. It is a dual phenomenon that helps to generate relative sur-
plus-value, in Marx’s scheme, by lowering the labour force’s exchange value, even if this is not
apparent because it corresponds to a higher standard of living (sale of goods or services produced)
and because it integrates workers into a capitalist production and consumption model.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
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des Artistes, covering all sorts of wage-earning arrangements including

state-sponsored entertainers or zero hour contracts. In relation to the
latter contracts, which polling companies use to recruit temporary staff
members, Rémy Caveng has spoken about

licensed professional wage earners…in a direct references to licensed pro-

fessionals. They do not have the same status but their activity is similar,
whether in terms of employer relationships or their need to construct a
‘portfolio’ of competencies and a reputation, being the conditions that
will enable them to reconcile the double imperative of stabilisation and
mobility. Otherwise, this salaried condition corresponds to representa-
tions of labour markets (and economic agents) conveyed via neo-liberal
theory, such as it is expressed through the conceptions/prescriptions
found in standard economic theory. In this market, work is a good like
any other. Workers are entrepreneurial actors making a career out of this.
They manage themselves like a kind of capital whose value needs to be
maximised. (Caveng 2014, 38)

The oxymoron of salariat libéral (independent wage-earners such as

Uber workers who recently won a court battle that challenged the idea
they self employed) refers implicitly to the completeness of the employ-
ment relationship that it signifies. In general, when an employer buys
working time in an employment relationship, the conditions in which
the labour force is used are not defined in the employment contract
so that the employer can apply a whole arsenal of rules and practices
to mobilise the employee, ranging from piecework a century ago to
today’s flux tendu logic. Employees know they are working for someone
else and therefore usually try to engage less. But if these new workers
or piece-workers have to prove themselves constantly, and even sur-
pass their normal capabilities, as happens with zero hour contracts or
self-employment, the situation becomes one that several authors have
started to call self-exploitation. According to Caveng (2010),

Ignorance of this self-exploitation logic, hidden behind people’s sense of

freedom, is an efficient way of exploiting a workforce without employers
having to offer either guarantees or non-pecuniary advantages.
286   J.-P. Durand

Of course, Marxists might not agree how the term is used, although
Lopez Calle defended it in analyses of independent lorry drivers in
Spain:

Conceptually self-exploitation is a contradiction in terms but one that

enables, inter alia, discussions of the determinations that force inde-
pendent workers to over-work as if this were their preference or choice.
Indeed, the concept’s explanatory power is found at this level. From a
critical perspective, the fetishist nature of work as a commodity reaches its
limits in the case of independent work. (Calle 2016)

On one hand, observers like Rémy Caveng consider that workers do not
always perceive the constraints that are an inherent part of the commer-
cial relationship inducing them to work so hard (intensified work and
high quality service provision) for an income that is more or less accept-
able, depending on the sector. On the other hand, researchers such as
Pablo Lopez Calle, who while recognising the concept’s misuse in terms
of Marx’s original conception, note that this is not direct subordination,
unlike salaried employment, where the owner of capital and the means
of production buys a labour force via a commercial relationship. The
latter is established in order to achieve a certain work outcome, rather
than buying the labour force itself, being in the present case the service
being delivered.
This is redolent of Marx’s analysis of labour’s formal subsumption
to capital, an approach he developed to explain the slow transition of
artisans and small farmers into a real subsumption of labour to capital,
embodied in the kind of salaried employment found in the capitalist
mode of production.

Capital is subject to a pre-existing and established work process involving

things like craftwork or peasant farming. The only transformations wit-
nessed in traditional work process subject to the imperatives of capital are
the progressive consequences of this submission, one realised by capital
and specific and traditional work processes. Specifically it is in opposition
to the fully developed capitalist mode of production that we might equate
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
287

a formal submission of work to capital with the subordination of capital

to a mode of work that was developed before the capitalist relationship
ever arose. (Marx 1971, 194–195)

Now that salaried employment has reached a state of maturity under

capitalism, individual work might be presented as the process that is the
opposite of that which reigned when capitalism was born. It is crucial to
note that,

What the two forms have in common is that capital is a coercive relationship
seeking to extort surplus labour, first by extending working times, with con-
straints at this level no longer based on a personal domination and depend-
ence relationship but solely on different economic functions. (ibid., 195)

Marx then went on to note that the substance of real work processes
and current technologies do not change (ibid., 194) even if formal the
exchange relationship does change between workers and capitalists,
whose

money is transformed into capital because it extorts unpaid work (surplus

labour) from the immediate producer. Yet it has not immersed itself into
the production process per se since it always functions along traditional
lines outside of this. (ibid., 198)

The crux here is controlling the tools and processes that both
proto-capitalism and today’s individual workers use:

The technological basis of this relationship is the artisan’s workshop,

whose crucial production factor is the greater or lesser artistry with which
individuals handle their work instruments. (ibid., 208)

Where the formal subsumption of work concept relates to services, this

highlights the permanence of the principle of work’s submission to cap-
ital in the capitalist system, as well as the inventiveness and capacities
for innovation that it contains enabling it to better exploit workers.
288   J.-P. Durand

Wage subordination and the underlying real subordination of work to

capital benefited capitalism during the ninetieth and twentieth centu-
ries, causing salaried employment to spread. With subordination factors
impeding and restricting modern workers’ subjective and creative mobi-
lisation, wage-earners find themselves in a framework that is too nar-
row to intensify their work and achieving a real reduction in the labour
costs crystallised in service activities. As such, capitalism is now in a
position to end this real subsumption and return to a formal subsump-
tion of work to capital. There is no reason to view this as the precursor
of capitalism’s imminent demise, based on a return to its initial form
of formal subsumption to work, and conceivably towards another cur-
rently unknown but emerging mode of production. Quite the contrary,
the return to older forms of exploitation at work, in today’s unprece-
dented globalised and financialised context, proves if need be capital-
ism’s formidable capacity for innovation. Faced with a crisis of efficiency
involving salaried work in the service sector, especially in high val-
ue-added service activities, capitalism has re-created the same conditions
of employment that it itself had begun to eliminate two centuries ago.
Of course, neither workers affected by this turn of events (in skills
terms) nor contemporary working conditions even remotely resem-
ble the nineteenth century. Yet the convergence is very real. Workers
are being rewarded based on the outcome of their labour, much like
piece-workers in the past. If one runs into unexpected problems
delaying the assigned tasks’ completion, their remuneration is not
really affected. This is redolent of the concept of the socially neces-
sary time need to make a good or service, the idea being that this
should be a prime determinant of cost. Clearly, getting all individ-
ualised workers to compete with one another in a way that is totally
free from Code of Work constraints20 will further reduce socially
necessary working time by any of the means that individual workers

20After France’s 2002 Social Modernisation Law, 2013 Employment Law and 2015 Macron Law,

this entails a series of labour law infringements where individual agreements increasingly replace
collective bargaining, lesser protection for employees and above all deregulation lowering labour
costs, i.e. workers’ direct or indirect income. For systematic analysis of these transformations, see
April 2015 Le Monde diplomatique.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
289

have been found to use. This can include accelerated work rates, the
reduction in the porosity of working time,21 a permanent race to
parlay intensive professional self-training into greater efficiency, and
self-funded means of production. Not only do companies’ internal
mobilisation systems no longer have any reason to exist22 but indi-
vidual workers, convinced that they are working for themselves and
have freely chosen their own status, hence are free to set their own
schedules, control their own work organisation and tasks, become
particularly engaged in executing the services ordered from them.
Most even affirm that they have found great fulfilment in their new
situation and worry much less about schedules or how hard they
work than salaried employees do.
The question here is whether both sides can win in something that
is not a zero sum game. This could happen, seeing as the value created
remains the same and the only difference is how it is shared, with the
opportunity cost essentially pertaining to the absence of a social safety
net and non-payment of the porosity space arising in employees’ work-
ing times, given that the only work being remunerated is piece-workers’
output. To have a non-zero-sum game however, a distinction must be

21It is also worth noting the extension of the workday, even if its explanation is not part of the
calculation used to determined the price of the service to deliver to the prime contractor. The
complexity here is that the construct of socially necessary working time is needed to analyse the
production of a good. The price that capitalists pay when buying a service is equal to the labour
price during, for instance, one month, divided by the number of service units delivered during
the same period. This number is a social average, forcing less-performing workers to work longer
for no extra pay because Marxist theory views the cost of reproducing the labour force as a con-
stant for all similarly skilled workers working at the same time in the same region (the socially
necessary working time required to reproduce the labour force). This explains why no consider-
ation is given to the idea that one individual worker may be less successful than another, neither
in social remuneration terms nor as regards the real time they work individually, which is a social
average. Lastly, permanent competition between individual workers lowers their costs, i.e. intensi-
fies their work and has them work longer hours (a non-remunerated extension that Marx refers to
as surplus labour and more specifically as absolute surplus-value).
22To fully compare salaried employment and piece-work, consideration must also be given to

the savings prime contractors realise compared to employers. These include management costs,
workforce supervision costs and above all costs incurred in mobilising increasingly sophisticated
employees. Service purchase outlays are lower, including because they often involve private trades
that are not underpinned by long-term contracts.
290   J.-P. Durand

made between perceptions of work, and workers’ general perceptions of

their own situations, and the reality of the service production process:

– The social and economic reality is as aforementioned. Only produc-

tive working time is paid, meaning whatever produces an outcome.
Downtime is not paid, nor are holidays or sick leave or pensions.
Workers have no right to training, nor are payments made for the
time they spend waiting for something to happen at work (i.e., if
orders are irregular).
– They believe they are free to organise themselves and control their
schedules in a way that will allow them to fulfill their personal aspi-
rations and/or only accept those work proposals they find interesting.
In reality, this does not happen very often.

This section has mainly focused on longstanding individual workers

operating in the world’s older industrialised countries, usually coming
from the middle classes and even upper middle classes where high-
value added creative services are involved. This sidelines members of the
working classes or office employees in these same countries but also in
the emerging world, where a rising share of total global industrial pro-
duction has moved. The reason why this is not a topic for the present
section is because its priority is to discuss the solutions that capitalism
has found to cope with the impossibility of both rationalising work and
producing services. Beyond a further destabilisation of wage-earners,
including weaker trade unions, less employee representation, unfavour-
able re-writing of entire swathes of France’s Code of Work, newly devel-
oped forms of the formal submission of work to capital can be expected
to develop through ‘innovations’ similar to the ones analysed here.
Lastly, other paths have already emerged in response to the difficulties
that capital is facing in producing low-cost services in a regime charac-
terised by severe competition. The idea here is to get users and custom-
ers to accept services of lesser quality made at an ever-lower cost. The
process relates to the questions that the present book has asked about
the advent of new types of workers, ones who are divided and have
agreed to live in an increasingly disjointed world, both as wage-earners
and as service consumers.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
291

Service Quality’s Inevitable Deterioration

Previous sections have demonstrated to what extent the rationalisa-
tion of work in the service sector has reduced production costs, much
as happened in the industrial sector while running up against certain
limitations inherent to these services’ very nature. To a large extent, this
relates to informational aspects, with service-producing agents strug-
gling to avoid referring to the meaning and significance of the infor-
mation needed to produce the service, something that increases its cost
even though production can only be partially automated. In addition,
the service relationship accompanying the dissemination and sale of
these services is generally based on a co-production that also requires a
customer or user relationship which is almost impossible to automate.
Even the WiFi terminals self-checkout counters found in stores, train
stations or airports everywhere nowadays need human beings to help
users/customers, especially for problems that machines cannot handle
alone.
All these forms of work carried out by customers and organised by
leading brands, from self-service to crowdsourcing, can only partially
replace the work that human beings do. Relying on individual workers,
referred to above as new piece-workers due to the nature of the subordi-
nation relationships they have established with customers today, is still
limited to a very few high value-added sectors. It is particularly hard to
generalise wherever work is monotonous and repetitive, if only because
it then has no real meaning and because monitoring and control func-
tions must always be located nearby.
The last solution trying to square the circle of rationalised work and
lower service production costs is entirely extraneous to employment
relationships or subcontracting arrangements with individual workers.
Cutting service production costs means lowering the quality of ser-
vices provided and the associated service relationship. Capital return
imperatives can offer radical solution at this level, but only if custom-
ers accept them. Hence all the advertising campaigns talking about
low-cost services, and goods, with service providers and their mar-
keting specialists trying so hard to show that this is win-win for both
292   J.-P. Durand

customers and companies. Of course, no one worries much about wage

levels and working conditions in these companies. Mediocre conditions
are assumed to be a voluntary part of low-cost service offers. The reality
is that customers/users are being forced to accept lower service quality
without having any clear vision of the reasons why this is happening.

The Paradox of Increasingly De-Humanised Services

Despite evidence to the contrary, service relationships are supposed to

be key to telephone operators’ expansion and customer support aspi-
rations, with one placing customer phone response quality at the very
heart of its advertising campaign. Yet there is also the case of people like
Robert, who had three contracts with French telecoms giant SFR but
then ran into a problem in 2013 when his son lost his telephone and
requested that the contract be stopped. Despite countless phone calls
and registered letters, SFR continued for a further nine months to debit
monthly charges from Robert’s account. The problem was that there
was no one with whom he could speak, given the dearth of physical
corporate premises nowadays. The de-personalisation of telephone ser-
vices has diluted people’s sense of responsibility and above all reduced
telecoms companies’ motivation to address the causes of dissatisfac-
tion. It was only after several months of warfare that Robert could get
a partial refund, with only four months being reimbursed, and SFR
trying to keep some of the unfairly collected charges by only dating
the reimbursement from the date of his letters of complaints. Robert
ended up dropping the case because he could not bear the idea of wast-
ing further time on sterile quarrels with an absent counterpart. Then,
there was the case of Irène, who took out a new “Révolution” contract
with French telecoms newcomer Free because the old technology was
no longer functional, whereupon a technician called her several times
before coming to her house to repair the old “box” rather than replac-
ing it with the new technology. At that point, Irène decided not to
migrate to “Révolution” since the extra expense was no longer worth it
now that her old box was repaired. Despite repeated calls and prom-
ises to cancel the contract, she continued to be charged the higher rate
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
293

for 13 months. Because she was generally busy and given the poor ser-
vice she had had, she finally gave up, feeling she was truly up against a
wall of anonymity. No one answered her phone calls or letters and the
few times she got someone, they were totally disengaged, reading scripts
out robotically. All in all, Free seemingly put up virtual walls that soon
became tangible and almost physical, with the customer’s being unable
to speak directly to the core unit charged with deciding her case.
Then too, there was the case of Clément and Clara, who tried to sign
up for two bundles when their preceding contracts expired on the infa-
mous “anniversary date” that people better not miss if they want a new
deal. As loyal costumers, Clément and Clara rang SFR and requested
the new features on offer, including lower charges with two hours of
free calls, unlimited texting, one month free contract and a loyalty dis-
count. The person on the line quickly agreed but SFR’s confirmation
failed to mention the new discounts on Clara’s contract and did not
even talk about Clément’s new conditions. Cutting labour costs had
led to the de-skilling of the company’s workforce, with less time spent
on each customer contract and back-office tasks being rushed through,
hence poorly concluded. The company then sent two new mobile
phones in two days in a blind effort to push product out. At the same
time, the sales department rang Clara to tell her there was a mistake in
her package and that she would have to pay an extra €11 a month. She
then had to ring the manager who after long negotiations confirmed the
initial conditions, gave a name (Mr. Pluque—a joke name in French)
and said he could be reached on the company’s customer hotline, if
need be.
Clara then received a new text saying that she owed €11 but when
she rang the hotline she learned that Monsieur Pluque did not exist.
The person on the other side of the line started the whole process anew
before concluding that Clara’s new conditions actually meant that her
monthly bill should go up. The couple then tried to contact the depart-
ment responsible for contract negotiations, a process that had to be
launched within eight days, but could not get through and were told
they had to ring back later in the day. Just two minutes later, however,
Clément got a direct message from the department noting his case and
294   J.-P. Durand

promising to call back within 48 hours. This was despite the person on
the phone having refused to send a text or email “because it is not our
procedure”. Five days after the initial contact, no notice had been sent
confirming the end of the contract, nor were the couple given any clar-
ification about the conditions governing the two contracts. It was as if
the company was doing everything it could to delay discussions beyond
the eight-day retraction period. In the end, because the competition
did not offer better conditions, Clément and Clara decided to stay with
SFR, despite their immense disappointment with the way they had been
treated.
Agreeing a contract over the phone can only work if the company
immediately sends a written confirmation of the specific conditions
that have been agreed. The fear here is having under-skilled telephone
operators commit to things that do not correspond to their employers’
interests, at which point the company has an incentive to initiate pro-
cesses that are very detrimental to potential consumers. The latter end
up suffering from a total lack of transparency, meaning they are not
clear which contract clauses will be applied, whereas the service pro-
vider does. This introduces arbitrariness to people’s choices. In addition,
greater reliance today on call centres distributed globally and employ-
ing telephone operators who are in a constant rush, and do not share
individual information correctly with colleagues working on other sites,
makes it almost impossible to track files accurately. Having so many
different poorly trained people on the phone, with none sharing much
specific information about the file in process, creates an impersonal ser-
vice and can be terribly frustrating to customers. As Clément said, “The
institutionalisation of non-quality” makes people want to drop ‘weak’
suppliers as soon as possible. Not only is it very difficult to renew a con-
tract without running the risk of having necessary services eliminated,
while bank payments continue, but there is also the fear that rival oper-
ators may not be much better. This is due to the tacit understanding
among operators to decrease customer service quality at the after-sales
stage. Once contracts are signed, the service provider disappears and the
traces they leave behind are not enough to remedy the mobile phone or
Internet problems that customers are facing.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
295

The situation is no better in the transport sector, particularly now

this has been opened up to competition. Paris commuters often have a
de-magnetised ticket preventing them from getting onto trains they see
from the platform. The city’s public transport provider, RATP, regularly
explains this in a flyer stating that,

Technical expertise has shown that the presence of magnets can alter tick-
ets’ magnetic strip. These magnets are often invisible and embedded in
the bags and papers we carry around with us as part of our daily lives. To
reduce the risk of de-magnetisation, tickets should be kept away from any
objects that could be magnetic (badges, cards, handbag clasps, eyeglass
cases, diaries, notebooks, etc.) or metallic (keys, mobile phones, small
change, MP3 players, etc.).

In other words, RATP refuses any responsibility for the non-quality of

the ultra-fragile tickets it has designed so poorly, passing the buck to
users. This sleight of hand illustrates the current trend for service pro-
viders to get customers to take responsibility for everything. The only
thing missing would be for RATP to force commuters to buy a metal
box that the company alone has the right to manufacture.
In an era of globalisation and non-stop trading, intercontinental
travel organised by powerful computers has facilitated intercity travel,
especially crossing borders. The question then is whether this organisa-
tion is more profitable. Take the case of Joséphine, who wanted to go
from a conference in Cannes on the French Riviera to visit friends in
Genoa (Italy) for three days. Two months before, she had thought about
renting a car and went on to her favorite discount website, AutoEurope.
After struggling for a while, it became apparent that the machine
refused to rent her a car in Italy for return in France. She then decided
to drop it off at the border town of Ventimiglia and pick another car
up on the other side of the border. None of the car rental companies
allowed this, however, meaning she could not find any agencies in
Ventimiglia. She then rang AutoEurope and after listening for several
minutes to endless advertising was finally granted the pleasure of speak-
ing with a real person. After about ten minutes searching for a good
rental company, her counterpart told her the cost of picking up a car at
296   J.-P. Durand

10 AM in Genoa and returning it to Cannes before 6 PM was a whop-

ping €620. This was all the more amazing since the deal involved two
neighboring EU countries. It also attests to car rental companies’ lack
of commercial interest in their customers’ real needs or desires. The next
day, Josephine got an email from Hertz offering an Italy promotion at
€21 a day. She tried to rent a car she could drop off at San Remo before
finishing the journey on a train, only to discover small print saying that
the minimum duration for this deal was three days. In the end, she sim-
ply took the train.
Given that she wanted to take a regular intercity line, Joséphine did
not worry about buying the ticket beforehand and simply got to Genoa
train station one Saturday morning 30 minutes before the regular 10:57
AM Genoa-Cannes service. The man at the ticket counter told her
there were no more seats on the train nor could she buy standing tick-
ets since the machine refused to deliver tickets without assigning a seat.
He then suggested she get a first class fare from Genoa to Savona, then
from Savona to Nice and finally from Nice to Cannes. The two transfers
meant the journey would take an hour and a half longer. The price was
also higher. The whole mess is explained by the rigidities planned into
railway companies’ software, whose sole goal is to maximise train occu-
pancy rates, mainly so fares can be increased on sections and at times
when demand is greatest. Finally, the 10:57 AM service that Josephine
was meant to take came and went more than one-third empty. In both
sectors (rental car and railway), commercial policies aimed at maximis-
ing revenues and minimising service production costs were only super-
ficially interested in customers/users’ interests. The aggressive marketing
that companies pursued in no way corresponded to the mediocre qual-
ity of the service offered. Rationalising services to make them more
profitable end up reducing their quality proportionally to the simplic-
ity of the customer demand. In other words, the simpler the demand,
and the easier it is to process, the less it interests service providers.
Rationalising to cut costs weakens companies’ ability to satisfy customer
demands and creates new constraints. Nowadays, it is easier to fly from
Genoa to Geneva to Cannes than to take a train.
Another example is the Rome-Paris train service that always arrives
a few hours late at Paris-Bercy station. The first time this happens,
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
297

users assume it is a one-off and do not complain. But when the same
problem kept happening to Sylvia, she decided to seek an explanation
from customer service. The response she got was, “We’re not here to
explain why trains are late. All we can say is that SNCF is sorry for the
delays”. Sylvia then filled in a questionnaire and sent it to an imper-
sonal address that was not SNCF. The same problems kept occurring
every time she travelled. These included the same delays and lack of
customer service. From SNCF’s view, however, the system has become
perfectly rationalised, with the company even handing out formal
complaint forms so they no longer have to employ someone to do this.
In Sylvia’s words,

This just seems wrong because you sense that filling in a form is a total
waste of time. My feeling was that they had become experts in making
fun of customers and this added to the tension. When I asked to speak
with the station master, he also told me to fill the form in. In the end you
can’t help but lose it with a system that exists simply to prevent you from
getting any answers or explanations. The whole thing certainly increases
your heart rate.

The same lack of responsiveness also happens with France’s TGV

fast train, which as everyone knows is increasingly late. In the battle
between cutting train service production costs and maintaining service
quality, the former is winning. SNCF has responded by distributing
complaint forms to calm down anyone who is unhappy and divert their
anger towards procedures where they themselves become actors and take
responsibility for the delays they suffer! Obviously this does not change
anything but at least it keeps people from expressing violent sentiments
in public. This example also shows that de-personalisation is no longer
the sign of a defective service but has instead become a tool for manag-
ing service relationships. Objective documents have replaced interper-
sonal relationships in a bid to assuage anger by asking questions that
trigger the subjectivity of users wondering what the point is of filling in
a form. Cynics would see the idea of de-personalising customer service
to manage these kinds of situations as an ingenious solution. But inno-
vation can be cruel.
298   J.-P. Durand

Normalising Customers’ Expectations to Narrow

the Service Offer

Nor are users/customers better served by airlines. This dominant prac-

tice in this sector is yield management, which focuses on maximis-
ing revenues from a particular seat (on a plane or train, from a hotel
room). The idea is to maximise the price of a unit’s total capacity.
Sophisticated algorithms familiar with the busiest dates for a given ser-
vice can be used to increase fares, with the remaining seats or rooms
discounted to ensure that the plane or hotel is at full capacity. This is
a differentiated approach to fares or rates based on total informational
asymmetry. The party offering the service is the only one to control the
information and indeed the pricing, as well as the decision to run spe-
cial flights or trains. The end result is that customers no longer know
the cheapest time to buy tickets and travel in comfort where they can
avoid stop overs. The following two cases illustrate this price disparity
for one and the same level of service, an experience that most readers
will be familiar with.

– In May 2015, the Gimenezes purchased round-turn Paris-Santorini

flights in August with Transavia, Air France’s discount operator.
They paid €250 more than friends who had bought the same tickets
mid-July.
– Also in March, Frédéric bought three tickets for Corsica but was
unable to get a direct flight to Figari and therefore chose to land at
Bastia, two and a half hours away from his resort. In August, how-
ever, the day before departure, he found online direct flights to Figari
for the same price as he paid in March.

The customer is no longer always right. Transportation is becoming

harder with more and more stopovers if people are unwilling to pay
much higher fares. Transport companies track demand daily and alter
fares to maximise the number of passengers paying the highest fare.
Rationalisation in this situation is not only a question of organising
work or the service production but also distribution and sales. It starts
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
299

with information received from customers searching for flights online.

Airlines use this to compile a database whose cumulative results are then
mobilised against customers’ interests thanks to increasingly efficient
algorithms that companies alone control. The number of seats sold at
the highest price can be increased or decreased, depending on demand.
It suffices to simply change the rows with curtains separating passen-
ger classes. Informational asymmetry between service providers and
customers is a rent, such as the one received from property assets or nat-
ural resources. The party possessing the information grid, database with
customer behaviour and algorithms, can appropriate part of the circu-
lating value. Customers are the main losers in this process since they
cannot help but be passive in the face of informational asymmetry. Even
worse, any adaptation, for instance where people buy tickets or reserve
a hotel room a long time in advance or indeed the day before departure,
is recorded and used against them. The new general trend is for yield
management software to decide to increase fares or rates during peri-
ods of high demand or simply when someone has looked for something
online.
Similar service quality trends have been witnessed in retail distribu-
tion, which is increasingly done online or in large outlets run by a few
well-known chains. Take the example of Maryse who one day went to
the FNAC bookshop in Paris’s Les Halles district to return a computer
she carried in the original packaging, together with the invoice and war-
ranty. This seems like a situation where the customer should have been
in control, especially since the warranty had another two months to
run. Maryse went to the customer service desk and took a ticket. After
waiting 30 minute on a quiet Tuesday morning, she was finally called
by a staff member who seemed totally disinterested and barely greeted
her. He looked through her extended FNAC warranty and asked if
she had contacted SPB, FNAC’s insurance company and a subsidi-
ary of AXA which covers purchases made with a Premier card. Maryse
was surprised and asked why she needed to contact SPS for a FNAC
warranty. The answer was unhelpful with the staff member simply say-
ing that is how things are. The decision Maryse then had to make was
whether to accept the imperatives forced upon her by the system and
300   J.-P. Durand

meander through its bureaucratic maze or keep her computer with its
half-broken keyboard.
Rationalising services to cut costs is supposed to only affect the work
organisation, not service quality. Yet this has not been the case for a
long time, with rationalisation efforts having had a major effect on a
variety of factors, including commercial policies and product availabil-
ity. Take the case of Georges who would periodically purchase an oat-
based milk substitute called Nature d’avoine at a local convenience store.
The product was available only sometimes, meaning every time he went
shopping he would buy up to ten of the fifteen one-litre bottles gener-
ally on display, the reason being that he had also noticed other custom-
ers buying up the product whenever it was available. One day, however,
the store had run out, so George asked for an explanation. The response
is very revealing.

Manager: The electronic label is gone so I don’t think we’re going to stock
it anymore.
Georges: But people clearly want it since it always runs out. Surely this is a
re-stocking issue.
Manager: Doesn’t matter, we’re not going to stock it anymore.
G.: Why not?
Manager: Because our supplier warehouse has decided we won’t get any
more product.
G.: But you could ask them to re-stock it on your behalf, right?
Manager: Yes, but it doesn’t matter since we’re not the ones to decide.
G.: This is worse than the Soviet Union. I’m a regular customer here and
you’re refusing to sell me a product I’m asking for.
Manager: Well that’s the way it goes. There’s nothing more I can say. You
need to find another store where they carry the product or you should
start looking for another one.

Hyper-rationalisation rigidifies the entire service production appa-

ratus to the point of conflicting with customer preferences. This does
not seem to bother sales personnel who nonchalantly justify whatever
commercial policy their employer decides upon. At a time when every-
one is talking about how great it is to have a diverse product offer and
flexible solutions, deeper analysis has revealed that beyond salespersons’
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
301

soothing discourse, product and service offers have generally become

more rigid, with customers increasingly forced to accept whatever con-
ditions are forced upon them. This is particularly true online despite
the different ways software might theoretically be used. It is as if online
suppliers limit their product offer voluntarily so as not to over-invest
either in the catalogues they develop, which become increasingly auto-
mated based on data provided by industrialists or else in customer inter-
face software. On most car rental or seasonal hotel reservation websites,
for example, backspacing to change an input, date, option, region,
forces customers to start everything again, i.e., to re-enter all informa-
tion from the start. Having irreversible procedures means customers
end up spending an enormous amount of time making reservations
or purchases, time that clearly costs nothing to the company making
the sale, minimising the cost of producing the website but also shap-
ing it to completely automate back office data processing. The relation-
ship between humans and machines, a key area for companies looking
to raise their apparent productivity of labour, is totally absent from
online sales software designs. Little thought is given to user-friendliness
or ergonomics of retail sale websites’ screens. The rigidity of operations
and the fact that it is almost impossible to backspace without having to
upload all data again means that these tools are miles behind the kind
of equipment that employees themselves use at work in companies or
public administration. It does not seem to matter much, however, with
problems using a given tool, and the customer time this wastes, being
viewed by companies as time that they are getting for free.
The information available to customers is also minimal, especially
given how broad a range of products or services are on offer nowadays.
This makes it hard to compare the advantages and downsides of the
alternatives featured in product or service offers, one possible excep-
tion being electrical appliances that come with much information of no
real value to customers. The solution is to consult other sites or forums
that can be more or less reliable depending on how business-like the
comments are—not to mention mystifying biases that suppliers them-
selves introduce. Going online uses up a lot of customer time, how-
ever. In general, they end up of having to invest more time doing this
than an expert would have spent with them in a store. Substituting
302   J.-P. Durand

free work done by customers for paid work done by experts is clearly
a big advantage for service providers seeking to cut costs beyond what
they could have achieved by rationalising service relationship-re-
lated work, based on face-to-face interactions between salaried experts
and customers. One example is the catalogue that Amazon offered for
a long time, featuring a handful of Sony GP-XXY cameras with pho-
tos of a few previous generations of GP-XXX models. Purchasers with
the first-generation camera began noticing that the manufacturer had
changed the connectors, so that despite the promise of compatibil-
ity their old ancillaries (i.e., adapter cables) would not work on the
second-generation cameras. Amazon quickly overcame the problem by
uploading a new picture where customers were no longer promised the
same connectivity.
Another example of websites’ asymmetric rigidity is the impossi-
bility of finding solutions to problems resulting from errors made by
a supplier’s employee. One example is the case of landowner Paolo,
who wanted to register two flats on a seasonal holiday rentals site. For
unexplained reasons, the address of studio A ended up under pictures
of apartment B. Paolo tried to change the profile himself using infor-
mation garnered from the FAQ section. This did not work so he went
to the owners’ chatroom. But since the error related to the manage-
ment of two different assets, he was not allowed to modify it himself
and had to ask the webmaster for help. At first he was sent a polite
automated message telling him that he would soon get an answer. The
next day, however, he was sent another automated response, this time
a ten-line thanks for his loyalty and explaining that he should visit the
FAQ for further information. The telephone hotline was, of course,
always engaged. After several days of ringing at different times, he was
finally able to speak with a real expert. The problem was that rent-
al’s seasonal nature meant that Paolo wanted to be able to scale down
his per-day rates for longer bookings. Unfortunately, the site software
only gave him a choice between one week and one month. There was
no reason for the IT not to have been more flexible and offer a mul-
titude of solutions. The only explanation was a desire to lower the
cost of developing customer/landowner interface software, and of
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
303

running a customer relations back office. To avoid costly complex-

ity, the webmaster preferred a rigid IT system that was a real prob-
lem for customers. Once again, an oligopoly developed by the four or
five international leaders in seasonal holiday rentals sites meant service
providers no longer felt the need to satisfy customers’ interests and
expectations.
Reducing service production costs, and the ensuing deterioration in
quality from a consumer/user perspective, tends to de-humanise the ser-
vice relationship itself. Telephone operators respond like machines using
a script they are not allowed to deviate from. For employers, this is a
chance to shorten call durations by preventing real human relationships
from developing. Many customers complain nowadays that telephone
operators talk like robots without emotion. This is probably because
showing compassion for customers or users suffering poor service will
probably lengthen conversations without anyone getting closer to find-
ing a solution.
The de-personalisation of service relationships, based on emo-
tion-free telephone operators trained to defuse (without raising
their voice) customer anger, is a strategy that service providers use to
get customers/users to buy online services (transportation, leisure);
goods; or maintenance, since the people on the phone are usually the
main ones supporting the product or service. Increasingly, it is soft-
ware-driven robots who answer, normally with even less personality
than telephone operators seeing as their voices are not particularly
‘human’. Robots are a new screen between customers and service pro-
viders. They further diminish and institutionalise a company or a pub-
lic administration’s sense of responsibility by objectifying the distance
between customers/users and service providers. It has become impos-
sible today to contact, and especially to meet, a manager to explain
problems and find solutions. Furthermore, information available on
a website tends to be presented in a way that gets customers to take
responsibility, and indeed blame, for any errors, increasing their sense
of guilt and making them feel isolated in their interaction with their
impersonal machine.
304   J.-P. Durand

How Consumption Shapes the New Worker-Consumer

Given how much it costs to improve service quality, large service-pro-

viding firms, and even some innovative public administrations, try to
ensure that every consumer/user demand, or expectation can be pre-
dicted in advance. Fundamentally, it is the unforeseeable nature of
human behaviour that can be so costly whenever this transforms into a
personalised service. Once a customer has exhausted, or negotiated the
FAQ stage, their file is processed and individualised manually (thus
expensively). As noted by Dominique Boullier (2014), the era of big data
is one where human behaviour can be predicted instead of simply fore-
cast, with certain well-resourced firms mobilising powerful algorithms
capable of processing the data they need to extract specific outcomes that
they can then use to orient their service offer. Predicted consumer prefer-
ences, and service uses, often deviate from their initial function. But by
crunching big data, it becomes possible to gain immediate knowledge of
these alternations. This necessarily transforms the offer, calling for further
rapid changes and affecting the relevant service relationships.
It is crucial to avoid any overly unequivocal vision of how big data is
processed or of the industry involved. Large firms will also be tempted
to predict human reactions and behaviour, orienting them to improve
their knowledge of the substratum, including by using certain media
that are already widespread today (Internet, bank cards, and a range of
consumption preferences). In other words, the new era of predictions
will be rooted in the normalisation of behaviour, meaning the imple-
mentation of more or less mandatory norms that individuals will adopt
to confirm through the behaviour that is both expected of them and
predicted. The idea here is to get individuals to situate their choices
within a given realm of possibilities while avoiding anything that is not
an offer, or to even suppress any consumer aspirations or demands that
cannot be satisfied immediately.23

23A different analysis might stress the creative possibilities and promises enabled by the ideology

associated with the fablab or hacking movements. Observers often wonder about which social
classes members of these institutions belong to, given the fees paid and especially the university
capital needed to run in such circles.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
305

This new era is based on integrated and internalised, and hence,

unperceived violence induced by a process that consists of imposing
unspoken choices: its about normalisation. It includes preventing peo-
ple from expressing choices that are not part of an existing product or
service offer. It also prevents people from talking about any unhappiness
or dissatisfaction they feel if they are disappointed or if the service rela-
tionship is of mediocre quality.
When producing goods or services, lean production, and the perma-
nent cost-cutting that is the reason why it exists, have used the ration-
alisation of work to further deepen the divide between what is said,
the promises made to employees, and the daily reality of work. On
one hand, there is the way everyone’s sense of autonomy, responsibility
and subjectivity have been nurtured. On the other hand, there are an
increased number of constraints and time pressures, with work norms
defined narrowly within stringent meta-rules.
In short, new type of worker appear to be divided and flawed. In
other words, they restructured in such a way as to accept the huge gap
at work between the enjoyment they are promised and a reality that
usually locks people into tightly structured tasks. Of course, it is still
possible to show that the linkages between these different autonomies
are greater than they were during the scientific organisation of work’s
peak years of Taylorism and Fordism. However, it is also possible to
show that today’s management announcements and promises are greater
than they used to, culminating in the divide between the extremes along
this spectrum being greater than ever before. Even so, work can still
achieve greater meaning in certain spaces of social interplay than in the
actual tasks that people carry out. Most employees say they feel ambiva-
lent at work yet often express unhappiness with the non-quality of their
jobs, attesting to the basic flaw that earlier chapters discussed.
The conclusion to this present chapter on deteriorating service quality
reveals a growing homology between working and consumption, even
before reminding readers that consumers are also workers. The same
divide is found in the consumption sphere between the promises made
to consumers and the real quality of the services being provided (or of
the service relationship). Clearly this is nothing new. Past divides how-
ever, derived from the distance between job-related promises, since the
306   J.-P. Durand

more someone was qualified, the greater their purchasing power, and
product availability. Today it occurs within the consumption space and
in this sense has become an intrinsic part of the consumption process.
Consumers, customers or users are increasingly torn between their
aspirations, probably encouraged and induced by the media and mar-
keting environment, on one hand, and the reality of the service being
offered, on the other. The best example of this is the enormous gap
between images sold of dream holiday destinations (landscapes, beaches,
hotels) and problems people face upon arrival, including rooms in a
poor state, dirty beaches, ugly landscapes and bad weather. Misleading
photos are a very powerful tool and something that people have never
understood clearly. If customers do not want to spend all their time for-
mulating complaints that almost never have any effect, because of the
way software is designed, and if they do not want to be permanently
engulfed in lawsuits, often against firms that have moved offshore, they
must learn to accept the fact that they are being cheated.
In short, consumers are induced (forced) to accept the dislocation
that they experience as customers. Indeed, they are expected to own and
internalise it, making it another part of their sense of self and person-
ality. By so doing, they are internalising the idea that it is easier not to
complain than to seek remedy. They accept this situation to the point
of starting to view the system as something comprised of impossibili-
ties and constraints that are both inevitable and preferable to the battles
they would have to wage to protect their consumer rights. This naturali-
sation of constraint situations tells them that ‘there is no choice’.
People also ignore the violence of this constraint process because talk-
ing about it means recognising and thinking about it as something that
must be fought, despite the risk of failure. The moral and psychological
costs appear greater than the chances of success. Withdrawing into one-
self subsequently reinforces the individualistic ideology that is part of
the all-consuming victory of Western financial capitalism today. Even
consumer class actions have been denatured and institutionalised to
such an extent in the United States, and now in Europe, that the only
people to benefit are lawyers. The financial cost of this trend towards the
legal treatment of consumer complaints has killed the hopes invested in
such solutions just one decade ago.
 6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities    
307

The homology of the gap between promises and realities in the

workspace, along with disrupture found within the consumptions
sphere, has constructed new type of persons. The convergence between
these division and flaw processes has helped to forge individuals who
are more fatalistic in a historical cycle where the sort of collective
effort needed to fight back seems to have run out of steam. People are
becoming increasingly isolated and flawed. They seem to have fewer
resources, with the real questions being how far this will go and how
long it will last. The end result is they are in a worse position for cop-
ing with an all-out inculcation of social mores. The objective is to
convince them of their condition as exploited workers and subordi-
nated customers.
One way of analysing this might be in terms of the anthropologi-
cal transformation of humankind. Yet this vision might also prove too
strong. A better interpretation is to say that a very deep, albeit possi-
bly provisional, transformation is affecting people’s individualities and
subjectivities, and that this corresponds to a moment in time where
capitalism combines the power and immediacy of ICT with globalisa-
tion and a socio-economic fabric that has become completely financial-
ised. Whether this will lead to the worst possible outcome is a question
addressed in the scenarios developed in he next chapter. Readers should
be forewarned about future dangers. But they should also be left with a
sense of hope.

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Pizzorno, A. (1986). Sur la rationalité du choix démocratique. In P. Birnbaum
& J. Leca (Eds.), Sur l’individualisme. Paris: Presses de la FNSP.
Tiffon, G. (2013). La mise au travail des clients. Paris: Economica.
Venco, S. (2014). La chaîne internationale de la sous-traitance: nouvelle
tendance de la division internationale du travail? Journées Internationale de
Sociologie du Travail. Lille (17–19 juin).
Vivant, E. (2014a). Les jeunes diplômés auto-entrepreneurs: une entrée atypique
sur le marché du travail. (Document de travail du Latts 14-01). http://hal-
enpc.archives-ouvertes.frhal-01025118.
Vivant, E. (2014b, novembre). Entre subordination et indépendance: la dif-
ficile insertion professionnelle des jeunes diplômés auto-entrepreneurs.
Connaissance de l’emploi, CEE (116).
 7
Two Scenarios for the Future

Constructing the new worker divided by the cognitive dissonance

between the theoretical possibilities on offer and the actual reality they
face is visibly a long process. Whether or not the transformation is of an
anthropological nature, there is little doubt that new workers are find-
ing it increasingly easy to accept norms dictated by a productive sys-
tem and consumption space in which they have less and less room for
manoeuvre. Even universities, which served as shelters for social initia-
tives and imagination in the 1960s and 1970s, have been steadily losing
their spaces of freedom, due to the utilitarian imperative that all stu-
dents be professionalised and that research make an immediate profit.
Two scenarios are possible here. One is very dark and foresees social
regression at both the global and the individual level, increasingly exer-
cising its effects on new workers until they fully accept their divide as
well as the conditions of their alienation. An alternative scenario is opti-
mistic and imagines a positive exit from today’s social and economic
crises through an at least temporary resolution of some of the key con-
tradictions characterising contemporary capitalism, which everyone
agrees is struggling today.

© The Author(s) 2019 311

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_7
312   J.-P. Durand

Humankind may or may not opt for one or the other of these sce-
narios. Everything indicates that people like helping to create their own
history but only do this on rare occasions, that is, whenever they face
challenges such as colonialism or fascism, in short, dictatorial, violent
and killer regimes (Durand 1997). At best, they influence major trends
through the resistances they offer or in their collective demands. It is
these kinds of upheavals that new workers are sometimes capable of
imprinting upon the unpredictable course of history.

The Dark Scenario of Social Regression

The current rise of financial capitalism derives from three converging
phenomena that arose over the period 1970–1990:

– The end of Third Worldism and anti-colonial battles, with almost

all former colonies gaining independence but setting up political
regimes that were more or less devoted to their former imperial pow-
ers (and to crushing any opposition)
– The weakening of any international worker movements (communist
parties and revolutionary trade unionism), particularly in Western
Europe
– The disappearance of the Soviet block and China’s adoption of a cap-
italist development model.

No longer having any substantial ideological, military, or eco-

nomic opposition, neo-liberalism began portraying itself as the only
socio-economic model capable of being viable over the long run.
Writers such as Francis Fukuyama went so far as to proclaim the end
of history (1993), predicting the unopposed global domination of
Western liberal democracy. In this scenario, the only remaining con-
flicts would be ethnic or national, hence regional in nature, relics of
proto-history. And in fact, 20 years later there is still no opposition
force capable of contesting Western leadership, aside from a Jihadist
movement known for its atrocities and willingness to destroy entire
civilisations.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
313

The dark scenario of social regression foresees a continuation of cur-

rent work and employment trends, based on further social inequal-
ity transforming the social fabric and similar elements at the behest of
financialised capital. However, there one neither predictions nor fore-
casts but an observation of the current orientation’s short-term effects
on humankind.

A Substantial Deregulation of Work and Employment

This book has reconstructed the recent history of major transfor-

mations in work, conducting in particular a detailed analysis of the
nature of lean production. Lean management came to be seen as the
epitome of work, and production, rationalisation, steadily spread-
ing across all industrial and mass tertiary sectors (banking, insurance
and mass retail) during the capital accumulation crisis that erupted
over 1970–1990 as a result of the economy’s new financialisation
imperatives, specifically, the attempt to permanently reduce produc-
tion costs by lowering labour costs. The battle against the porosity
in people’s working time, the intensification of work, the extension
of working hours and the decline in remuneration, whether direct
wages, working benefits or pensions, all had consequences that
increased socio-psychic disorders and workplace suicides. More than
a mere fashion as Alain Ehrenberg would have it (2000), the role that
socio-psychic disorders, referred to as psycho-social risks in lean man-
agement literature played in the early twenty-first century translates
the violence of these transformations. The fact that the topic is raised
less frequently nowadays does not mean that Ehrenberg was right
to depict it as a passing fancy for scientists but attests instead to the
problems that business leaders and managers in public administration
have had in normalising exceptional circumstances and crises. They
have found, and are finding, it very hard to normalise workers’ psy-
chic difficulties and sufferings, meaning that in the end no one talks
about these problems. Hence the likely dawn of a new cycle empha-
sizing “creativity at work”, even though working conditions keep get-
ting worse and worse.
314   J.-P. Durand

Clearly, not all workers are sick of work. Many have followed a psy-
chological or emotional trajectory enabling them to cope with the
disrupture between the promise of autonomy and greater responsibil-
ity at work, and the reality they face of being handcuffed by increas-
ingly stringent meta-rules. The end result is that they experience lean
management as nothing more than one reform among many others.
Even so, accepting the reality of this dislocation, and the flaw in their
own egos, means they tend to accept whatever situations they find
themselves in, criticising with words but almost never with actions.
Sometimes they actually exacerbate the very conditions that are so
harmful to them, for instance when they agree to personal evaluations,
falsify reports or simulate expected behaviour. By allowing themselves to
be moulded in this way and by acquiescing to their own imprisonment,
they legitimise their own social shackles. A number of texts have looked
at this constrained involvement phenomenon (Chapter 1), ranging
from Etienne de La Boétie’s voluntary servitude construct to Hannah
Arendt’s thesis about the instrumentalisation of communities as vehicles
of oppression (Arendt 2002; Durand 2017).
The emergence of dislocated humans, combined with the individual-
isation of employment relationships instituted via a competency model,
and including the perverse idea of an individual evaluation of employ-
ees who are being forced compete with one another, largely explains the
collapse in militant unionism and its replacement by functional kinds of
representative trade unions. A further factor is business leaders’ violent
attack on unions, encapsulated in high profile trials enshrining anti-un-
ion discrimination, in particular in the French automotive industry
(see interalia Chappe 2015), not to mention well-known restructuring
practices where the first people fired are union activists, irrespective of
the protections their status supposedly affords them. Then there is the
co-option of inexperienced union officials, with management either
encouraging them to spend more time in meetings hence less time in
the field, or pushing top candidates into higher, thus more distant,
elected positions. Lastly, medium and large-sized companies engage
with so many representative bodies nowadays that they often end
up ignoring union officials who, given how little time they spend at
the office or on the factory floor, can no longer mobilise as much as
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
315

they used to. This combination of employer practices and union con-
straints, in conjunction with unions’ detachment from critical experts
or academics who might otherwise help them, means that in most tech-
nologically advanced countries,1 unionism has been condemned to rel-
ative passivity vis-à-vis the work transformations that management has
implemented to accompany the advent of lean production. Unions have
been blind to the essence of this phenomenon, or in many Northern
European countries like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland or
Finland, too quick to embrace it.
The weakening of trade unionism in the world’s technologically
advanced countries, and the abandonment of any opposition to capital-
ist choices, goes a long way towards explaining the successful efforts of
employers, and often governments, to deregulate labour, epitomised in
more flexible working time, with workers being forced to accept sched-
ules that are poorly publicised and irregular. The last 30 years have seen
frontal attacks everywhere against work and especially jobs, especially
in the Global North where a veritable deregulation of employment
has been organised. In addition to the rising number of atypical jobs
(interim positions, fixed-term contracts and involuntary part-time con-
tracts), this kind of workforce rationalisation has fostered new forms of
work mobilisation, ones adapted to self-employed individual workers,
irrespective of their legal status, for instance, in sectors characterised by
great intellectual creativity.
Germany offers a good example with the Hartz reforms (2003–
2005) that liberalised the country’s employment system (labour
market) through an array of measures (Blot et al. 2015) and made
employment more flexible and workers more precarious by invent-
ing all sorts of atypical jobs. Take self-employment, which accounts
for more than 11% of Germany’s active population at a time when the

1The distinction here is between technologically advanced Global North countries like North
America, Western Europe, Japan or Australia as opposed to emerging countries (China, India,
Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, etc.) that often depend technologically (and sometimes econom-
ically or financially) on the Global North. Beyond this, poor countries in Africa, Asia or Latin
America are subject to all kinds of domination without any real ability to resist. It is also possible
to identify technologically advanced regional subsets in the Global North. There is a discussion
below about the links between technology, globalisation and economic financialisation.
316   J.-P. Durand

country’s labour movement seems to accept “neo-corporatist integra-

tion” (Brinkmann and Nachtwey 2013). In France, it is the Code of
Work that has come under the most criticism, as witnessed in the 2015
Macron law2 and El Khomri law, bizarrely called the “Labour Law” (Loi
Travail ), that sought to liberalise the country’s employment systems. In
the name of job creation, for instance, Macron eliminated almost all
obstacles to Sunday work even in locales where this was hardly neces-
sary, such as retail trade, especially is non-tourist zone. Fantastic num-
bers were bandied about (200,000 new retail jobs, for example) whereas
in reality only a few thousand jobs were created. Expecting people to
work voluntarily on days when they would otherwise be off is a big con,
as it was in the 1980s when Paris’s leading department stores tried to
stay open on Mondays. Lastly, whereas the Macron law increased pay
for Sunday work, the sums involved were largely left up to to employers
because “in a context where people can be blackmailed because they fear
losing their job, the risk is a race to the bottom” (Le Monde diploma-
tique, April 2015). Note that the same law made it easier to fire people,
with any employer found guilty by industrial tribunals of malpractice
no longer having to rehire the person or pay them off and severance
packages in the event of constructive dismissal being limited hence-
forth to sums specified by the French state. The absence of new con-
straints on employers also encouraged them to recruit posted workers,
meaning persons employed under the rules and at the kind of wage lev-
els found in other European countries engaged in the race to the bot-
tom. Deteriorating working conditions, one consequence of the focus
on a permanent rise in the productivity of contract work, and a leading
cause of socio-psychic disorders and orthopedic problems, have spread
across France due to the Macron law, because of the way it undermines
public-private partnerships. One example is the country’s CHSCT
Workplace Health and Safety Committees, which will find it harder to
get specialists in given the drastic reduction in time allocated to expert

2The Macron Law refers to two bills drawn up by France’s Economics Minister, one dealing

with the economy (the actual Macron law) and the other with work and employment issues (the
Rebsamen law). This legislation has confirmed and accelerated the process dismantling the Code
of Work that has long been the foundation of France’s social model.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
317

interventions. It was especially note worthy that France’s Socialist

Party was actually very divided on the the Macron law, with the Prime
Minister being forced to invoke a constitutional article 49.3 emergency
procedure to secure its enactment.3
Similarly, the arrival in France of Uber, which offers both chauf-
feur-driven cars and UberPop services, where private parties carry cus-
tomers in their own passenger vehicles, has also further liberalised the
employment system. Uber offers drivers or passengers no legal protec-
tions. It also pays no tax in France. Unsurprisingly, the right wing news-
paper Le Figaro glorifies Uber and defends its ‘collaborative model’. This
is because Uber lowers service costs and because it promotes crowd-
funding solutions, ostensibly in the same way that Airbnb does for
housing. De-politicised lower middle class citizens’ predilection for trav-
elling in black stretch limousines with darkened windows translates the
downgrading of the work done by drivers, most of whom come from
deprived neighbourhoods on the outskirts of large urban centres. These
are people who view Uber as an opportunity for achieving “independ-
ence” via a well-paid job. The number of social movements contesting
this platform since 2015 shows how badly people’s hopes have been
dashed. Countless books and articles describe the phenomenon but few
analyse it in a way that shows how deteriorating working conditions,
lower pay and a weakened social safety network can be attributed to the
games played by politicians complicit in the ongoing deregulation of
the global economy. Of course, this is also the death of a social model
based on solidarity between generations and social classes, one that used
to offer paid holidays and a social safety network but which has come to
be replaced by individualised practices in which all activities are viewed
as commercial transactions, thereby killing off any residual mutual sup-
port systems.

3There are a multitude of retrograde measures in this text, envisioning inter alia the sale of major
public assets such as the Groupement industriel des armements terrestres (GIAT) arms company and
the Lyon and Nice airports. Not to mention, in the vast list of items the law contains, greater
recourse to government decrees replacing parliamentary debate about issues as important as urban
construction, regulatory revisions (including of the Code of Work), etc.
318   J.-P. Durand

The illusions associated with independent contracting in a soci-

ety in which neo-liberalism imposes its individualistic ideology on
everyone has caused the Uber-isation (increasingly poorly paid work
managed on ill-intentioned platforms) of most commercial and even
non-commercial services, with consumers and workers’ active consent.
The strength of this innovation resides in the fact that consumers and
workers are often the same people, with the promises made to the for-
mer constantly undermining the satisfaction of the latter. This too stems
from the invention of a new type of worker.
Referring to this new system as a “gig economy” seems mislead-
ing. It is a reference to a rock or jazz concert that involves a (usu-
ally verbal) agreement about an occasional event between organisers
and musicians. The subtext here is the instability of the transaction,
something supposedly desired by one side (prime contractors) and/
or the other (employees) in a new, more libertarian kind of econ-
omy—one reason being the tendency of the very same advocates of
unfettered freedom to cultivate ambiguity by getting three otherwise
perfectly heteronomous demands to converge: customers who want
to order their products or services at any time of the day; companies
that must satisfy this volatile demand; and workers who apparently
have no desire to sign open-ended employment contracts. The ques-
tion then becomes whether the freedoms in question are the same for
each of these parties, and above all whether jobseekers hoping to sta-
bilise their income are being forced to accept a situation that they
never really wanted.
In France the situation of Uber drivers, pizza and/or ready-made
meal motorcycle or bicycle home delivery staff—like the rickshaw
cyclists increasingly seen around tourist hot spots—are more or less the
same: availability, instability, precarity, uncertainty about the future, low
income, poor social safety net, etc. In reality, the gig economy is full of
piece-workers suffering from uncertain pay conditions yet forced to run
after whatever income sources they can find. Analysis here must abso-
lutely focus on the negative effects that this kind of productive model
has on the rest of the economy and on work in general. Not only does
it drag wages down but it also undermines working and employment
conditions. On top of this, by hitting workers’ wages it reduces demand
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
319

for goods and services and forces the older industrialised countries into
a vicious tailspin of social and economic regression.
In sum, the neo-liberal ideology that right and left-wing govern-
ments alike have been fomenting in France and in other technologically
advanced democracies can be summarised as a form of globalisation
that forces workers in these countries to align themselves with employ-
ment, work and remuneration conditions similar to those found
in nations engaging in a social race to the bottom. These include the
emerging economies and the world’s poorest countries, one example
being Bangladesh and the way that it treats textile workers. By refusing
this race, workers in the Global North risk seeing their jobs disappear
quicker than ever. In the very direct words of one Chinese industrialist,
“In an era of globalisation, there is no room anymore for social pro-
gress. The French need to understand that there is no such thing as a
free lunch” (Le Monde diplomatique, April 2015). Thus, even with the
hope that emerging economy labour costs will rise rapidly, due to class
warfare and the labour cost impact of having a strong middle class, it
is inevitable that the income of workers in the Global North is going
to drop, especially given how hard it is to imagine any social move-
ments or election results that might stop this from happening. Valérie
Segond has shown how these mechanisms operate in different sectors,
not only reducing employers’ labour costs but also forcing workers to
indemnify their future employers because they hope to get hired sub-
sequently (Segond 2016), a practice that has already been observed at
Ryanair (Fletcher 2013; Lichani 2015). What remains to explain are the
foundations of this trend, avoiding simplifications such as ‘globalisation’
when trying to understand the dangers caused by an infernal machine
that has already crushed so many human lives in the Global North, in
the emerging economies and in the world’s very poorest nations.

Blind Globalisation and Financialisation

Although the present book does not purport to offer a treatise in eco-
nomics, and especially not in finance, it is still worth revisiting these
two disciplines to ask what effects the world of finance has had on the
320   J.-P. Durand

world of work. How do these effects play out and why. Nowadays,
financial imperatives tend to focus more than ever on cutting the costs
of production, in the broad sense of the term, including design, and
of distributing goods and services. This cost-cutting is supposed to
be achieved both by lowering labour costs and by rationalising work
and production. The process involves transferring productive activities
to low-wage emerging economies mainly focused on low value-added
industrial and service activities. It also includes productive re-organisa-
tion, like lean production, in the Global North, which is, of course, the
object of the present book.
This process of transferring profits from the productive to the finan-
cial sphere has been accompanied by the emergence and rapid devel-
opment of autonomous financial activities, referred to nowadays as the
financial industry, following a number of monetary deregulatory meas-
ures that first began around 1971.4 Little by little, the financial indus-
try’s profitability imperatives began to contaminate the real economy
to the point of requiring the same returns here as those generated by
purely financial activities. This is best exemplified by LBOs (leveraged
buyouts), where financial operators with minimum capital at their dis-
posal acquire a company by borrowing funds they repay by requiring
higher returns from the company than those customarily practiced
in its branch.5 If this fails, financial operators have no compunction
about re-selling everything to repay the debt and recommence the same
destructive work elsewhere.

4Briefly, this involved de-indexing the dollar from gold (1971), leading to the liberalisation of

exchange rates then interest rates in the 1980s with the creation of independent central banks.
The door was then open to the free movement of capital and the globalisation of the world’s
money and capital markets. New financial operators (pension funds, hedge funds pursuing purely
speculative goals) massively leveraged bank loans to debt-equity ratios that went as high as 400 to
1. This ended in tears, one example being the 2008 crisis (Chesnais 2011). Note additionally a
host of “derivative” financial innovations, being complex speculative mechanisms that are discon-
nected from the real economy.
5As explained by Isabelle Chambost (2013), “In this case, financial investments are frozen for

around five years but can still expect to benefit from high annual returns of between 20 and 25%.
Reaching these return levels notably requires the kind of financial leverage seen in many LBOs.
Acquisitions are financed by equity capital that is relatively minimal compared to the total size
of the private equity fund involved (institutional investors and speculators). Hence the very high
debt levels that the acquired companies must repay themselves”.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
321

Another way of increasing pressure on work in the Global North

is to align their labour costs with those found in the emerging econ-
omies. This is being achieved through the proliferation of free trade
agreements within the world’s top economic region (NAFTA in North
America, European Union6) or between regions ( Trans-Atlantic Free
Trade Agreement [TAFTA], Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP]). The
later two agreements have been opposed by almost all left-wing forces,
ranging from social democrats to union members fearful of seeing their
wages and working conditions aligned to those practiced in the relevant
regions’ poorest countries. The Global North’s political establishment,
on the other hand, supports its financial oligarchs in this free trade cru-
sade, one depicted in their narrative as the best way for the developed
world to create jobs and ensure economic recovery. Everyone knows this
is not true, however, since low value-added industrial and service sec-
tor jobs are likely to continue their exodus to the Global South in a
way that benefits the local elite and investors, who are themselves very
dependent on Global North investors for technology transfer reasons.
Of course, it might also be that the Global North and South elite are
one and the same.
In short, it is clear that politicians, including those who criticise
financial capitalism like US Democrats and self-proclaimed European,
Japanese and Australian Socialists, have become completely dominated
by the financial interests of fund providers, traders and oligarchs. They
allow experts from the world’s leading financial policy institutions (the
IMF, the Fed, ECB and other central banks, stock market supervisory

6NAFTA’s indirect purpose is to align US and Canadian workers’ direct and indirect income
(inc. social security and pensions) to the levels in Mexico and Central America. The fallout has
included the destruction of 700,000 jobs in the United States due to industrial offshoring to
Mexico and the re-employment of jobless Americans in service activities characterised by less
qualified work and 20% lower (see Le Monde diplomatique, June 2015; Manière de voir, June/
July 2015: Libre-échange, la déferlante “Free trade’s breaking wave”). The EU’s expansion from 15
to 28 members was a bit anarchic, given the decision not to consult populations in the region’s
15 most industrialised countries. This led to social (and fiscal) dumping detrimental to Western
European employees, based for instance on a low cost production of industrial goods (automo-
biles) and services (air transport) benefitting certain private capital interests. The proliferation of
posted workers in Europe, particularly in the service sectors (road haulage), has had a similar
effect, especially where state authorities preferred to encourage this trend rather than control it.
322   J.-P. Durand

bodies and the WTO) to run the mass reorganisation and deregulation
of their own financial and trading systems as they see fit, even if they
pretend to work as equal partners. Marx may have correctly predicted
that the State will always serve the ruling classes, but it still surprises us.
Today the permanent betrayal of a powerful elite who push programmes
that they abandon as soon as they get elected. This betrayal is a key fac-
tor in the crisis of Western democracy today, structured around two-
party systems where the same economic platforms are proposed election
after election despite plummeting voter participation (Moualek 2015).
The rise of the far right has not been a positive choice for most voters
but instead a sign of their rejection of a political system that lets finan-
cial interests do whatever they like even if this is damaging to workers
and to society in general. Even worse, when an alternative arises to the
wealthy’s pillage and immiseration of their fellow citizens—as happened
in Greece in 2015, it quickly runs up against a coalition of right-wing
so-called parliamentary European parties whose toxic discourse and
actions translates their particular version of class warfare. Witness the
demand formulated in a Figaro Magazine editorial entitled “Goodbye
Greece” (10 July 2015) that, “An unambiguous European refusal should
be the response to Greece’s refusal [because the country] has already cost
us €40 billion that we are unlikely to ever seen again”. This discourse
not only glosses over how Goldman Sachs manipulated Greek national
accounting, at the time the country was being governed by a financial
capitalist coalition, and how this affected its entry into the European
Union. It also says nothing about how ever since it had a military dicta-
torship, almost no tax has been levied on the very rich Greek Orthodox
Church or the powerful Greek shipping industry. Note as well how far
the German government was willing to go to subjugate the Greek Prime
Minister, including using undemocratic means and rejecting the Greeks’
expressed desire to stay in Europe without having to pay an intolera-
ble level of reimbursement. It was as if Germany, with its €200 billion
annual trade surplus, was reversing the Versailles treaty and organ-
ising a massive transfer of value coming from all Europe back into its
own pockets. One unsurprising consequence has been the Far Right’s
rise in most European countries, clearly a manifestation of popular
exasperation.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
323

In all probability, politicians’ capitulation to financial interests has

transformed the nature of Western government, at the national level
but also and above all where this involves supra-national bodies like the
European Union and even, viewed in another light, the United States.
Politicians are still in charge of the institutions managing people’s daily
lives but they have no control whatsoever over strategic questions, even
if they do their best to create a discourse that hides their impotence.
In addition to their voluntary abandonment of the economic sphere to
financial interests,7 it is also worth noting how useless politicians have
been in terms of controlling large industrial and financial firms’ tax
optimisation activities, the counter-effect of which has been increased
personal taxation all throughout the Global North, especially hitting
workers who, as aforementioned, are already suffering from the way glo-
balised competition squeezes the remuneration of labour. The arrival of
Jean-Claude Juncker at the head of the European Commission, after he
had transformed Luxemburg into a tax haven, followed by the election
of the frankly odious billionaire Donald Trump to the Presidency of the
United State, attests not only to the osmosis between financial oligarchs
and politicians but also to the ravages of legal and institutionalised cor-
ruption in Western democracies.8

7Note the new paths of public “governance” being closely monitored by the Washington and
Brussels lobbies who dictate what big industrial groups and financial operators’ preferred options
should be. This involves hundreds of consulting firms employing thousands of advisors, experts
and communication specialists “making” decisions on behalf of national legislatures and min-
isters. In other words, those who “make” policy are no longer constituents’ elected representa-
tives but instead experts and lobbyists appointed by the world’s main economic and financial
oligopolies.
8Talking in terms of institutionalised corruption can be justified by two events that happened in

2016. When the European Commission required Apple to pay Ireland $13 billion in back taxes
(an amount corresponding to an exemption incomptatible with EU rules), the Irish government
refused to accept the payment. Then in December 2016, France’s Constitutional Council can-
celled the “Google tax” targeting GAFAT (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Tweeter) profits
made in France but declared in other, lower tax countries. This was a phony argument that gave
the country’s Finance Ministry the right to “decide which taxpayers should be liable to pay cor-
poration tax”. French SMEs or large companies did not enjoy the same level of discretion and
had to pay their taxes irrespective of what the country’s legislative authorites might decide in this
respect.
324   J.-P. Durand

Even worse, this political impotence and surrender to financial

interests has caused a slow but steady destruction of the planet’s fossil
resources; a dramatic rise in temperatures causing deep and certainly
irreversible climate change; a rapid desertification that is bound to
reduce the area available for agriculture or habitation; and an increased
number of extreme climate events ranging from destructive hurri-
canes and torrential rain to uncontrollable fires. The net effect will be
to worsen the living conditions of those populations that are already
the most threatened, including in sub-Saharan Africa (drought) and
other tropical regions where floods and loss of arable land have become
common place. Not to mention rising ocean levels forcing millions
of people to flee to already over-populated zones before moving on to
the world’s more developed regions, whose populations will then try
to barricade themselves against these human flows. On top of this, the
race to increase agricultural productivity has exacerbated global pol-
lution and exhausted soil resources worldwide, even as hundreds of
thousands of tons of agricultural, and sometimes processed, goods are
being destroyed every year. In a similar vein, deforestation continues,
to the great benefit of a tiny handful of big agribusiness interests, usu-
ally closely tied to the leading international banks. Above all, more than
50,000 people starve every day.
Hence the need to resurrect the “demographic leveling” construct
that the geographer Yves Lacoste used in the 1965 edition of his book
Géographie du sous-développement, referring to the disappearance of mil-
lions of people, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, killed by war,
epidemics and famine. Unfortunately, Lacoste ended up being right,
certainly when one thinks about the massacres in Rwanda, Algeria’s
civil war during the 1990s, wars in the Mideast and Sudan and so forth.
AIDS, bilharzia and so many other pandemics that kill hundreds of
thousands of people every year because they cannot afford exorbitanty
priced medicine.
And this is not even the full story of all the terrible side-effects caused
by the total primacy of financial logic over the human and ecological
health considerations. Non-specialists can read a host of scientific pub-
lications documenting the damage being done to Planet Earth. It has
been the topic of many international conferences, including the 2015
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
325

COP21 in Paris. This was mainly a PR exercise for France’s President

Hollande, with the adopted measures being five times (or even one hun-
dred times) weaker what is needed to restore the world’s main ecological
equilibria, ensure biodiversity and save the life of many members of the
poorest populations. The absence of a social force strong enough to beat
these powerful organisations means that humanity is consciously hur-
tling towards its own doom.

An Absurd and Incongruous Financial Logic

It is hard to imagine what extraterrestrials observing how modern soci-

eties and economies work would think they were witnessing. The world
has men and women busy producing goods and services, most of which
are entirely surplus to requirements and actually quite irrelevant to hap-
piness, a strange thing since according to basically all human thought
systems (whether philosophical, economic, moral or political, happiness
is supposed to be everyone’s supreme goal. The extraterrestrial would
see individuals running in all directions without rhyme or reason.
Otherwise, noticing the waste, specifically, the packaging, produced by
the world’s technologically advanced countries, extraterrestrials might
be surprised that the value of these commodities is almost the same as
the good and services that are actually being consumed, meaning that
their only justification is a spurious need for ‘communicators’ to com-
pete via advertising, attractive merchandising).
Broader questions might also be asked about the frenzy to produce
things. It would become clear that the basic reason is not to satisfy ever
greater human needs (Cloustard 2007)—because otherwise the world
would not continue to have more than one billion people living below
the poverty threshold of $1.25 a day. Extraterrestrials would be sur-
prised that much of the value created is not consumed in the form of
good and services, or even invested in productive equipment, but sub-
sumed into a mass of digital hence virtual dollars flowing into depos-
itories that until recently claimed much less importance, and which
Earthlings refer to as financial institutions (banks, investment funds
of all kinds, insurance companies). It would be apparent that these
326   J.-P. Durand

financial institutions are in cahoots with one another and increasingly

disinterested in the ‘real economy’. The games they play sometimes gen-
erate quantitative outcomes in excess of the real productive activity in
which they are actually engaged. Included in these indicators would
be the rapid ascension in banks of “derivatives”, new values always be
drifting off in unexpected directions (Aglietta and Rebérioux 2004).
Confusion about their value would then be followed, unsurprisingly, by
a great deal of human agitation, especially when the value of these new
quanta suddenly started crashing without anyone being able to do any-
thing about it. Within just a few days, the economy will then have lost
thousands of billions of dollars that it had been patiently been accumu-
lating for years before. After the crisis, business would slowly go back to
normal. Ultimately, the word ‘crisis’, such as the one witnessed in 2008,
would increasingly become the term used to refer to this always tempo-
rary slowdown in the financial machine.
The real problem is how to accurately analyse this concentrated accu-
mulation of billions of dollars in the hands of financial institutions,
currency moving around at the speed of light, thanks to digital technol-
ogy, between financial interests and governments and/or real economic
actors. The capital accumulation rate may have been slow when capital-
ism was first getting underway but nowadays its acceleration is viewed
as a prime goal, subjugating all Planet Earth to this one imperative.
Extraterrestrials might try to understand the purpose of this ambition
before deciding that what world’s financial markets are doing is no more
than a magic trick and represents a complete waste of time for the rest
of Planet Earth.9 In its current form, cut off the from the real econ-
omy, these actions are chimerical at best. The ambition itself is absurd

9Many analysts have equated the rise of the Internet and ICT to the advent of a new society

based on free information and constituting a clean break from capitalism in its financialised
form. This new illusion began to dissipate in summer 2015 when the Internet’s “Big Five” started
recruiting Wall Street’s top economists and financial experts for their strategy departments. “To
atttract these big names, Silicon Valley had to mobilise all of its financial power, which is now
greater than the world’s leading financial institutions. Google, for instance, promised to pay $65
million in shares over two years to Mrs. Porat [who had just been hired as finance director]. In
four years at Morgan Stanley, she had ‘only’ received $40 million. Otherwise, Twitter paid one
Mr. Noto more than $60 million in shares” (Le Monde, 26 July 2015).
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
327

since the parties driving accumulation can themselves lose everything

almost instantaneously. The fact that the whole process is suicidally
destroying the planet makes it a trap that has no end, in both senses
of the word. Ultimately, extraterrestrials would come to the conclusion
that all finance is fictional, characterised by an illogical accumulation of
objectives seeking to accumulate something that will never be tangible.
Nor should the harm caused by this fiction be underplayed, particularly
given its impact on the work world and on Planet Earth itself. Quite the
contrary, a light should be shone on this economic, political and social
absurdity. It is an aberration, especially seeing how those are responsible
for it tend to emerged unscathed from the destruction it causes.
Having said that, although the infinite and unreasoned nature of this
fiction proves that finance only exists to exist, extraterrestrials might
nevertheless perceive an underlying reality, namely the capital that is
itself the product and crystallisation of a social relationship between
capital and work. The link between the infinite and almost unreal
nature of capital accumulation and work is the fact that the former,
which results from the latter, has started to police modern society. It has
become the guardian of the social order in much the same way as capi-
tal and capitalists dominate wage-earners and impose working standards
upon them.
It remains that despite the illusionary nature of capital accumulation,
in the sense that its partial destruction affects neither its reality nor its
existence, the whole of the world is affected by the fact that this objec-
tive exists, one whose internal logic is impervious to what anyone really
wants to see, including those parties whose destinies are most closely
intertwined with this accumulation process (financiers, traders, etc.).10
The implacable logic propelling financial accumulation is based
on the idea that people are easy to subjugate if their rulers can be dis-
tracted and turned into political conduits for the logic in question.

10Readers will know that this analysis temporarily distances itself from any moral approach to
social inequality. Nor does it speak to a social minority’s over-consumption of material goods. The
point here is to demonstrate the impersonal (and systemic) nature of a process that, despite being
social in nature, evolves outside of the ken of individuals or classes, the latter being no more than
social manifestation of the process that dominates them.
328   J.-P. Durand

Public deficits are now being organised by the very same private finan-
cial institutions as the ones who endlessly siphon money off from the
state or the public or private sector bodies responsible for administer-
ing its social security provisions. No surprise then that these interests
feel empowered to demand that governments increase taxes on work-
ers even as social provisions including education, training, healthcare,
housing, unemployment benefits, get watered down. This frontal attack
affects workers’ purchasing power, hence the government’s tax proceeds,
hence ability to service its debt (Chesnais 2011). Public policy analysts
view this as exactly the same kind of vicious circle as the one that led
to Greece becoming insolvent. It is worth remembering that the coun-
try’s financial situation was not materially worse than what its partners
in the European Union, or elsewhere in the world, were facing. The dif-
ference is that the Greek government had dared to contest the strangle-
hold of the ECB, IMF and EU troika, led by Germany and a few other
northern European nations who wanted to teach the Greeks, but also
the rest of Europe and beyond, a few lessons (Lordon 2015). Portrayed
as a conflict of legitimacy pitting “popular sovereignty versus demo-
cratic imperative, nation versus institution, election versus delegation,
referendum versus memorandum” (Le Monde, 6 July 2015) and/or as
a war between democracies, what was really imposed upon the Greek
people is a ultimatum dictated by partisans of a system centred on the
infinite accumulation of finance. This is how the fiction of turning the
infinite accumulation of capital into an unachievable virtual object can
be turned into a political tool of domination and subjugation.

Budgetary Impasses and Global Disorder

One key factor in this domination and subjugation process is the expo-
nential rise in global public and private debt, particularly in the world’s
more technologically advanced countries. Any exceptions are few and
far between. International financial institutions have been forcing
indebted Global North states to raise taxes on all sources of domestic
vitality, i.e. on all work. Yet this does nothing to staunch their de-in-
dustrialisation. With jobs flowing to low income countries, Global
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
329

North governments and public-private social benefits delivery organisa-

tions have seen their resources collapse, adding to the pressure on those
workers who still have a job. In turn, this exacerbates the debt crisis.
The vicious circle is unbroken.
Along similar lines, it appears that a theory popularised by Alfred
Sauvy (1980) about how jobs spill over from ageing sectors to emerging
ones (see the classical example of how industry destroyed agricultural
jobs in the Global North during the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries) no longer applies. Information and communications technologies
(ICT), automation, computerisation, have created fewer jobs in corre-
sponding sectors of activity than they have destroyed in industry. There
are a number of reasons for this, relating to the very essence of these
changes. Individuals’ consumption of often mass-produced, and tyically
low value-added, information has been limited by their physical and
mental ability to absorb it (Durand 2007). This is different from indus-
trial goods that, once purchased, can no longer be used despite having
been paid for. Information calls for an availability on the part of its tar-
get consumer, whereas it is always possible to buy a car or a lawnmower
and just leave it in the garage.
The ICT sector may have publicised fantastic economic and financial
results but there are doubts about its performance in terms of jobs and
value creation in the world’s technologically advanced countries. On
one hand, the tangible goods associated with the spread of ICT are gen-
erally produced elsewhere. On the other, engineers and strategists work-
ing for the great companies that have propelled this sector throughout
its history, explaining why alongside finance and advertising it pays
the highest wages, are concentrated in a handful of regions of Global
North. Moreover, few jobs have been created compared to the number
destroyed. Lastly, although the sector’s most global companies (Google,
Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter) have generated enormous profits
and pursue very clever tax optimisation strategies, the multiplier effect
has been minimal in most developed economies. This supports Jeremy
Rifkin’s idea that only a few firms have experienced global success in
these technologically advanced sectors, meaning that only a few regions
will benefit from an intensive re-orientation of activities that should
330   J.-P. Durand

have benefited many more regions than it actually did. This explains
why Rifkin focused on inter-regional competition, largely based on
state aid.11 Looking beyond the soothing discourses usually sprinkled
throughout this area, what it really represents is the polar opposite of
Schumpeter’s famous ‘creative destruction’.
An optimistic vision of the Global North’s future would highlight
its development of a knowledge economy capable of preserving its
technological headstart over the emerging world. This neglects, how-
ever, industrialists’ requirements in these countries. Whenever they
buy planes, nuclear power plants, car factories or electronic component
workshops, this is always conditioned on there being a real transfer of
technology. In turn, this makes it less likely that they will keep their
lead in sectors like automobiles, motorcycles or electronic equipment
for very long. Futurologists all consider it normal that Korean, Chinese
and Indian engineers move up the technological value chain in a whole
range of sectors, starting with aeronautics, aerospace, IT, microelectron-
ics and even biotechnology.
In short, the main initiatives structuring national branches of glob-
ally emerging industries, usually around ICT, often seem to be happen-
ing outside of the Global North, despite the fact that the companies in
question like to say that even if nothing else matters, at least they come
from this part of the world. For the aforementioned reasons, de-indus-
trialisation during the 1990s–2010s neither had the effect of renewing
local value-producing activities nor service activities. Yet this is exactly
what had happened in most industrial sectors during the boom years
that followed the Second World War. On one hand, this has meant
ongoing high taxes on workers who have a job. On the other, Global
North countries’ public and private sectors deficits are also being repro-
duced now on a much wider scale. Greece, Portugal, Italy, the UK and
France are not the only governments in debt. The United States and
Japan have also run up enormous red ink, exceeding 100% of their
respective GDPs. Because of their economic power, however, this does

11This is tantamount to taxing the general population to support entrepreneurs who have often

been instrumentalised by the aforementioned financial groups and interests. The question then
becomes how many companies go AWOL once they receive a subsidy from the State.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
331

not worry them. Indeed, they do not seem at all bothered to have been
downgraded by a few banks and specialist institutions. At present, total
US debt, nearly $18 trillion or 107% of the country’s GDP (15% more
than in France), amounts to one-quarter of global GDP. This means
effectively that it will never be reimbursed: it is fictional. Of course,
like all fiction, public debt has some connection to reality and translates
certain concrete practices. Its influence on different countries will vary,
however, depending on how powerful they are. Rich countries will not
have to repay their debts, unlike the poorest countries, sucked dry by
the wealthy world and its financial institutions.
Hence the need to determine how much of a threat fund providers
such as China, Japan and sovereign wealth funds (recycling petro-dol-
lars) pose to American supremacy. There is no clear answer, although the
close relationship between an increasingly probable currency war and a
military war for hegemony on land, sea or indeed outer space12 is inaus-
picious. New wars are likely to break out between the world’s leading
regions, even if their form has yet to be determined. Indeed, some may
already have started, or are in the process of being born, given certain
countries’ intensification of their mutual surveillance and industrial espi-
onage efforts. The question then becomes how these activities relate to
the battle against terrorism (see below) and the risk that recurring crises
could drive great democracies, weakened by partisanship yet still com-
mitted to the primacy of financial logic despite all the human and eco-
logical devastation that this causes, into the arms of authoritarian leaders.

Acceleration and Intensification of Abberant

International Migratory Flows

In addition to ecological problems that capitalism is incapable of resolv-

ing, a second major challenge for the twenty-first century is accelerated
international migration. Three types of migrants are converging towards

12Historians
and geographers have discovered a close relationship between maritime hegem-
ony and monetary supremacy throughout history, exemplified by Holland, Spain, the United
Kingdom and United States today.
332   J.-P. Durand

the Global North at present, being interconnected categories whose

exact shape does not need to be defined in any great detail here. Grosso
modo, these are:

– Refugees from African or Middle Eastern wars (the smallest flows),

– Urgent economic migrants who cannot survive in their home coun-
tries and/or have been forced into exodus due to rising sea levels,
– Socio-economic migrants who have no job back home and survive as
best they can in the interstices of society or on the periphery of their
Global South city. This group is attracted to the bright lights of the
wealthy Global North cities they see on television.

The world’s technologically advanced countries, mainly North America,

the European Union, Japan and Australia, account for slightly more
than 1 billion of the 7 billion people on Planet Earth. The number
of Global South residents seeking immediate migration to the Global
North is around 100–200 million, a total expected to double by the
end of the twenty-first century. No physical barrier, be it walls, barbed
wire or ships in Mediterranean or elsewhere, is in a position to staunch
migrations on this scale over the long run.
The obvious underlying cause is the inability of the neo-colonial
regimes that the world’s wealthy governments, generally the former
colonial power, set up in Africa, Asia or Latin America to structure their
new national economies around industrialisation, an agricultural sector
capable of both exporting and satisfying domestic consumption, edu-
cation and training and urban regeneration. Their impossible mission
started with the corruption of local elites subjugated by their former
masters’ economic and financial dictates. Two centuries of human his-
tory argue that international migration is little other than the demo-
graphic result of colonialism in Africa or Asia or the neo-colonial
policies that the United States has pursued in Latin America or Asia.
That the elites in these dependent countries prefer to see their people
emigrate to the Global North instead of participating in their home-
lands’ economic construction is historically understandable but not
politically or morally excusable 60 years after decolonisation began.
Local elites are co-responsible for preserving the asymmetrical order that
gave them so many short-term benefits, bank accounts in tax havens,
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
333

conspicuously affluent lifestyles, international mobility that the lower

classes can only dream of.
This analysis is not meant to provoke ex post facto Western guilt five or
twenty generations later but instead to offer a stark reminder of some of
the factors that have destructured the world, starting with European wars
of conquest that destroyed once autarkic systems enjoying a relatively
sustainable equilibrium, even if the regions in question did have their
own wars and invasions.13 The net effects of this history are the demo-
graphic and economic problems that the people affected are still facing
today. No one is asking the Global North to apologise or pay reparations
to the South but the very real way in which colonialism and slavery sub-
jugated entire populations should still be recognised. Such analysis would
then open everyone’s eyes up to the demographic, social and economic
aberrations of today’s migrations, featuring hundreds of millions of people
walking away from lands that are perfectly apt for agricultural, industrial
or mining uses, or for the generation of solar or wind power, for a new
kind of poverty and social marginalisation, ultimately meaning real moral
and emotional misery. Having said that, asking financial capitalism today
to deal with the root causes of these international migrations relies on an
illusion that has itself become less widespread. The Global North would
be well advised to prepare to host these millions of migrants over the next
few decades. The unrealistic hence useless incantations of far right parties,
despite their growing influence on right wing government policies,14 are
not going to change the basic facts of the situation.

13Remember that historically there have been many other invasions and colonisations than those
undertaken by the Western world between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Examples
include the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Japanese, Germanic tribes, Arabs, etc. The question then
becomes whether Western colonisation was even worse in terms of destroying traditional socie-
ties, particularly through the powerful technologies they imported (with the effect this had on
health, demography, weaponry, agriculture, forestry, etc.). On top of this, it is worth considering
the role played by “modernity”, which has made the Global North an ongoing magnet for people
from the South.
14Le Figaro, a right-wing opinion paper in France, would like for instance to get rid of the

Schengen agreement, “designed for a happy Europe without any faultlines or problems” (10 July
2015 editorial). In addition to the violence and xenophobic tones of a narrative that equates the
Other with a troublemaker, the subtext at Europe’s transformation into a heavily guarded fortress
offers no clues as to what might comprise a realistic way of achieving this goal or overcoming the
pressure of migration.
334   J.-P. Durand

Among all the states and local elites dominated by Western politi-
cal-financial powers, some are under serious threat today from their own
populations without any hope of being saved by their protectors. Because
they have maintained authoritarian policies for so very long, often keep-
ing the local population in great misery, many have sought refuge in
Islam, depicted as a remedy to the problems they face. In other words,
because political regimes have been unable to share available resources or
offer aspirations or a desirable future improving their citizens’ situation,
many of the latter are starting to view Islam as a remedy to their prob-
lems. Despite benefiting individually from the boon of Western modern-
ism, and with the possible exception of Egypt (Ziadé 2015) or Tunisia
under Bourguiba, these elites have not shared the benefits with their fel-
low citizens nor tried to merge national and religious traditions with con-
sumerist modernity or a shared vision of the future. This is very different
from what happened in Japan, for instance, when it showed “that it is
possible to be modern without being a Westerner” (Sabouret 2015).
This then is a twofold failure on the part of Western democracy. On
one hand, the failures have happened at a local level. Notwithstanding
exemplars of government inspired by the French and American revolu-
tions, the Arab elite has failed to contain popular initiatives other than
by resorting to tyranny. One obvious consequence is the increasingly
widespread proclamation of Jihad, which uses an extremely skewed
reading and re-interpretation of the Koran to declare that everything
foreign to the Muslim culture is unholy, expanding the idea of sacrilege
to include music, dance, sport, painting and sculpture. This is no longer
mere fundamentalism, also resurgent in the Christian and Jewish faiths,
but intolerance erected into a political principle. It has caused the kind
of Islamist fascism15 that Jihadists practice in the Middle East or Sudan,
or terrorists in the Global North, including filming beheadings and
posting them on Islamic websites—all acts that trample on the value of
human life and, of course, run counter to the spirit of the Koran.

15This term is difficult to use in European democraties because Far Right movements use it in

another sense and for another purpose. But there is not a strong enough, scientific, based word
to describe the political program of those groups who insist on taking religion, in this case, Islam,
to attack everybody who does not agree with them in the way that the early Catholic church
attacked heretics.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
335

Above and beyond the horror caused by these practices, together

with Jean-Claude Carrière (2015) it is possible to be taken aback by
the continued strength of religious belief today in the early twen-
ty-first century. The more science progresses, the more it gener-
ates self-doubt, which then opens the door to obscurantism. That
humans generally need to believe in a supernatural being or a utopia
is an established fact that is difficult to doubt. But that these retro-
grade and backwards-looking belief systems (i.e. Islamists’ and ortho-
dox Jews or Catholics vision of women’s’ role) might conquer the
spirit of young Western boys or girls to the extent that they aban-
don their nearest and dearest and become assassins, is disconcerting
to say the least. That the Islamist argument attracts minds shaped in
families and schools dominated by a Western Christian culture shows
how Global North ideals have weakened, paving the way to the most
ferociously abominable convictions. That Islamic terrorism is linked
with major international migrations should not cause any confusion
between these phenomena, much as Islamist terrorists must be dis-
tinguished from Moslems integrated into European or American
societies.16
Returning now to transcontinental movements, the intensification of
migration from the Global South to Europe or North America is clearly
causing upheavals in these host societies. With regards to the focus of
the present book, these newcomers constitute a “reserve army” increas-
ing pressure on Global North wage-earners and forcing them to accept
deteriorating working conditions and pay cuts (affecting both wages
and their social safety net).

16There remains an ancillary question as to how hard it is for Muslims to integrate into their host

countries due to their possible amalgamation with terrorists professing the same religion. In turn,
this raises questions about how such ideologies have influenced the rise of racism and anti-Sem-
itism, for instance in France, where the main parties fomenting these sentiments—asides from
the Far Right—include a not insignificant cross-section of Arab, North African and sub-Saharan
African immigrants (especially the younger generation). The refusal to teach the Holocaust, and
the way Islamic fundamentalists manipulated children’s minute of silence honouring the Charlie
Hebdo and Porte de Vincennes Kosher grocery store attacks, should not be minimised.
336   J.-P. Durand

Social Polarisation and “Averaging Out” in the World’s

Technologically Advanced Countries

By crossing the increased return on labour (an imperative in a finan-

cial logic) with the aforementioned offshoring of jobs—and adding the
pressure of migration (including the rise of undeclared workers encour-
aged, for instance, by large construction groups17)—what becomes
apparent is the slow and relative pauperisation of Global North
wage-earners and pensioners, even if different categories are being
affected in different ways. Those with the lowest income are clearly
being hit the hardest even if they are not always aware of this because
of cheaper consumer goods and personal services, witness the explo-
sion of discount manufacturers. Pauperisation is hidden here due to the
fact that purchasing power has remained stable and even risen slightly.
One exception is, of course, people working for these very same dis-
count companies, since their employers’ race to lower costs is predicated
first and foremost on a constant decline in the price of labour, hence in
employees’ wages.
The effect of all these movements, some of which converge whereas
others diverge, has radically transformed the Global North, both objec-
tively by increasing economic disparity and subjectively by exacerbating
conflict. These societies, and even certain emerging countries, are being
subjected to two polarising forces, with society as a whole “averaging
out” even as its poorest citizens are being transformed into an increas-
ingly visible minority.
Statistics show a steady rise in wage inequality in France over the
past 30 years (www.inegalites.fr). A more detailed analysis would reveal
that income from tangible or paper assets, stocks and bonds, has risen
faster than income from work, especially after tax. Otherwise, sala-
ried employees’ minimum wage has barely kept up with inflation, at a

17Bouygues was fined €50,000 in July 2015 after recruiting to its EPR worksite in Flamanville

nearly 500 employees who were then accorded few if any statutory benefits. According to the
Cherbourg district attorney, this saved the company between €3 and €8 million in payroll taxes.
Such a wide gap between the penalties suffered when someone breaks the law and the savings
they incur is a strong incentive to commit fraud.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
337

time when people earning more than €300,000 a year have had annual
rises of anywhere between 10 and 20%, mainly materialising in stock
options and other advantages that executives get from large companies’
boards of directors. At the same time, the more deprived social catego-
ries, meaning the long-term unemployed or people on very low pen-
sions, are continuing to experience stagnant or even declining income.
To fully understand how social class has been transformed in
France, it is worth looking at changes in shared representations that
tend, quite unscientifically, to classify as middle-class all employees
who benefit from an open-ended full-time contract, despite differ-
ences remaining between upper middle class and lower middle class
wages, to use social stratification terminology. Many workers and
office employees like to assume, for instance, that they are not part of
the working classes, often because they prefer saying they are middle
class. It is a form of delusion where anyone enjoying an open-ended
employment contract is portrayed as being ‘privileged’. In other
words, even though the economic reality is some form of opposition
between social classes and fractions of social classes, at a symbolical
level most of those who enjoy least some employment guarantees and
secure purchasing power tend to perceive their social status as being
advantageous and even privileged. It is this social-ideological phenom-
enon that can be referred to as the ‘averaging out of society’, reflect-
ing most employees’ perception of their own situations, one far from
any concrete socio-economic reality. In turn, this might be analysed
as a clear victory of the neo-liberal ideological line that has always
glossed over the concept of classes, especially working classes, by glori-
fying the expansion of the middle class (c.f. Valery Giscard d’Estaing,
Démocratie française, 1976).
The social under-class rarely has a job. For this group, employment
is uncertain and above all very temporary, sometimes lasting less than
half a day. On top of this, its members receive very small pensions.
Out of a total active population of 30 million people in France, 7.5
million (25%) are in this situation. Three million have atypical jobs as
work as interims or else on fixed-term, involuntary part-time or falsely
open-ended contracts in sectors like fast food. Out of the 5.5 mil-
lion French people lacking a job, some are counted in unemployment
338   J.-P. Durand

statistics (see Chapter 4) with others being excluded, because they

are too young or old, not required to seek employment, or enrolled
in a training programme offered by the Pôle Emploi job center. Thus,
whereas some jobseekers are able to find at least temporary work, many
longer-term unemployed persons only receive minimum benefits on top
of their RSA work welfare benefit. Nearly 2.5 million persons receive
RSA, with 1 million also getting RMI minimum income benefits.
Notwithstanding differences in eligibility, this also signals a deteriorat-
ing economic situation for the country’s least affluent populations.
The theoretical amalgamation of these two opposing paradigms,
polarisation and the averaging out of society,18 reveals a new reality in
which the poor have become a highly visible minority. It also redirects
attention to middle and lower middle class narratives expressing more
and more openly an aversion to, and deep resentment of, poor people,
scorned as ‘scroungers’ in today’s liberal right wing political jargon.
This then raises questions about France’s status in the international
division of labour now that it has lost many of its industrial jobs and is
only in the second tier of technologically advanced countries. France’s
strengths are historical and include its monuments, museums, gas-
tronomy, wine and landscape. As the world’s leading tourist desti-
nation, with 85 million tourists in 2015, and despite a population
accounting for such a small proportion of global total, France has real
potential in this respect. Many of the new tourists rush through the
country, however, with most Asian visitors, from China, Japan, India
and soon Indonesia, “doing” Europe in one or at most two weeks. This
means that they increasingly require visual stimulation and big shows.
It is no longer enough to offer them monuments, museums or restau-
rants. Instead, they want to see scenes of real life, children dressed up

18It can be demonstrated that this double paradigm also works within each social class or stratum,

including the lower and upper middle classes, for those who like independent professionals or
senior civil servants performing top social functions (hence enjoying high income) continue to
forge ahead. Conversely, many engineers and salespersons have lost status over time. In the work-
ing classes or among service sector employees, ‘permanent’ staff members have fared better than
interim employees brought in to do their dirty work. Above all, there is a distinction between
those, mainly beneficiaries of full-time open-ended contracts, who can get bank loans to buy a car
or house and those who find access to finance very difficult.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
339

as peasants or as skilled craftspersons, wearing clogs and chewing on

straw to give a taste of Europe as it was back in the Middle Ages. These
are scenes where tourists can glimpse and try food prepared the way it
was 500 years ago, using industrial ingredients made by agribusinesses
owned by modern financial institutions. State-sponsored entertainers,
employees or self-employed persons are all having to show more his-
torical imagination to take customers from their neighbours and rivals.
It is not at all certain, however, that future French generations will be
pleased to be bequeathed a country that is little more than a living
museum.

Social Disintegration in the Wealthy World

Comparing the 1980s to today, the disastrous employment situation

and lagging public funding of poorer populations, combined with the
massive arrival of migrants, has made poverty more visible. On top of
this, there has been a juxtaposition of very dissimilar ethnic communi-
ties. It is therefore no surprise that most will take several decades before
creating their own ‘new society’.

Who Funds Poverty

The state aid or social benefits that the more disadvantaged popula-
tions are being offered nowadays, in the professional jargon of politi-
cians looking to hide what is a miserable reality, totals something like
10 or 15% of GDP, once the different kinds of aid packages are added
up, and including all the social workers whose job depends on the exist-
ence of poverty. Contrary to the widespread idea that France has a very
generous welfare system, the reality is that the amount of social fund-
ing in this country is more or less the same as in other more neo-lib-
eral nations like Great Britain or the United States. This means that the
phenomenon is global in nature, even if neo-liberal ideology refuses to
acknowledge that. It is being implemented all across the Global North,
despite violent denunciations of the aid policies of the IMF and World
Bank, who have been responsible for state budget imbalances hence
340   J.-P. Durand

public deficits in the Global South, explaining in turn why basically all
of the cost-cutting programmes carried out by these bodies have failed.
It is important to study the functions that aid plays in the Global
North. There are at least two:

– Social benefits prevent, or at least mitigate, the kind of absolute

misery that would lead to the Global North importing terrible pan-
demics. Keeping minimal cleanliness and respecting a few simple
sanitation standards makes it at least temporarily possible for the
medical systems in this part of the world to prevent a massive and
rapid dissemination of viruses that the medical system can more or
less control (e.g. the panic in Europe when Ebola broke out in West
Africa). More specifically, these kinds of benefits fund social housing
and sanitary facilities that, if they did not exist, would see millions of
people thrown into the street, many more than the 150,000 homeless
counted in France today, causing a spike in health risks,
– Benefits also stave off social rebellions that not only threaten the
social order but above all the economic order when they are recur-
ring and lasting. This would cause both investors and tourists to flee
France, recalling that it gets 85 million visitors a year, without resolv-
ing the contradictions at the heart of capitalism. All that would hap-
pen is the immediate effects are mitigated and urban violence at least
temporarily prevented. The fact that so many pundits predict that
these support systems are magnets attracting and uprooting millions
of people from the Global South, and that benefits should therefore
be eliminated, has not stopped said systems from surviving and even
growing. Thankfully, all states focus from time to time on their long-
term responsibilities and in this way avoid catastrophe.

There is no doubt that all of these measures are costly. Indeed, they
could be equated with the extraction of an economic surplus from the
profits of globally accumulated capital, a loss that is in any event inevi-
table for the aforementioned reasons. Above and beyond the absence of
economic regulation, there is a kind of social regulation that is not only
unavoidable all but also trans-historic, having been seen in all social sys-
tems. This can be a witnessed by the similarity between social benefits
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
341

functions today and the charity work that religious orders and aristo-
crats used to perform before the merchant classes took over.
It is at this level that things get complex, mainly the confusion about
what funds the national or local government bodies responsible for pay-
ing and organising social benefits.19 The answer is clearly taxation, so
that the next question becomes who pays the most tax in its different
forms, including sales tax, fuel tax, income tax and local tax. The answer
is the middle classes such as they define themselves, globally meaning
all employees and independent workers receiving between 1.5 and 17
times the minimum wage. In other words, the vast majority of all work-
ers and pensioners. The implication is that society is divided between
those who have a secure income and everyone else, around 25–30% of
the population, who is facing imminent pauperisation. Note that this
poor population is mainly comprised of more or less recent immigrants
and their second and third-generation descendents, explaining the over-
lap between ethnic origins and poverty. As a result, a not insignificant
percentage of all social benefits are spent on alleviating the misery of
more or less recently arrived immigrant families.
This situation exacerbates people’s sense of not being understood and
sparks conflict between the poor and the middle classes, who blame
the former for their own frustration with the lack of social mobility,
income and consumption. Hence many people’s sense that they ‘are
paying for the poor’, a feeling reinforced by their daily experiences,
the social interactions they have around the schoolyard, their housing
problems or more broadly their consumption patterns. One example in
France comes from the reshaped family benefits system, with depend-
ents of salaried employees paying a lot more for school dinners and
other municipal activities than poor families, often recent immigrants
to big cities, who pay next to nothing for services or access them for
free. People everywhere react very negatively to this situation and even
if their perception is not entirely rational they end up thinking that it is

19Likecertain local authorities in the greater Paris region who pay about one-quarter of their total
budget directly to residents in the form of various benefits but only spend 0.5% on economic
regeneration. Even if local authorities and central government share responsibility, this imbalance
shows that the former have lost any strategic responsibility in the fight against unemployment.
342   J.-P. Durand

an individual’s social and ethnic background that determines how much

money is taken out of their wages for social spending like healthcare or
unemployment benefits. The well spring of racism for sure.
Such a socio-ethnic or class-ethnic divide has rapidly sparked great
resentment and hate. In France like most Global North countries, this
has made shared living increasingly difficult in many public spaces.
Xenophobia and racism are on the rise, encouraged by far right parties
and even by certain government parties talking about expelling people,
taking away the host country citizenship or simply imprisoning them,20
depending on the seriousness of the crimes they are said to commit.
Society’s segmentation along social class, or at least class fraction, and
ethnic-religious community lines is bound to worsen, until one day
social class references, which are already being disputed, are no longer
allowed. It is likely over the next few decades that different communi-
ties will engage in urban guerrilla warfare, with this violence provoking
reciprocal acts of hate and brutality until the day when it is considered
justified to create repressive regimes of the kind that European Western
democracies like to think they can escape.

Absolute Pauperisation and Growing

Destitution Across the World

Despite efforts to regenerate cities, develop living spaces and improve

the environment for most of the world, perceptions of deteriorating
living conditions in urban public spaces have become widespread, par-
ticularly in the so-called middle classes. Above and beyond traditional
anti-social behaviour pitting motorists against different road users,
pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, other car drivers, there has also been:

200.1% of France’s total population is comprised of prisoners, versus nearly 1% in the United

States. In both cases, most prisoners are of immigrant origin (or Afro-American in the US).
Clearly there is a whole discussion about the cost of keeping people in prison in France, were
the rate here to achieve or exceed American levels. Nor has rehabilitation always worked—quite
the contrary. The end result has been an exponential increase in the number of prisoners, hence
costs. Something that those who advocate the mass imprisonment of delinquents would do well
to reflect upon.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
343

– A sharp rise in the number of beggars and homeless persons coming

from a variety of backgrounds and aimlessly spending time in city
centres. These can be French people who lost their job and are now
going through a total social collapse, accompanied by theirs dogs and
shopping trolley; Eastern European immigrants dependent on the
gang masters who brought them to France as professional beggars,
and so forth.
– The fact that most city councils no longer invest in keeping streets,
pavements and other spaces clean of rubbish of all kinds, not to men-
tion animal and even human excrement.21 Some would argue ironi-
cally perhaps that certain spaces in some Western cities remind them
of the middle ages.
– Total disrespect for standards of hygiene and cleanliness. There is an
urgent need for education in this domain, even if questions remain
about what measures should be imposed, whether they should
be mandatory. People spitting on the street or throwing rubbish
out their tower block windows is something that no one ever talks
about in their election manifesto. Residents and tourists alike all
want action in this area, even if their demands can be excessive or
unrealistic.
– Pop-up vintage clothing markets organised by salvagers who leave
behind mountains of unsold merchandise that pile up for days at a
time. The pretext used is the need for recycling, a valid point. But it
is just as true that these temporary markets might have been organ-
ised by local municipal representatives.

The destitution of urban spaces in the Global North means that life
here has started converging with the kinds of things that citizens of the
developing world have always experienced, such as having rickshaws
everywhere, streets and pavements overflowing with pedestrians, espe-
cially if smoking is prohibited in bars, hordes of scantily dressed resi-
dents or tourists walking around, measurably greater loudness (starting

21Because French politicians hesitate to apply the law and fine people who dirty public spaces,
including dog owners. After all, there is always an election coming up.
344   J.-P. Durand

with music blaring out of cars or cafés) etc. One example of a (probably
subconscious) response to the change is something that haute couture
and prêt à porter clothing designers alike have started doing, namely
selling strategically torn and ruffled jeans for more than €1000 in cer-
tain stores (many times as much as jeans in good condition retail for in
ordinary shops). Extraterrestrials would surely find this behaviour curi-
ous! As for rickshaws, naive persons may call them an “ecological” and
rapid mode of transportation that allow riders to weave in and out of
traffic but another view is that they re-create the kind of relationships
that used to apply between masters and servants (Gorz 1988), i.e. they
exemplify a servility that is nothing other than a return to the kind of
social regression last seen in the Middle Ages.

Mafia-Like Groups and Communitarianism

The growing destitution of the visible world has been accompanied by

other phenomena that are just as significant. By definition, a short-
age of goods and services is one of the main attributes of the social
spaces that poor people inhabit. One direct result is a rise in delin-
quency, illegal traffic and corruption, all of which often enters com-
munitarian practice. A further prognostic along these lines might be
formulated following recent major scandals in France, where bribes
were paid to sweeten global arms sales, namely that the thugs of
the future are going to start forcing people to pay for access to pub-
lic documents such as birth or marriage certificates, an illegal trade
that according to one interviewee has already kicked off in one major
Rhone Valley city. Corruption always degrades the institution where it
occurs, be it a private or public sector body. In this latter case, corrup-
tion becomes the first step towards the end of democracy. The Rhone
Valley example should be taken extremely seriously since information
coming out of the local government sector confirms that these kinds
of networks operate more broadly than one might imagine, paving the
way towards a local takeover by Mafia-like organisations analogous to
the ones operating in Italy or in a few cities in North America, Latin
America, Japan or South France.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
345

These organisations keep a lid on serious crime but also on the lower
level delinquency that follows behind. It is also true that illegal traf-
fic has always existed, including in the working class where there have
always been individuals who supplemented their daily income quite
considerably, often via freight haulage activities. In general, however,
there were codes and rules restricting these illegal activities, even if they
were sometimes tolerated by bosses who had an interest in keeping
them going. Nowadays, the fact that these networks have penetrated a
number of public sector initiatives has disorganised them in the sense
that they will soon be replaced by private initiatives. Above all, there
will be big change in the way that people access a good that is supposed
to be shared freely and equally by all. Mafia-like organisations rely on
individual and personalised allegiance to a godfather, and on individ-
ual competition for the right to access this leader. These values are dia-
metricially opposed to the democratic principles engraved on public
buildings, even if everyone knows that the words solidarity, equality and
fraternity mean less in reality than they should.
Note that Mafia-like networks also control serious crime like traf-
ficking in drugs, arms, humans, waste or protected species.22 They also
influence lower-level criminals operating in neighbourhoods, cities
or counties. In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, residents have sur-
rounded their homes with an electric fence. In Latin America, city cen-
tres are full of buildings converted into real fortresses featuring barbed
wire fences and sentries. The United States has seen more and more
gated cities populated by middle-class inhabitants insulating themselves
from urban crime, surrounded by high walls and fences, often protected
by guard dogs and impossible to access by any visitor not accompanied

22The sum total of illegal traffic in all activities combined equals approximatively 1.5% of global
GDP. This may seem small but given that the drug trade by itself represents something like the
world’s 21st biggest economy, after Sweden, its economic and strategic importance becomes
obvious. The key factors are the conditions in which this occurs. To pursue and expand their
activities, drug dealers bribe customs and police officers, civil servants, etc. The steady expansion
of their business therefore increases corruption (see what is happening in Mexico) and violence
(gang rivalries, assassinations of judges and public sector officials) until deviant norms become
the rule. This corresponds to the final phase of society’s ‘de-socialisation’. It is the current state of
affairs in much of the Global South and increasingly the Global North.
346   J.-P. Durand

by a local resident. Some residents refuse to pay any tax at all, arguing
that they are self-sufficient in water, and water purification, electricity,
education and healthcare. This combines a neo-liberal logic with a die-
hard refusal to fund any spatial or local solidarity measures.
In France, closed communities or walled estates, not the same thing
as gentrification, which consists of putting metal doors and coded
access on social housing to change its image, has arrived in the bigger
cities’ more affluent neighbourhoods or in the tourist zones visited by
the same privileged classes. Gated cities epitomise the hierarchisation of
urban spaces, in opposition to the ghettoisation of some outlying neigh-
bourhoods or even a few central districts in leading French cities. On
one hand, this makes it easy to define local communities’ geographic
borders. By excluding themselves from urban life and building physi-
cal barriers, gated cities isolate sections of the general population. For
most everyone else in France, interactions between social classes or eth-
nic groups, often the same thing, happen daily and aggravate misunder-
standings to the point of making coexistence almost impossible.
There is no reason for low-level criminality to disappear, since as no
one believes in full employment anymore nor in a return to a virtuous
cycle of consumerism, it will very probably increase in the future. What
might change is that minor criminals will stop robbing neighbours who
are just as poor as they are and start visiting middle-class and upper-
class areas. Just as likely is the outbreak of urban guerrilla warfare last-
ing longer and going deeper than the few skirmishes pitting anarchists
versus police forces in the early twenty-first century. Questions will stop
being asked about social class and especially about the responsibility of
politicians supportive of certain narrow financial interests and there-
fore doing their best to get rid of the few regulations to which they are
still subject. All that will matter is the ethnic and community group to
which a person belongs, a turn of events that will spark further xeno-
phobia and racism, latent sentiments ready to erupt again at times of
economic hence social crisis. In additional to physical confrontations,
political and symbolic battles will create conflict between the middle
classes and the visible minority underclass. With between 5 and 8.6 mil-
lion French people, nearly 10% of the national population, living under
the poverty threshold, depending how this is defined (Observatoire
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
347

des inégalités ) (Maurin and Schneider 2015) this situation is probably

inevitable. Poorer neighbourhoods are likely to experience, violent or
non-violent, conflicts between downgraded citizens who have lost their
jobs and any hope of finding a new one, versus delinquents with more
or less solid roots in their community networks.
This vision may not be very joyful but it is much more realistic than
being an ostrich. Future conflicts will unavoidably translate into more
repressive law enforcement, with all the unavoidable policing blun-
ders that feed into cycles of violence. New resources will bolster police
intelligence activities (see below), following a general, and uncon-
tested, appeal that more be done to fight terrorism. The combination
of threats to the social and economic orders, based as aforementioned
on certain economic-financial foundations, is likely to translate into
greater authoritarianism in France and the world’s other technologically
advanced nations, all regimes defining themselves as democracy’s virtu-
ous defenders but relying in reality on increasingly high-performance
technology.

The Boon and Danger of Technology

Modern neo-liberal prophets preaching a better world often aver that

ICT offer a new opportunity to build a more egalitarian society, open-
ing the doors of knowledge to everyone. This vision was fizzling out in
France until former president Jacques Chirac started repeating an idea
he had picked up in Le Monde diplomatique magazine referring to the
digital divide. In reality, ICT merely reproduces and reinforces social
differences in people’s ability to appropriate and use knowledge, irre-
spective of the vehicle they use. Indeed, ICT might be construed as an
extra filter that actually limits access, seeing as it not only affects peo-
ple’s ability to enter the world of information but also controls all ancil-
lary aspects, including the things that people are actually browsing for
as well as the reasons why. In other words, the generalisation of tablets,
smartphones and social networks masks to some extent new dichoto-
mies that exploit these new resources to turn passive consumers into
simple communications channels. Note in addition the phony concept
348   J.-P. Durand

of social networks, alluding to the existence of an intensive social life

whereas in reality it is nothing more than a technical facility. Social net-
works are often portrayed as tools enabling a horizontal construction of
society but in truth they do no more than reinforce the power of the
powerful. That is those who already have a big audience and want to
build it further by generating a buzz that they know how to organise,
including with the help of the communications professionals at their
sides.
When seen from up close, networks possess a head and a centre that
they organise and operate, and from which they benefit economically,
socially and symbolically, or all three at a time. ICT met with blind
optimism when it first arrived a few decades ago. However, it does not
seem to have become the egalitarian tool that some people expected,
with accurate analysis being that it is more of a work in progress. ICT
offers one explanation for why activities have intensified when meas-
ured in unit of time terms, as Harmut Rosa (2010) has shown with his
“acceleration” construct. If at all possible, greater understanding should
also be developed of how ICT drives activities’ simultaneity (Durand
1991, 2006). The issue then becomes the social meaning of this accel-
eration and simultaneity, something that Rosa is not particularly inter-
ested in. Given all these analyses and observations, however, he should
at least have attempted to show that ICT contributes to the acceleration
of work activities, the intensification of work and the reduction in the
porosity of working day for workers such as engineers or artists, all of
which is a constant theme in lean production.
As demonstrated in earlier chapters, ICT and lean production com-
bine to achieve goals specified in a financial logic that demands annual
productivity increases of anything between 15 and 25%. ICT has also
largely reinvigorated the consumption standards that had started to run
out of steam at the end of the postwar boom years. On one hand, ICT
has transformed traditional goods (automobiles, motorcycles, household
appliances, photos and videos and toys) by building into them a whole
slew of new electronic components. On the other, it has paved the way
for new consumption practices, which some people refer to as hyper-in-
formation, whose usefulness is questionable but which clearly form a
big part of many people’s leisure time, in the shape of video or online
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
349

games, social networks, Internet browsing, e-commerce and intensive

emailing. As was the case with tangible goods but with even greater acu-
ity, industrialists have organised an accelerated obsolescence of mate-
rials. Lastly, in terms of producing and delivering information, today’s
suppliers expect to make a mint, with information now being seen as a
“queen commodity” that becomes useless and outdated once it has been
sold and published, so that the market opens up again for new informa-
tion-merchandise (Durand 2007).
Much has been written about this hyper-information society, one
that will ultimately disseminate massive amounts of low-value infor-
mation, literally drowning consumers but also professionals in infor-
mational maelstroms where they will turn around in circles forever and
ever. People are no better informed than they were in the past, nor are
they in a better position to support democracy, be it at the local level
through participative actions that only really mobilise those who have
the resources to sort and apply whatever relevant information they find.
In reality, the information society reproduces the social and economic
inequalities it inherited and extends them to new fields like knowledge
and the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff among the billions of
data bytes that are available today, but which are usually forced upon us
without our consent.
The best evidence of the asymmetry caused by the automated pro-
cessing of information is of course intelligence, whether military, polit-
ical, industrial or commercial. The Wikileaks revelations, for instance,
were terrifying. They demonstrated both the hyper-power of the world’s
power elite—who break the law all the time and betray their own
allies—as well as the hyper-fragility of their power since they must spy
on these very same allies to maintain their superiority. Examples of this
thunderstorm include the 2013 publication of more than one million
cables sent out by the Kissinger administration, 300,000 secret classified
defense documents and 200,000 messages or notes written by the CIA.
In 2015, Wikileaks announced that the past three French presidents
had been wiretapped by the National Security Agency (NSA), with help
from German intelligence via Deutsche Telekom. France and its leading
telecoms operator probably did the same to the NSA.
350   J.-P. Durand

It is no surprise that the world of intelligence has no rules. What was

revealed by Wikileaks or Edward Snowden’s NSA wiretapping docu-
ments was the intensification of all-out espionage and the preservation
of a power asymmetry that benefits the United States. Not to mention
the considerable technical and financial resources that are being mobi-
lised or the information war that has broken out between the world’s
great powers and which affects all areas of human activity: industry, pol-
itics, diplomacy, finance, military, culture and private life.
Although the ‘necessity’ of this surveillance tends to be supported by
the middle classes, slippage towards more of a police state raises many
questions, specifically who is going to pay for a transition that is likely
to deviate sooner or later into authoritarianism and a Total Society,
being one where citizens’ activities are exercised under total control
without their being given the chance to control this. Of course, the
so-called information society, one where every single political, financial
and personal power works constantly to protect its own secrets, is vul-
nerable on two different levels. Firstly, rivals or enemies always end up
accessing the prohibited information. Different kinds of encryption or
other firewalls can delay but not prevent this. Today the war revolves
around the speed, and maybe especially the acceleration, with which
information is processed. Secondly and complementing the fact that
information always ends up being shared sooner or later, modern soci-
ety has become much more complex, including because of the way it
interconnects and networks all actors in a given field, and then all these
fields with one another. The end result is technical, political, economic
and financial fragility. One can see how the last few financial crisis
erupted despite the existence of circuit breakers. Hence the temptation
to erect barriers protecting sensitive information. This rarely works,
however, so what remains are societies that are increasingly fragile and at
the mercy of structural enemies or terrorists who find it easy to hit them
at any point on their territories, or to find new ways of harming public
or private sector interests.
The accelerated development of ICT and process of complexifica-
tion that accompanies it has helped to make societies even more frag-
ile while also increasing risks through a kind of vicious circle. Not only
is there little awareness of this phenomenon but it is unlikely that any
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
351

politico-economic actors are in a position to stop it. Even as the great

powers place one another under mutual surveillance, there is another
kind of surveillance occurring in cities and homes, one reflecting the
social and urban disintegration of the world’s technologically most
advanced countries and aggravated by the fear of terrorism. A French
intelligence law enacted in springtime 2015 was validated by the coun-
try’s Supreme Court despite

the “extremely intrusive nature of new tools - microphones, cameras,

hacking, etc. - that will equip intelligence services legally and can be used
without any judicial control”. (Libération, 25–26 July 2015)

Mass surveillance is now considered compliant with the French

Constitution and has become the new normal without anybody criticis-
ing this ‘wicked law’. Yet just 20 years ago, tens of thousands of people
took to city streets to protest against laws that were much less of a threat
to civil liberties.
Other technologies merit further attention, starting with nano-
technology, whose diverse potential applications are clear to see. The
worry is that, as was the case during early arbitrages between diesel and
petrole engines, or between motor vehicles and trains, industrialists and
labouratories tend to sweep under the carpet most of the risks they cre-
ate for the rest of the world, like the health effects of uncontrolled emis-
sions of micro-particles.
Healthcare is clearly making, and will make, progress thanks to
technology and gene therapy. At the same time, biotechnology opens
the door to possibilities that are not very reassuring, as exemplified by
Monsanto’s agricultural practices (Robin 2009), the debate about GM
food, etc. Clearly, the future will see real polemic about genetic manip-
ulation or synthetic biology (Beansaude-Vincent and Benoit-Browaeys
2011; Pièces et main d’œuvre 2013). On one hand, the industrialists
and financial interests driving these activities hope they have come up
with a rich source of potentially unlimited profits since they are deal-
ing with the thing that is most dear to people, namely their health
and life expectancy. On the other, international competition between
researchers and big research laboratories has always advanced knowledge
352   J.-P. Durand

without anybody being able to slow down or stop the process. If an eth-
ics committee were to try and control or even prohibit certain research
activities, it would soon come under pressure from researchers, or
industrialists, denouncing in the name of international competition the
delays they would suffer compared to foreign rivals. This would end the
moratorium and lower the barriers undermining these activities. Hence
a major risk of seeing scientific progress and industrial applications
develop steadily without society debating their limitations due to the
way they transform the human brain and body.
***
This pessimistic scenario of social regression started with the deregu-
lation of employment and work and reviewed two significant causes,
namely how financial logic supersedes industrial logic, in parallel with
a globalised trading system partially explained by the disappearance
of the ‘socialist bloc’. The great destructuring of poor economies fol-
lowing years of colonial and neo-colonial policies has caused tens of
millions of people to migrate to the Global North from the South,
without there being any system to stop this wave over the short or
medium-term. All these elements are radically restructuring the world,
and the social classes in its technologically more advanced countries,
causing a kind of insolent polarisation plus the stigmatisation of var-
ious communities. The combined effect of these systemic transfor-
mations is a general deterioration in most Global North populations’
living and working conditions, even as democracy becomes an increas-
ingly difficult exercise for them. The social order is preserved through
broad surveillance policies carried out in the name of the fight against
crime and terrorism. The risk is to see the advent of a total order,
which is not totalitarian in the twentieth century sense of the term,
featuring some very heterogeneous norms, including reduced auton-
omy at work and stricter supervision of workers at all levels. Note that
these are workers facing a further destitution of public spaces that
have been increasingly neglected by state and local authorities, asides
from the increased surveillance they exercise, and awaiting ultimate
privatisation. This highly normed, or normalised, total order crystal-
lises in political regimes that may have differentiated discourses but
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
353

enact the same economic policies, giving free rein to a financial logic
that has hurt many people’s standard of living in a climate marked by
intra-community conflicts.

The Bright Scenario of a Rosy Future

This second scenario can be presented much more succinctly than its
darker counterpart. On one hand, it is less likely to happen. On the
other, the social pessimism that is so rife nowadays means there is less
of a tendency to believe in utopia. Fundamentally, the difficulty in
sketching out rosy future relates to the need to conceptualise and dis-
cover the historical necessities that capitalism must internalise in order
to revisit some of its basic principles and avoid being overtaken by
another mode of production. It is, for instance, possible to imagine
ICT requiring this kind of mobilisation of knowledge within the pro-
duction and consumption spheres, which is where the value indispensa-
ble to the capital cycle is actually created (Durand 1991). Towards this
end, decision-makers would have to considerably increase the educa-
tional level of the world’s entire population, going much further than
current experts say. This would not only require an instrumentalisation
of knowledge and information as is already happening today but a real
mobilisation of everyone’s intelligence, not only at work but also and
above all through a comprehensive ingestion of information and cul-
tural programmes. All of which might maintain capitalism’s essence
while causing major changes to its habitability.
These kinds of necessities are likely to become the main driv-
ers behind any transformation in capitalism. These are essential to
the weakening of the early twenty- first century neo-liberal absolut-
ism analysed above. In turn, this might affect future economic rela-
tions to the point of transforming them radically, leading in turn to
the emergence of other development principles in both the Global
North and South. These new principles would respect the main equi-
libria between humankind and nature while also putting an end to
disorderly international migration. This is without mentioning a new
354   J.-P. Durand

vision of enterprise that would no longer focus on profits alone but

also invite a structural reorganisation of work—and ultimately the end
of unemployment.

The Inevitability of New Economic Regulation

The deregulation of globalised capitalism since 1971 accelerated dur-

ing the 1990s to the point of causing ever-increasing upheavals more
and more frequently. Global economic and financial leaders, followed
by the political elite, have regularly tried to at least temporarily resolve
the contradictions within capitalism that have been uncovered by this
process. They have not done this within a framework defined by an
advanced awareness of their own actions nor for humanist reasons but
simply by necessity. All things being equal, the trend is comparable to
the rise in wage income that accompanied the increased productivity
of direct work during the postwar boom years, at a time when capital
might otherwise have appropriated all of the surplus value being cre-
ated. Today’s less unequivocal sharing of produced value, despite the
inequality that is its very nature, has led to a big rise in workers’ pur-
chasing power, rapid expansion in the production of industrial series,
new productivity gains and an extension of the working class itself. This
virtuous circle, conceptualised by Keynes, has not been implemented
voluntarily and intentionally by the Western powers or their elite classes
but results from a series of adjustments partially driven by the traumas
and deprivations of the Second World War, associated with powerful
labour movements.
History has witnessed few instances of societies voluntarily organising
themselves, or successfully reorganising themselves, following a social
movement or revolution. Hence the need to always contextualise the
famous dictum by Marx that,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circum-
stances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradi-
tion of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
355

living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing them-

selves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely
in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spir-
its of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slo-
gans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in
time-honored disguise and borrowed language” (Marx 1993). It is worth
reflecting how past revolutions have gone wrong.

There is no use dreaming today about past applications of reason. Social

movements may have influenced the course of history but they did not
change its direction. Hence the idea (Durand 1997) that the only thing
people change is the comma of history, which is better than nothing.
More specifically, people tend not to be overly persuaded by pretty talk-
ers, concentrating instead on priorities like the defense of democracy,
including in its bourgeois, meaning formal and unsatisfying, form. This
is because anyone who has known democracy and is then deprived of it
will always fight to recover it. The density of these battles, the human
suffering and loss that accompanies the return to democracy, demon-
strates its necessity and intrinsic value. It also explains the priority of
denouncing and fighting those who use it to subsequently destroy it,
whether they come from the far right or are proponents of Jihadism.
Similarly, democracy must be saved from financial interests’ economic
abuses or the proponents of a zero risk security society, advocating
intensive surveillance of everyone’s acts or thoughts, and basically seek-
ing to establish a total society.
Another way of putting this is to say that, although people and social
movements are unlikely to transform or abolish capitalism, there is a
good chance that ‘the civil servants of capital’, as Marx referred to finan-
cial managers, will soon fulfil the historical mission of inventing new
regulations to avoid new crises. This is already happening with discus-
sions about tax evasion (see the 2015 OECD agreement) and especially
about limiting banks’ speculative risk-taking. It should be acknowl-
edged, however, that homeopathic prescriptions of this kind have little
effect on tax optimisation behaviours, nor do they prevent future finan-
cial crises that can be reliably predicted as having greater consequences
than 2008.
356   J.-P. Durand

One possibility is that future crises will be followed by irreversible his-

toric decisions raising questions about capitalism’s ability to reform itself
if financialisation becomes its raison d’être and supreme form. The hope
is that beyond this one form, there maybe others in which self-regulation
is viewed as a condition of survival. Indeed, there are a number of paths
to self-regulation23 that might constitute an entirely new system one day:

– The obligation to get leading financial institutions to prioritise bank-

ing functions (collecting capital and lending it to companies and
individuals) and not speculation,
– Leading in turn if not to then elimination of stock markets (c.f.
Frédéric Lordon, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2010) then to
their transformation into organisations raising capital for the benefit
of business irrespective of speculation on shares or involving deriva-
tive products,
– Making it impossible for financial institutions to make any invest-
ments committing more than twice their capital,
– Rewriting tax laws so companies’ taxable location be the place where
they are actually creating value (producing, selling and distributing
goods or services),
– Renegotiating and/or writing off public debt to eliminate a tool that
the major public and private sector international financial institu-
tions often use to siphon off value,
– Renegotiating debt (especially for healthy small and medium-size
companies),
– Developing functions that incentivise large public sector banking
institutions (IMF, World Bank, development banks, central banks) to
engage in productive funding,
– Ending central banks’ independence from government (thus restruc-
turing policy in concentric circles around the countries most in
favour of rapid political integration),

23This term appears to be inapropriate in a critique of capitalism: it is necessary to understand

a temporary resolution of the contradiction (a new economic equilibrium and temporary social
necessity) that creates other problems as Hegel and Marx pointed out. For example the long term
tendency of the falling rate of profit.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
357

– Creating national, regional and even global bodies to ensure com-

pliance and with the power to use appropriate information systems
to immediately shut down any defective institution (by blocking its
funding and restituting it to its owners), etc.

The new system would do more than simply try to regulate financial
speculation. After all, the finance industry is particularly innovative
industry and often takes very little time getting around whatever new
rules are imposed on it. If the financial elite, for reasons endemic to the
nature of financial capitalism, must regulate their own activities, they
will take drastic measures not because they want to limit speculation
but to eliminate all tools of speculation, even though this, of course, a
very different kettle of fish.
A rosy future requires an at least temporary resolution of some of
the contradictions characterising financialised capitalism. It does not,
however, eliminate the exploitation of humans by capital, nor social
inequality. Nor does it equalise access to different economic, techni-
cal, cultural, educational, etc. resources. Nor is it the product of a rev-
olution. Instead, the hypothesis here is that capitalism might be able to
thoroughly transform itself to avoid dying out completely. It is also pos-
sible to imagine capitalism destroying or consuming itself because of its
own contradictions, leading in turn to the emergence of another mode
of production. This latter scenario relies on a great deal of fiction, how-
ever, and is not the topic of the present book.
The self-transformation of capitalism also involves getting rid of the
most egregiously destructive financial misbehaviour and enabling other
possibilities in the world of work and employment. Lastly, it accounts
for the very serious threat that is the disappearance of the conditions
necessary for a continued human presence on Planet Earth.

A Capitalism That Re-Builds the Planet

Green capitalism such as it is imagined by neo-liberal ideologues has

neither convinced the planet’s defenders nor capitalists themselves,
outside of a few very profitable investments in waste management,
358   J.-P. Durand

sometimes involving efficiently organised criminal organisations, renew-

able energy, electric vehicles, biofuel and organic farming. In a capital-
ist world where financial logic has lost its primacy, however, capitalist
companies without high profit rates will seek large new markets in all
sectors, particularly energy, transportation and agribusiness.

A Different Way for the Global North

to Accumulate Wealth

Other authors try to imagine how society might develop instead of

grow. Growth only measures economic outcomes whereas, etymologi-
cally, development includes qualitative dimensions like human well-be-
ing. Hence all the texts about negative or zero growth (Ariès 2012;
Latouche and Jappe 2015; Klein 2015) that have been misunderstood
or deliberately discredited whereas all they are suggesting is a reasonable
and harmonious development that respects environmental equilibria.
Human, technical and financial investment in some of the aforemen-
tioned areas enables an alternative to the destruction of nature, ensur-
ing planetary sustainability and creating millions of jobs in the Global
North and South alike (see below).
In the world’s technologically advanced countries, energy transition,
above and beyond the need for drastically lower consumption, involving
research and facilities that produce electricity in new ways, offers dec-
ades of real work. Turning around the agriculture sector’s productivity
orientation is an equally vast project that will lead to an exodus out of
cities into the countryside, helping with urban de-congestion and more
balanced landuse including for the staging of cultural and symbolic
activities. Note as well the need for a transportation revolution requir-
ing colossal infrastructure, particularly railways, waterways and oceanic
and port facilities. Cities must be totally redesigned around transport
needs that currently constitute damage people’s health and well-being
and waste economic and personal time. There is also more to do in
terms of how cities are constructed (Durand 2015).
This kind of transformation programme will only be viable if men-
talities are changed and goods and services offered in a different way.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
359

It can never be overstated that supply creates demand in a market sys-

tem and not the other way around. Goods and services suppliers would
no longer use quantitative measures to improve people’s well-being (for
example the biggest refrigerator, the most powerful car, the most distant
holiday destination) but equate happiness with the quality and depth
of people’s lives and feelings. There would be a greater mobilisation of
intelligence and emotion i.e. more knowledge, culture and reflexivity.
People would be less passive in handling the objects or processing the
information they receive from different channels. There would also be
greater individual and collective creativity and less inertia and apathy.
This reversal in the values associated with consumption, leisure and free
time (see below concerning job-sharing) would ultimately require a
strengthening of essential human qualities such as free will, conscience,
reflexivity and creativity.
Other educational investments, not only in resources but in renewed
teaching methods, would spawn the teaching of curiosity so that the
aim is no longer to inculcate knowledge but ensure a love of learning,
including among those who would otherwise ‘be on the scrapheap’.
This would mark the end of a utilitarian vision of training and diplo-
mas. Efficient knowledge would only occur when people enjoy doing it,
whether in a professional capacity or not. The goal would be to ensure
that teenagers from all social classes take pleasure in learning, some-
thing that is currently the reserve of middle-class children alone. In
this context, ICT would no longer involve playing with consoles and
smartphones but mean active creativity mobilising one’s intelligence and
emotions. The noble concept of “collaboration” would transcend today’s
limited meaning and no longer be a playground for the few citizens
who are already well-equipped in terms of their educational and social
capital (Lallement 2015). Collaborative and peer-to-peer approaches
would no longer be stuck in a logic of distinction or utilitarian usage
but freed from all such constraints. This vision of ICT and collabora-
tion’s future role is not some utopian bottom-up reconstruction of the
post-capitalist world (Bauwens 2015)24 but clear awareness that it is

24See critical note in Nouvelle Revue du Travail n. 7: URL: http://nrt.revues.org/2478.

360   J.-P. Durand

through the temporary resolution of financial capitalism’s contradic-

tions, leading to the elimination of its primacy, that new kinds of ICT
and peer-to-peer cultural practices can become available in the future.
All these cultural, and above all economic, transformations signify
development criteria that no longer revolve around growth measured
by quantitative models. Instead, measurements would be aligned with
what some have started to term “gross domestic happiness” to replace
traditional gross domestic product calculations (Méda 2008, Le Monde
diplomatique, April 2012). The new evaluation criteria would be imple-
mented once behaviours changed and not before, as the tenants of
GDP want. But it is clearly in the Global South and the world’s poor-
est countries, accounting for more than two-thirds of global population,
that alternatives can be pursued to a solely quantitative measurement of
growth.

Alternative Paths for Developing the Global South

There are such enormous infrastructure needs in areas like transporta-

tion, housing, industrialisation, education, professional training, public,
including cultural, amenities and miscellaneous services that several dec-
ades of considerable job-creating investment are needed, firstly in the
Global South but also the Global North to sustain this movement, if
the world is to at least start addressing the gap between living standards
in its different regions. Global South countries all have forests, agricul-
tural resources, rare earths and other minerals that should allow them,
if trade were conducted on egalitarian terms, to generate significant
funding enabling them to carry out these investments. Tens of thou-
sands of émigrés who graduated from a foreign university, or developed
vocational skills abroad, would be encouraged to take part in rebuild-
ing their country of origin. The likelihood is that public and interna-
tional control mechanisms would be needed to ensure that no new
parasite social class were reproduced, one that would speculate on the
new emerging wealth. The price that would have to be paid, in terms
of national independence, to pursue this kind of material and intellec-
tual investment is minimal compared to the costs of corruption and of
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
361

maintaining a self-interested political elite focused solely on accumulat-

ing private fortune in European banks.
The success and efficiency of these investments, which might also
boost economic activity in the Global North, would create hundreds
of thousands of sustainable jobs in the Global South, producing value
that could then be reinvested in these countries to improve local pop-
ulations’ living standards. This reversal in historical trends would have
dual effects. It would motivate many people to stay at home, thereby
ending emigration to the North. And it would diminish, and possibly
eliminate, people’s anxiety in the face of social misery, hence change the
thinking of those who in recent years have sought salvation in religious
fundamentalism, one example of which is Jihadist terrorism. Poor coun-
tries’ social, economic, cultural and intellectual development would
open new doors and spark other hopes and dreams that counter reli-
gious fundamentalism and the fascist practices associated with it. This
better future would also empower women, almost for the first time in
history, to participate in the collective organisation of resistance against
their own subjugation by men, exemplified by female genital mutila-
tion, which continues to be practiced massively throughout East Africa,
female prostitution in Asia or elsewhere, and more generally, in the vio-
lent daily domination of women, often driven by erroneous readings of
religious texts.
International treaties and trade agreements would no longer reflect
the existing balance of power, or violence, but be based on counter-
parts’ ‘mutual interest’ in creating the conditions enabling the primi-
tive accumulation needed to nurture local capitalism of a kind that has
never happened before in Africa, Latin America or parts of Asia. The
goal would not be to reproduce the sort of local development that the
Global North experienced in the past, seeing as this is the main cause
behind the world’s ecological degradation, starting with lethal climate
change. The new development model would enable nine or ten billion
humans to live happily on Planet Earth, generating other moral and
cultural values that would be shared by everyone everywhere and which
could become the basis for other lifestyles that consume less energy or
fossil materials.
362   J.-P. Durand

The idea here would be to re-orient the aims of industrial and service
production. In turn, this would necessitate a re-orientation of the goals
that companies themselves are pursuing.

Companies Pursuing a New Kind of Ambition

Until now, and given the representations conveyed in neo-classical the-

ory, the purpose of companies has been to produce profits benefiting
owners, whether families or international shareholders. Other business
functions like producing goods or services for customers or creating jobs
for employees who want to raise families have often been portrayed as a
direct benefit of neo-liberalism even though they have always been sub-
ordinated to the search for profit. Then, everything in business, includ-
ing accounting systems, has been skewed. Hiding the reality such as the
depiction of work not as something that produces value but as a cost
while using accounting tricks to mask maximised profits and confuse
employees and unions who might otherwise demand higher pay, requires
a change in the way that value is shared between labour and capital.
There exist other conceptions and definitions of companies that rec-
ognise non-financial business functions and highlight the rights of
customer and employee alongside shareholders. Companies are dis-
tinguished here from the corporations that own them (Bachet 2007;
Hatchuel and Segrestin 2012). The difference is not only conceptual
but legal. In a context where both finance and profit demands must be
regulated (this is our optimistic scenario), separating a company and its
shareholder corporation is feasible.
Companies can be managed by:

– Shareholders
– Employees
– Consumers, customers or users
– Local officials, for issues such as pollution, transportation, energy and
common interest.

The procedures managing this new approach would still have to be

determined in a general framework enabling as much local autonomy
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
363

as possible. This does not mean that tensions would just disappear, quite
the contrary. But innovators would no longer be frightened off and
will see these renewed institutions as a way of bathing companies in a
logic that is no longer single-minded, profit-oriented, but highlights
the imperative of a development where qualitative outcomes are priori-
tised. There would also have to be radically new accounting standards to
ensure that the company’s existence is closely aligned with its legal real-
ity and sustained by the diversity of its functionalities (Bachet 2007).
The political fallout of viewing companies as entities independ-
ent of their shareholder corporations would be multifaceted, seeing as
the basic idea here is to re-direct the production of goods and services
according to employees’ desires and demands while also staving off
any health problems or socio-psychic disorders that they might suffer.
Another barometer should also be demands expressed by customers
reflecting their political concerns about healthcare, education, culture,
etc. Above and beyond these immediate preoccupations, the state would
ensure adherence to principles of sustainable development, thereby sav-
ing the environment and organising a minimal consumption of energy
and fossil resources.
In this way, the new company would converge with other mar-
ket developments where economic trade would be regulated in such a
way as to repel any speculative pressures from the financial sphere. At
which point it becomes possible to revisit work, especially in the Global
North where structural unemployment has long had a negative effect on
society.

Job-Sharing as the Basis of a New Social Egalitarianism

The various benefits paid to the long-term unemployed, jobless youth

and more generally to the poor in the Global North do not represent a
sustainable solution, especially because the amounts paid are constantly
rising and the costs, funded by different levies including job-related
taxes, fall on the middle classes, defined in the broadest sense of this
term. Pressure on people’s wages, particularly for the working class and
the middle class, has a political cost as well as an electoral one (less voter
participation in the main national elections). Finally, there is a cost in
364   J.-P. Durand

terms of civil society’s disorientation, leading to a rise in racism and

community tensions. In short, the social redistribution of value created
by some citizens to other inactive ones, besides pensioners and students,
appears increasingly as a historical nonsense.
Of course, one major trend for several centuries now has been the
shortening of working hours. This has not been enough, however, to
offset the job losses caused by offshoring over the past 30 years and/
or constantly rising productivity. There are schools of thought where
employment is not considered a necessity for everyone, the idea being
that professionally inactive people can live very comfortably by simply
attending to their personal interests. This is at odds with the ongoing
narrative that depicts people lacking any professional activity as being
totally disoriented when it comes to gainful employment or personal
happiness. There is, of course, a cultural tradition of equating socially
useful remunerated employment with morality. From religious prescrip-
tions, “you will work by the sweat of your brow”, “thou shall not steal”,
to secular precepts, work, or more broadly employment, in its institu-
tionalised work sense and referring to the actions of employees or inde-
pendent workers operating within a precise legal framework, structures
social life. Employment defines an individual’s income and social sta-
tus according to the tasks they have fulfilled. The whole school system
revolves around access to jobs, with scholastic success or failure posi-
tioning future workers in this race. Jobs for everyone is not pie in the
sky, and the investigations that the present book has undertaken show
that even the most disadvantaged unemployed rarely claim benefits so
they can sit at home. The vast majority want a job, even as they reject
jobs that are dirty, strenuous and above all poorly paid, something
everyone can sympathise with.
The effects of unemployment and the impossibility of finding a job,
itself the vehicle for attaining social status (usually open-ended con-
tracts in the French system), damage people due to the negative effects
on their psyches and loss of self-confidence (Linhart et al. 2002).
Paradoxically, those who appear strong and sure of themselves at work
(oak trees ) are the ones who crumble and fall apart if they lose their job,
especially when they are deeply invested in it. In this case, being fired
feels like a betrayal.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
365

In social terms, the unemployed are the most vulnerable because they
cannot access the credit they need to purchase, for instance, a motor
vehicle. Nor can they get the guarantees needed to rent a flat. The
youngest drop out before they have even become part of society, pre-
venting them from starting a family. Wandering from relative to rela-
tive or friend to friend, they de-socialise and become delinquents, with
a few even thinking Middle Eastern Jihadism can “save” them. There
are many children in families where no one has ever had stable employ-
ment, hence never known the kind of regular schedules that working
employees enjoy, not to mention the discipline of having to be some-
where at a certain time and to wear the appropriate clothing. The only
things they know are survival trajectories defined by expediency. They
will never encounter the kinds of structures that would otherwise help
them construct themselves and develop the aspirations that will set
them on an upwards path.
These are all reasons why demanding “jobs for everyone” is para-
mount socially and in terms of building a more just and equal soci-
ety (Gorz 1988; Aznar 1993). The problem is that neither neo-liberal
economic growth nor balanced development are capable of creating
the millions of jobs that have gone missing in the Global North.25
Shorter working hours, administered bureaucratically as they were in
France and Germany during the 1990s and 2000s, is economically
inept. It was foreseeable that productivity gains averaging 2.0–2.5%
year would be used to offset shorter working hours in France, aver-
aging four hours in four years or 1/39, i.e. 2.5% per annum. Above
all, workers’ ability to adapt to slight acceleration in their work rate,
known as “work elasticity”, means that predictions of a massive cre-
ation of jobs were always an illusion. The official result of France’s
adoption of a 35-hour work week was the creation or preservation of

25The relatively good economic health of the United States in the late 200s has created hundreds

of thousands of jobs after previously destroying even more. Analysed in more detail, however,
most are poorly paid unqualified service jobs often featuring atypical schedules (part-time jobs of
varying durations, jobs alternating periods of inactivity and hyper-activity, etc.). They are also out
of sync with the times when most people socialise and have therefore had a de-socialising effect.
The situation in Great Britain is more or less the same.
366   J.-P. Durand

350,000 jobs. It is unclear how this was affected by shorter working

hours or by the subsidies paid to counter offshoring. The sum total
has, however, been very far from the 1.5 million jobs that ‘experts’ had
expected. Social facts never work like clockwork, something that the
economists and sociologists advising France’s socialist princes at the
time should have acknowledged.
Given all these economic constraints, jobs for all might seem a neces-
sity, and is portrayed as such as in the French Constitution, even if it
has no effect in reality. If the dream of a better future is ever to become
a reality, there needs to be a new kind of logic, one based on people
sharing their jobs and wealth.
In 2016, France has an economically active population of around 30
million people, with 22.5 million working full-time and 7.5 million
either unemployed or engaged in so-called atypical jobs representing the
equivalent of 1.5 million full-time jobs. Expressed differently, the coun-
try has an overall deficit of around 6 million equivalent full-time jobs.
The total cost of unemployment, related spending on social work, crime
prevention and workforce re-entry programmes, etc. amounts to about
€60 billion a year, making it one of France’s biggest budget items, about
the same as the government spends on national education or defense.
Above and beyond the fact that these colossal sums take a chunk out of
the state budget, they are also part of a situation in which people’s per-
sonalities are being destroyed, especially in communities where there are
a large proportion of jobseekers.
Due to the unlikelihood these 6 million jobs will ever be created,
it is worth imagining what might happen if all these jobless persons
were hired to occupy 50% of all existing jobs. Or from another per-
spective, analysis should look at what would happen if the 6 million
people who are currently working full-time were to be employed only
50% of the time. The end result would be 12 million people working
50% of the time and 18 million full-timers, if there is no change in
the total active population and number of equivalent full-time jobs.
Given the impossibility of living on half a salary, the shortfall in peo-
ple’s wages will have to be funded. One possibility is simply recoup-
ing the €60 billion that the French government currently pays out in
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
367

unemployment benefits. These monies could be gradually used for a

clearing fund.
Furthermore, even if all workers are to be paid full-time wages, there
is no reason why some of them, 12 million in the present hypothe-
sis, should not be able to work half of the time. Social justice dictates
that working hours break down differently in the future. It is possible
to imagine that many people (i.e. between 7 and 9 million) will want
to continue working full-time for a variety of personal reasons, whereas
others might wish to only work on a 80% basis yet receive full pay
thanks to the clearing fund.26 Guy Aznar already developed this idea
with his “second cheque” concept (1990, 104), although he later had to
abandon it because it did not resonate in the world of politics and eco-
nomics, including trade unions.
Despite this, and something that can never be repeated enough, even
if one of the consequences of this upheaval is that some people receive
full-time pay despite working less than full-time hours, the proposal has
another motive. The real justification for these transformations is that
everyone should have a job, something that after 30 years of structural
unemployment means sharing jobs and the income associated with
them, supplemented by subsidies from a clearing fund heretofore used
to finance unemployment and its ancillary aspects. The principle of
sharing jobs and wealth would keep public and private sector employ-
ers from resorting to work elasticity, i.e. prevent them from intensify-
ing work as they would do in the absence of a job-sharing policy. The
‘second cheque’ should be seen as something akin to a complementary
income that cannot come from the company employing the person but
instead from an autonomous public institution.
Sharing jobs and wealth, even if this reduces most workers’ work-
ing hours, is very much at odds with the policies pursued around the
turn-of-the-century by France’s Socialist Jospin government, or German
employer-employee agreements shortening some people’s work week.

26Another distribution of working hours is conceivable, with 25–28 million people working
between 75 and 90% of a full-time schedule while being paid a full-time salary.
368   J.-P. Durand

These policies failed to create enough jobs to overcome Europe’s current

deficit27 because public and private sector executives were using work
elasticity to get employees to produce in 35 hours, the limit in France
from the early 2000s onwards, what they used to produce in 39 hours.
Again in France, it is no real surprise that the 2.5% annual reduction
in working hours, 10% over the four years between 1998 and 2002,
was offset by productivity gains of between 2.0 and 2.5% per annum.
Hence politicians’ great disappointment when it became clear that the
transition to a 35-hour work week created or preserved a mere 300,000
jobs, versus the 1.5 million that ‘experts’ had expected.
The idea of sharing jobs and wealth is resisted by most actors in the
work world, including company directors, managers, trade union offi-
cials, experts in all shapes and sizes, employees, even though they would
benefit from this, job placement professionals and social workers who
would be out of work. All view this idea as unrealistic and even unhelp-
ful. Of course, they all already have a job and a salary. Hence the idea
that the policy should be developed as part of an optimistic scenario
leading to a rosier future. Resistance is fear of the unknown or else of
how hard it is changing the way people think. Of course, 50 years ago,
patching up bicycle tire tubes seemed a better idea than inventing tube-
less tires.
The fear of creating new inequalities in the world of work between
those who work full-time and the rest, while paying everyone the same
wage, reveals a lack of imagination. Not only it is possible for employ-
ees to work a different number of hours over the course of a month but
the time saved needs to be analysed against the backdrop of workers’
entire professional and private trajectories. Some people want to shorten
their careers and retire young, with others preferring sabbaticals when
they can travel, learn or start a new career. There should also be national
rules systematically shortening working hours in jobs that are physically
or psychologically difficult. This should extend beyond the categories of
workers currently targeted by such policies, including miners, chemical

27Germany is an example that should be treated separately, given the country’s demography and

good economic health which, in today’s unequal intra-European trade system, has helped it to
repatriate a substantial amount of value originally created elsewhere.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
369

workers, train drivers, airplane pilots, bus drivers, school teachers, to

include, as a priority, specialist industrial workers and cleaning staff.
Lastly, many workers love their professional activity and do not want to
work fewer hours. This is particularly true for those who have risen up
the ranks and are now better paid.
Employer resistance is based on a false certainty, namely the idea that
shorter working hours de-motivates employees who might then spend
too much time away from their company and invest more of them-
selves in other pursuits, with their productive efficiency diminishing as
a result. Evidence reveals that the opposite is just as possible, however.
Industrial accidents generally occur at the end of a team’s shift when
fatigue makes people negligent. This is something that has been noticed
by all work doctors and some retail chain managers who therefore pre-
fer hiring more cash register staff on a part-time basis to increase pro-
ductivity. Similarly, managers, engineers or creatives are no longer very
efficient when they work more than six to eight hours in a row. This
explains why Californian start-ups are happy to spend so much on small
recreational equipment, ping-pong or foosball tables, cafeteria, to ensure
that creatives remain in tip top shape.

Experience has shown that when two people are working two and a half
days each sharing the same position (university dean, head of HRM, legal
advisor, city architect, doctor, etc.), they are less effective than one person
working full-time. (Gorz 1988, 284)

This anticipates another employer fear, namely that production or

service might become disorganised due to the increased number of
employees intervening in teams whose composition is constantly chang-
ing. This critique shows that its authors know nothing about the busi-
ness world or look down their noses at it. With lean production, having
interchangeable staff members, industrial workers, office employees,
engineers, managers etc. has become a key managerial principle (see
Chapter 1) because it offers an immediate response to any absentee-
ism by getting rid of potential replacements. All that then remains is
for existing employees to move from one position or function, or even
department, to another, adding to their personal competency as they
370   J.-P. Durand

evolve. One of lean management’s few achievements is that it gives

meaning to some tasks by mobilising the subjectivity of employees,
including frontline operatives (Sebag and Durand 2003—sociological
documentary). In other words, employees’ systematic internal mobil-
ity in companies or public administrations prepares and enables them,
organisationally, to share jobs. The adaptability, competency, experience
and agility that employees demonstrate in no way undermines the pro-
ductive apparatus’s effectiveness. ICT, if applied intelligently, can also
encourage staff members to rotate across similar functions or positions.
And, as André Gorz noted, employees’ productivity will rise, as will
managers’. Meaning that the resistance of those who find themselves at
the top of the ladder largely translates as a fear of losing control over
their personal fiefdoms.

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Albin Michel.
Arendt, H. (2002 [1963]). Eichmann à Jerusalem. Rapport sur la banalité du
mal. Paris: Gallimard/Folio.
Ariès, P. (Dir.). (2012). Décroissance ou récession. Pour une décroissance de
gauche. Lyon: Éditions Parangon.
Aznar, G. (1990). Le travail c’est fini (à temps plein, toute la vie, pour tout le
monde) et c’est une bonne nouvelle. Paris: Editions Belfond.
Aznar, G. (1993). Travailler moins pour travailler tous. 20 propositions. Paris:
Syros.
Bachet, D. (2007). Les fondements de l’entreprise. Construire une alternative à la
domination financière. Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier.
Bauwens, M. (2015). Sauver le monde. Vers une économie post-capitaliste avec le
peer-to-peer. Paris: Les Liens qui libèrent.
Beansaude-Vincent, B., & Benoit-Browaeys, D. (2011). Fabriquer la vie: où va
la biologie de synthèse? Paris: Le Seuil.
Blot, C., Chagny, O., & Le Bayon, S. (2015). Faut-il suivre le modèle allemand?
Paris: La Documentation française.
Brinkmann, U., & Nachtwey, O. (2013). Relations professionnelles, syndical-
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Travail, 3 [Online]. http://nrt.revues.org/1210.
 7 Two Scenarios for the Future    
371

Carrière, J.-C. (2015). Les croyances. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.

Chambost, I. (2013). De la finance au travail. Sur les traces des dispositifs de
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les politiques publiques. Paris: Éditions Raisons d’agir.
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Production.
 8
Conclusion: What Comes After Work

It is significant that narratives about the end of work (Rifkin 1995;

Méda 1995) have been developed at the very time that jobs are becom-
ing rare. Discrediting something that is no longer accessible to everyone
but which remains indispensable to the construction of identity at work
(see Chapter 2) is a trick that the media and conservative ideologues
generally play on researchers hoping to be able to write a book with a
catchy title. Few analysts worry whether employment and its substance,
work, still monopolise most people’s waking hours. But work remains
the leading organiser of social living. demands on people during their
free time outside of the workplace are constantly increasing. Some activ-
ities are intellectually enriching but others less so, depending on the cir-
cumstances. Yet it remains clear that variable access to activities during a
person’s free time, and even more, the nature of these activities, basically
depends on how the individuals involved have fit into the work world.
Thus, even if the future is likely to see people working fewer days in a
year—and over the course of their lifetime (see Sue 1994)—status and
respect is still closely related to everyone’s place in the work world (the
status associated with a particular job, level of remuneration, kinds of
tasks and responsibility and power). In short, although people are less

© The Author(s) 2019 373

J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_8
374   J.-P. Durand

occupied by work than they were in the past, it remains central to their
lives (Schnapper 1997). It is work, in its relationship to capital and as a
producer of value, that continues to structure economic and social real-
ity. This is basically why the present book has been written.
Lean production based on Japanese inventions, such as it spread dur-
ing the 1990s, ended up being portrayed as the obverse of the crisis
that the Postwar Fordian model was suffering at the time. By increasing
global productivity, and the productivity of work specifically, it radically
transformed work and the conditions in which this occurs but without
really changing its essence in a productive system that remained capital-
ist in nature. Work in the Global North has become harder, not because
people have to lug heavier items or do more complicated transportation
manoeuvres than in the past but because it has intensified. On the one
hand, more physical gestures or intellectual ideas are expected during
each unit of time nowadays. On the other, time at work is no longer
porous, due to flux tendu of materials or information that keep people
busy every minute they are paid to work (see Chapter 1).
Even so, work has become more interesting in most situations, not
intrinsically (since the gestures and activities at the heart of work hav-
ing more or less stayed the same, particularly in operative functions)
but in terms of its immediate environment. The socio-technical tools
needed to maintain optimum tension in the flow and quality output
have mobilised employees’ subjectivity by at least partially increasing
their autonomy and responsibility. In this sense, Frederick Taylor seems
well and truly dead, albeit partially resuscitated wherever meta-rules
have been implemented to control employees, or independent workers
or subcontractors, as has happened in all functions and across all sec-
tors, including engineering, healthcare, and education (see Chapters 3
and 4).
Hence the concept of the new worker, in the Gramscian sense of
someone who is disciplined and trained to obey both in the factory and
in the way they consume things. The new workers operating in lean
production environments, whether in a factory, as an office employee,
as a manager or independent worker, must adapt and restructure them-
selves in a way enabling them to survive in today’s fast changing world
of work. Their autonomy and greater sense of responsibility should
 8 Conclusion: What Comes After Work    
375

ideally help them both to find pleasure in work and also accommo-
date the increasingly fragilised process by means of which goods and
services are being produced today. Alongside of this, time constraints
and meta-rules circumscribing new workers’ activities prevent them
from assuming the responsibilities they want. Plus their autonomy is de
facto undermined by productive necessities and well-known meta-rules.
The disrupture between the possibilities that were originally portrayed
as being an integral part of the job, and the claustrophobic condi-
tions within which people actually operate, has modeled and shaped
each subject’s temperament to convince them to accept this new way
of working (see Chapter 2). Most workers develop a mindset enabling
them to accept this dislocation and overcome the tensions it causes. But
some cannot abide and that is when things become dangerous for them.
They fall prey to depression: people stop sleeping, experience psychoso-
matic problems such as ulcers, and only survive by absorbing copious
quantities of pills. Without mentioning those who go so far as to end
their lives.
This restructuring of personalities in and through work has been rein-
forced through new consumer practices. Tangible goods may be more or
less satisfying to consumers, particularly when they are not bothered by
planned obsolescence, but the same thing rarely happens with services,
whose consumption is rising at a steady rate. Since it is notoriously dif-
ficult and onerous to rationalise production and work organisation in
the service sector, service quality has tended to deteriorate rapidly, forc-
ing users or consumers to work for free and masking certain forms of
exploitation (see Chapter 5). Worsening service quality in general and
the difficulties that consumers face in self-producing services, ones that
they have already paid for, converges with and reinforces the need to
restructure workers’ personalities.
In the past, including the period beginning with Fordism until the
advent of lean production, Gramsci’s new type of worker was subjected
to an iron discipline that enforced externally defined modes of produc-
tion and consumption that the worker would then experience as an
outsider. Today, it is up to new workers operating under lean manage-
ment to take subjective and psychological responsibility for this disci-
pline, despite its heteronomous nature. To bridge the divide between
376   J.-P. Durand

the expectations and hopes that their employer, or service provider, have
fostered and the daily reality, and their personal experience, of work,
people are constantly struggling to overcome their ‘narcissistic flaw’ in
a hope of remaining sane. Which explains why they must live this new
discipline actively instead of simply accepting it as they did in the past.
This could be interpreted as one of the consequences of the alienation
that is so central to work (Marx) and consumption (Marcuse 1964) in
capitalism. Against the backdrop of long-standing but ever-deepening
capitalist production relationships in which employees work for who-
ever makes their means of production available (instead of for them-
selves), salaried or falsely independent workers no longer determine
their own destinies. The disrupture between the possibilities and the
reality of work is refracted in these individuals to the point of no longer
being acceptable to them.
All in all, work remains central to human activity, structuring work-
ers mentally through the ever-growing divide between what they expect
from work, or from consumption, and the basic impossibility of satis-
fying these expectations. It is this process that defines how new workers
are made. It is entirely possible that the basic propensity of this divide
is not to stifle the spirit of revolt and rebellion, seeing as acceptance of
the divide is part of its very essence. Instead, what it does intimate is
a willingness to accept that one’s expectations, created and maintained
through work and in the consumption of the commoditised fruits of
their own labour, will never be satisfied.
This can only be understood if consideration is given—as this book
has done—to a financial capitalist context that has exacerbated compe-
tition between companies, nations and individuals. A full report would
highlight all of the changes that have been taking place in the external
environment, exemplified by the accelerated financialisation of capi-
talism and increasingly fragile economic equilibria. The end result has
been a massive offshoring of industrial jobs leaving the Global North
behind, without the emerging or developing world experiencing any
truly positive poverty or misery mitigation as a result. Hence the ongo-
ing, massive and uncontrolled migration from the Global South to the
Global North, without there being an alternative model preventing the
destruction of fossil reserves or climate change (Scenario 1).
 8 Conclusion: What Comes After Work    
377

On the other hand, under constrainst to resolve its inner contra-

dictions, capitalism could regulate its own financial excesses and kick-
start planetary reconstruction. Discovering the possibilities of another
kind of development, it could spark a virtuous circle where the quality
of people’s lives and the environment itself offers a range of new profit
sources. It could lead to a re-balancing of the order between the world’s
leading regions and the Global South with its substantial agriculture,
forests, minerals and of course energy resources, including sun, wind
and tidal power. This would, of course, affect the ‘typical jobs’ model
(Scenario 2) but by shifting it away from a world of precarious work
and low remuneration and towards a sharing of jobs and wealth—
thereby resetting the reasons why people work. In turn, this should end
the personality divide that the new worker experience between irrational
expectations and structural dissatisfaction. Reconstructing and restoring
divided and dislocated people requires to give back the work meaning.
Managerial initiatives (for example around “the freed company”, in spite
of its obvious limits) and especially a multiplicity of trade-union expe-
riences or self-managed cooperative companies converge to make plau-
sible bottom up organizations. It remains to translate economically and
politically all these hopes!

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 Index

Note Page numbers in italic type refer to figures and tables, page numbers
followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

0–9 automation 246–7, 302–3

5S concept 22n. automotive sector 3–4, 14–15, 65–6
autonomy 7, 8–9, 74
definition and purpose of 47, 48
A in design-related work 127–8
abandonment identity, 91, 95–6 employee struggles with 48, 51,
adaptation 1–2. See also coping 374–5
adaptation rhetoric 187, 197 and hidden knowledge 23–4
affinities model 90 and identity 73
agriculture 358 and management functions 40–1
air transport 17–18, 298–9 of pickers 112–16
alcohol 4 ‘averaging out’ of society 336–9
alienation 114–16 Aznar, G. 367
alter ego 79, 84–5
Amazon 106–7, 108–9, 111, 118,
302 B
anticipation competencies 185–7 Balazs, G. 225
anti-social behaviour 194, 253 banking sector 17, 236, 246–7
appraisals 29, 30, 31–3, 219–28 behaviour evaluation 30–1
attenuation rhetoric 167–8, 187–8, behaviour prediction 304
197, 234 Besnier, J.-M. 117

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 395
to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
J.-P. Durand, Creating the New Worker,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6
396   Index

Biagi-Chai, F. 58–9 communication 168, 234–5

bibliometry 213–19 community 256, 346–7
big data 304 companies 70–1, 362–3
biotechnology 351–2 competencies 28–30, 183–8, 197–8,
Bleitrach, D. 6 202
Boullier, D. 304 competition 179–83
Bourdieu, P. 222 competitions for customers 256
Boutet, J. 167 complaints 297, 306
branches 70–1 comprehensive communication 168,
Burawoy, M. 67, 223 234
business services 162, 168–9, 238 concurrent engineering 122–4
constrained involvement 20–1, 33,
125–33, 206, 314
C consumers. See customers/users
call centres 18, 235, 236–7, 245, 294 consumption 5, 304–7
Calle, L. 286 contentment identity, 91, 92–3
capital 286–8 contracts 97, 283
capitalism contractual dimension of service
financial capitalism 179, 244, relationships 166–7, 235
312, 376 contrats d’usage (zero hours contracts)
future transformation of 354–7 266, 268, 274, 285
green capitalism 357 coordinators 27–8, 40
car rental companies 295–6 coping 54–61, 139–40, 192, 199–
Caveng, R. 277, 285 200, 227–8, 314, 375
Chenu, A. 6 co-production 167. See also custom-
climate change 324–5 ers/users, service work by
CNPF (employers’ union) 29–30 corruption 323, 344
Code of Work 266, 274, 316 creative service industries 269–72,
collaboration 359 274–6, 278–9
collective action crime 344–7
and identity 89–90, 92. See also crowdsourcing model 254–7, 258–9,
unions 263–4
collective discipline 26, 137–8 customer profiling 255
collectives 134–5 customer queues 18, 245, 252–4,
collective work 134–8, 201 258
colonialism 332–3 customer satisfaction surveys 256
commercial relationships 182, 233 customer-supervisor model 252–4,
commercial services 163–4 258, 263
 Index   397

customers/users collective 26, 137–8

narrowing service offer and expec- and Fordism 3–5, 6
tations of 298–303 dislocations
responsibility of 295, 297, 303 coping with. See coping
service work by 167, 244 in design-related work 134–40
crowdsourcing model 254–7, and new worker 52–4
258–9, 263–4 Dujarier, M.-A. 36, 257
customer-supervisor model
252–4, 258, 263
self-service model 245–51, E
258–9 economic regulation 354–7
spoliation 258–64 education 242–3, 359
and transformation of companies egalitarianism 363–70
363 ego
customisation 251 and alter ego 79, 84–5
and identity construction 76, 79
and responses to dislocations 55,
D 57, 62, 63
debt 328–9, 330–1 Ehrenberg, A. 50–1, 313
de Gaulejac, V. 51, 208 emails 150–2, 153, 199
de-humanised services 292–7 employee participation 22–5
democracy 255, 312, 322, 334, employees
355 and discipline of Fordism 3–5, 7
demographic levelling 324 dislocations under lean for 52–4,
depression 50, 52, 140 134–40
Deprez, L. 132 evaluation and appraisals of 30–3,
deregulation of work 313–19 219–28
design, changing process of 120–5 health of. See mental fatigue;
design-related work physical health; social-psy-
dislocations in 134–40 chic disorders
flux tendu and constrained individual history and identity of
involvement 125–33 75–6
management by projects 120–5 mobilised in flux tendu system
destitution 342–4 20–1
detachment identity, 91, 97–8 reconstructed as divided entities
dialogue, instrumentalisation of 61–4
234–5 responses to lean management
digital divide 347 54–61, 190–1, 192. See also
discipline 375–6 coping
398   Index

and transformation of companies financial logic 325–8

363 financial sector 320, 325–6, 356–7
versus self-employed workers flux tendu 7, 206
280–90 definition of 16n.
workforce reductions 20, 36–7, in design-related work 125–33
52, 189. See also autonomy; generalisation of 16–19
new worker; responsibility; in healthcare 241
work groups hidden meaning of 19–25
employment and logistics 105
future transformation of 363–70. at Pôle Emploi 195–7
See also work and work groups 25–8
employment agencies. See Pôle flux tendu pressé 18, 252–3, 258
Emploi FNAC (bookshop) 299–300
employment contracts 97, 283 forced cooperation 20
zero hours 266, 268, 274, 285 Fordism 3–5, 6, 7, 14, 25, 46, 58
employment relationships 177–8, in contemporary logistics 106–12
181–2, 233, 277, 285 Foucault, M. 223–5
employment status definition 265–7 fragility of processes 19–20, 21, 52
energy 358 France Télécom 36–7
engineering sector 237–8. See Free (telecoms company) 292–3
also design-related work; free trade agreements 321
researcher engineers functionalism 5–6
environmental change 324–5, 357–8 funding
ethnicity 341–2 of public sector 239
evaluation 30–3 for R&D 144–5
self-evaluation 51–2. See also fusional model 90
personal appraisals future scenarios 311–12, 376–7
extra surplus-value 259–61, 284 optimistic. See rosy future
pessimistic. See social regression

F
Faguer, J.P. 225 G
far right politics 322, 333 Gaborieau, D. 113–14, 116
fast food business 236, 245 Gadrey, J. 164–6, 175, 243
financial capitalism, rise and impact games 64–9, 112–16, 174–5, 227
of 179, 244, 312, 376 Garfield, E. 214
financial crisis 326 gated cities 345–6
financialisation 15, 319–25 geographical mobility 27
 Index   399

Germany 315–16 hospitals 17, 241

gig economy 318 Huizinga, J. 66–7
global disorder 331 Human Resource Management
globalisation 15, 140, 145, 319–25 (HRM) 72
global northn 315 hyper-information 348–9
optimistic future of 358–60
pessimistic future of 319, 321,
328–31, 336, 339–40, 352. I
See also migration ICT
global south 315n., 321, 360–2. See in design-related work 123
also migration failures of 37
Goffman, E. 166, 168, 171–3 and flux tendu 19
Gori, R. 210–11, 226 future transformation of 359–60
Goussard, L. 48, 93, 126, 133, 135, and lean production 348
140 in logistics work 106–7, 108,
Gramsci, A. 3–7 109–10, 111–12, 116
Greece 322, 328 and online service quality 301–3
green capitalism 357 in police work 240
gross domestic happiness 360 role in R&D 142–3
group leaders 27–8, 40, 141n. and self-service 247, 248–51
Groups. See work groups and social regression 347–51
groupware 129n., 135–6 ICT sector 132, 329–30
identity
constructed at work 69–76, 79
H and customer participation 256
Hanique, F. 170–1 link with recognition 88
Hartz reforms 315–16 typology of 89–98, 91. See also
health 74–5, 204. See also mental professional ideal
fatigue; physical health; impact factor of research 214–18
social-psychic disorders imprisonment 342n.
healthcare 17, 241–2, 245, 351 income 271–3, 336–7
health and safety committees 94–5, indicators
140, 316 bibliometry and scientific research
higher education 242–3 213–19
holiday rental sites 302–3 purpose of 206–13
homelessness 343 individualisation 61, 117
Honneth, A. 77–84 individual workers. See
horizontal mobility 27, 37–8 pieceworkers
400   Index

industrial activities, compared with Internet 247, 248–51, 301–3

services 231–2 intersubjectivity, and recognition
industrial cleaning 177 78–84, 87
industrial design-related work invisibilisation 152
dislocations in 134–40 invisible activities
flux tendu and constrained monitoring as 209
involvement 125–33 pieceworkers’ 279–80
management by projects 120–5 at Pôle Emploi 198–200
industrialised services, concept of in R&D 149–54
160 invisible competencies 183–8
industrial relations, and identity Islam 334–5
71–3 isolation 116–20, 201
industrial workers (logistics sector)
104–5
isolation of 116–20 J
re-appropriation of work 112–16 Jihad 334
return to Taylor and Ford 106–12 job advisors. See Pôle Emploi
inequality job-sharing 366–70
polarisation and ‘averaging out,’ just-in-time systems 16–18, 104. See
336–9 also flux tendu
and self-service model 248, 249
information
activities relating to 38–9, 146 K
for customers 301 kaïzen 22
purpose of management indi- knowledge
cators 206–13. See also hidden 23–4
intelligence work invisible competencies 183–8
innovation 237–8, 255–6. See also and learning 359. See also infor-
research and development mation; intelligence work
instrumental communication 168,
234–5
insurance sector 17 L
intellectual work. See design-re- Lacoste, Y. 324
lated work; research and Lagrange, D. 110, 118–19
development Lallement, M. 85–6
intelligence work 349–51 lean management
intensification. See workload production of new worker by
interactionism 169–75 current context 46–52
international migration 331–5, 352, 361 dislocations 52–4
 Index   401

reconstruction as divided entity Malet, J.-B. 108

61–4 management
responses to dislocations 54–61 conversion of 36–9
social games 64–9 double constraint of lean princi-
rise and impact of 15–16, 103, ples 34
313–14 identity and industrial relations
sector examples. See design-re- 72
lated work; logistics sector; levels of 34–6. See also lean
research and development; management
service activities management by projects organisation
lean production 120–5
competence and appraisals 28–33 and dislocations in design work
emergence and diffusion of 14–16 134–40
flux tendu’s hidden meaning managers
19–25 certainties and doubts of 40–2
generalisation of flux tendu 16–19 mobility of 37–8
impact of 238, 374 in R&D 141, 144–9
management of 34–42 marketing 256, 276
new worker under 374–5 Marxist theory 164, 259–61, 284,
work groups 25–8 286–7
learning by embarrassment 253 Marx, K. 259–60, 286–7, 354–5
Leguil, C. 216 mass (fusional) model 90
leveraged buyouts (LBOs) 320 mass services 162, 163, 236–7
linguistic dimension of service rela- matrix organisations 123–4, 127,
tionship 167–8 131, 146–7
logistics sector 104–5 Mead, G.H. 78
re-appropriation of work 112–16 meaning
return to Taylor and Ford 106–12 and comprehensive communica-
worker isolation in 116–20 tion 168, 234
LOLF (Loi organique relative aux lois in logistics sector 117–18
de finances) 239 Meirieu, P. 217
mental fatigue 194–7. See also
social-psychic disorders
M meta-rules 48–9, 67, 128–30, 133,
machines 246, 302–3 375
Macron Law 316–17 micro-enterprises 284
Mafia-like groups 344–5 migration 331–5, 352, 361
malaise 26, 41, 59, 60, 61, 202–5 Miller, L. 215
402   Index

mobility 27, 37–8, 97 reconstruction as divided entity

monitoring 38–9, 227 61–4
purpose of management indica- responses to dislocations 54–61
tors 206–13 social games 64–9
morality, and Fordism 3–5, 6 in logistics sector 104–5
multi-media bundles 264 isolation of 116–20
re-appropriation of work
112–16
N return to Taylor and Ford
NAFTA (North American Free Trade 106–12
Agreement) 321n. in R&D 140–1, 154–5
nano-technology 351 invisible work 149–54
narcissism 55, 57 management and supervision
narcissistic flaw 55–6, 59n., 62, 63, 144–9
68, 95, 376 workload 141–4
negotiation model 90 recognition at work
neo-colonialism 332–3 and Honneth’s thesis 77–84
neo-Fordianism 8, 9 theory of social recognition
neo-liberalism 312, 319 84–9
networking 276 in service activities. See service
networks 136–7, 142, 143, 348 activities
neurosis 50 typology of workplace identity
New Public Management 35, 52, 89–98
239 under lean production 374–5. See
new worker also employees
in contemporary context 7–11 new worker-consumer 304–7
and co-production 263 non-quality work. See service quality
Gramsci’s concept of 3–7 normalisation 304–5
identity constructed at work of customer expectations of ser-
69–76 vice offer 298–304
industrial design-related work normative violence 222–5
dislocations in 134–40 norms 210–11, 222–5, 227
flux tendu and constrained
involvement 125–33
management by projects 120–5 O
lean management’s production of oak trees 57, 62, 93, 95, 192, 364
current context 46–52 Ogien, A. 212–13, 215
disruptions and dislocations 52–4 Ohno, T. 17
 Index   403

online courses 242 Pôle Emploi (PE) 193–4, 240, 245

online purchasing 247, 248–51 professional ideal 200–5
online service quality 301–3 and self-service model 248–9
optimism. See rosy future working conditions 194–200
outsourcing, and self-service model police 240–1
245–50 politics, and financialisation 321–4
post-Fordism 7
poverty 338, 341
P power relationship, and personal
passenger safety 189–90 appraisals 221–6
pauperisation 342–4 pressed flux tendu. See flux tendu
perceptive competencies 185–7 pressé
performance measurement. See prisoners 342n.
indicators privatisation 191
personal appraisals 29, 30, 31–3, 219–28 production
personality construction 55–6, 57 consumption and 5. See also lean
personal resources 54–61. See also production
coping production systems 7–8
personal services 162 professional ideal, at Pôle Emploi
persuasive competencies 186–7 200–5
pessimism. See social regression professional identity 70–1, 124,
Petit, S. 128, 129, 131 127
physical health 74–5, 108, 110–11, professionalism 185
116, 204 professional mobility 37–8
pickers 106–12 progress groups 22–4
autonomy of 112–16 project managers 126, 141n.
isolation of 116–20 promotions 221
pieceworkers prospecting 276
defining and counting 264–9 psycho-social disorders. See
and deregulation of work 315–16, social-psychic disorders
317–18 psycho-social risk 60–1
motivations and income 269–73 public service ethos 190–1
versus salaried work 280–90 public services
working time 273–7 rationalisation in 238–43
workload and mobilisation self-service model in 248
277–80 public spaces 343–4
PMSI (Programme de medicalisation public transport sector 17–18, 236,
des systems d’information) 241 239, 358
404   Index

service quality in 295–7, 298–9. theory of social recognition 84–9

See also rail services typology of workplace identity
89–98
recognition of customer contribution
Q 257
qualifications 29, 30, 46–7, 72 reeds 57–8, 95, 190, 205
quality. See service quality relative surplus-value 284
quality circles 22–4 religious fundamentalism 334–5,
quantification 361
bibliometry and scientific research reluctant identity, 91, 93–4
213–19 research, scientific 213–19
function of personal appraisals research and development (R&D)
219–28 140–1, 154–5
purpose of management indica- invisible work 149–54
tors 206–13 management and supervision
queues 18, 245, 252–4, 258 144–9
workload 141–4, 147, 149
researcher-engineers 140–1
R complexified workloads 141–4
R&D. See research and development invisible work by 149–54
rail services 179–83 research publications 142–3
impact of SNCF change on work- research supervision 144–9
ers 188–92 responsibility (customers’) 295, 297,
invisible competencies in 183–8 303
service quality 295, 296–7 responsibility (employees’) 7, 8–9,
rationalisation 47–8
of intellectual work 129–33 in design-related work 127–8
of service activities 178, 231–3 and identity 73
factors preventing 233–43 struggles with 48, 51, 374–5
impact on quality. See service retail sector 236, 246, 249–50,
quality 299–302. See also Amazon
See also lean management; Reynaud, J.-D. 67–8
lean production RGPP (Révision générale des politiques
RATP (transport provider) 295 publiques) 239
recognition at work rickshaws 344
and Honneth’s thesis 77–84 Rifkin, J. 329–30
link with identity 88 Rosa, H. 348
in Pôle Emploi 202–3 rosy future 253–4
 Index   405

companies 362–3 return to Taylor and Ford

economic regulation 354–7 106–12
employment 363–70 limits of mass services 236–7
environment 357–8 pieceworkers in
in global north 358–60 defining and counting 264–9
in global south 360–2 motivations and income
Roy, D. 223 269–73
versus salaried work 280–90
working time 273–7
S workload and mobilisation
safety, on trains 189–90 277–80
Sainsaulieu, R. 89–90 quality of. See service quality
Sauvy, A. 329 rationalisation of 178, 231–3
scanners, in logistics work 106–7, factors preventing 233–43
108, 111 theoretical approaches to
scientific research 213–19 categorisation 161–4
security services 240–1 interactionism 169–75
Segond, V. 319 simplified definition 164–9
self-employment 265–6, 267–8, 269, systemic definition 175–9
315–16 work by users 167, 244
versus salaried work 280–90. See crowdsourcing model 254–7,
also pieceworkers 258–9, 263–4
self-esteem 48, 53, 54–6, 60, 77 customer-supervisor model
self-evaluation 51–2 252–4, 258, 263
self-exploitation 285–6 self-service model 245–51,
self-fulfilment 48, 58, 59, 269 258–9
self-prescription 133 spoliation 258–64
self-regulation 356 service quality
self-service 245–51, 258–9 deterioration of 291–2, 375
service activities de-humanised services 292–7
changing nature of 159–60 narrowing service offer
compared with industrial 231–2 298–303
growing uncertainty of 236 and shaping new worker-con-
industrial workers in logistics sumer 304–7
104–5 at Pôle Emploi
isolation of 116–20 context 193–4
re-appropriation of work professional ideal 200–5
112–16 working conditions 194–200
406   Index

and self-service model 248 social polarisation 336–9

at SNCF social-psychic disorders
context 179–83 in design sector 140
impact of change on workers and identity 90–1, 94–7
188–92 and lean management 50–2,
and invisible competencies 60–1, 69, 313, 375
183–8 in R&D 149, 153. See also mental
service relationship 165–8, 175–7, fatigue; stress
233 social regression 312–13, 352
dimensions of 166–7, 234–5 debt and global disorder 328–31
and interactionism 169–75 deregulation of work 313–19
at Pôle Emploi 196–8 and financial logic 325–8
role of invisible competencies globalisation and financialisation
183–8 319–25
at SNCF 180–8 mafia-like groups and communi-
under stress 234–5. See also cus- tarianism 344–7
tomer-supervisor model migratory flows 331–5
sexuality 4 and social benefits 339–42
SFR (telecoms company) 292, 293–4 social polarisation and ‘averaging
Singlemann, J. 161 out’ 336–9
Single Minute Exchange Die and technology 347–52
(SMED) 22 urban spaces 342–4
singular services 162, 163 social services 240
SNCF (railway company) social workers 240
context 179–83 speed
impact of change on workers and service activities 168–9. See
188–92 also work rates
and invisible competencies 183–8 spoliation, and service work by users
service quality 297 258–64
sociability dimension of service rela- stacking of packages 112–13,
tionships 166, 234–5 118–19
social benefits 339–42. See also wel- staff reductions. See workforce
fare benefits reductions
social class 71, 337–8, 341–2 state-subsidised entertainers 266,
social egalitarianism 363–70 268
social games 64–9, 112–16, 174–5, stress 74, 132, 194–5
227 subcontracting 130–1, 241–2, 265
social networks 348 subjectivity 30–3, 58, 76
 Index   407

subsidies, and job-sharing 366–7 TGV railway service 180–1, 297

suicide 60, 97, 103 Tiffon, G. 18, 245, 252–3
supermarkets 18 tight flow. See flux tendu
supervision 27–8, 144–9. See also time management
collective discipline; cus- and customer-supervisor model 252–4
tomer-supervisor model and self-service 245. See also flux
supply chain management. See logis- tendu; speed; work rates
tics sector Total Productive Maintenance
surplus-value theory 259–61, 284 (TPM) 22
surveillance 349–51 Total Quality Management 22
sustainable development 363 tourism 302, 306, 338–9
symbolic violence 222 towers game 112–13
Toyotism 7–8
training 72
T transformation 1–2, 7, 42. See also
T2A ‘Activity-based tariffs,’ 241 lean management; rosy
taxation 323, 341 future
Taylorisation of design-related work transport sector 17–18, 236, 239, 358
dislocations in 134–40 service quality in 295–7, 298–9.
flux tendu and constrained See also rail services
involvement 125–33
management by projects 120–5
Taylorism 6, 7 U
in contemporary logistics 106–12 Uber 317
team leaders 27–8, 40 under-class 337
teamwork, transition to work groups unemployment 93, 98, 193n., 337–8,
25–8 363, 364–5, 366. See also
technical dimension of service rela- Pôle Emploi; welfare benefits
tionships 167, 236 unions 72, 92, 95, 96, 314–15
technicians. See design-related work university rankings 213–14
technology urban spaces 342–4, 345–6, 358
in logistics work 106–7, 108, users. See customers/users
109–10, 111–12, 116
and pieceworkers 279
and social regression 347–52. See V
also ICT violence, symbolic and normative
telecoms sector 292–4 222–5
telephone operators 303. See also call Vivant, E. 280n.
centres
408   Index

voice recognition technology 106, pieceworkers’ 273–7

109–10, 111–12, 116 shortening 364, 365
working relationships 123
workload
W at SNCF 189
Waters, L. 217 engineers’ 131–2
websites 301–3 impact of lean production on 374
welfare benefits 268, 338, 339–42, invisible activities 149–54,
363–4, 367 198–200, 209, 279–80
Weller, J.-M. 171 managers’ 38, 40
Wieviorka, M. 86 perceptions of 74
Wikileaks 349–50 pieceworkers’ 277–80
withdrawal model 90, 93–4 in R&D 141–4, 147, 149–54
Womack, J.P. 14 work organisation, and identity 73–5
women’s empowerment 361 Workplace Health and Safety
work Committees 94–5, 140, 316
centrality of 373–4, 376 work rates
deregulation of 313–19 worker games with 65–6, 114–16.
future transformation of 363–70 See also time managemen
work elasticity 365, 367–8
workers. See employees; new worker;
pieceworkers Y
workforce reductions 20, 36–7, 52, yield management 298, 299
189
work groups 25–8, 68, 74, 135–6,
206, 223, 224 Z
working conditions, deteriorating zero hours contracts 266, 268, 274,
194–200, 316, 317 285
working hours Zurich Insurance 103
increased 38, 40, 289n., 316
and job-sharing 367–9