L'idéal au travail

Citation

Parant, J. (2007), "L'idéal au travail", Society and Business Review, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 330-331. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680710825514

Marie‐Anne Dujarier is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Paris‐III and at the French Polytechnic School. She has published several books on management and has worked in great companies for several years. In 2005, the book has been rewarded with the prize of academic research by the newspaper “Le Monde.”

Veronique, 25 years old, is a waitress in a chain of restaurant. Mrs., 40, is a nurse in the geriatric service of a public hospital. Theoretically, their work is very different, but both are faced with the same imperatives: satisfaction of clients and patients, respect of regulation norms, autonomy and performances to improve each day. Both also have the feeling of being exhausted and to do an endless work. At the same time, employees have to deal with mass production and personalized service, as well as with prescription from their hierarchy and with the specific demands of each client.

From this noting, Marie‐Anne Dujarier proposes to analyze the social process of the normalization of ideal and the specific social link which follows from the numerous contradictions of mass services. The result of it takes shape in a realistic but terrifying book, which accounts of the difficulty to execute unrecognized tasks and to accept the absurdity of organizational work.

The author points out that there is a great gap between the assigned and the effectively realized work. By analyzing the full of contradictions organizational work, she supposes that the ideal organization would prepare tasks which would be adapted to the human nature. But in mass services, employees are asked to be superhuman.

To illustrate this statement, she gives a colorful description of the work of each woman. For example, she enumerates security and hygienic norms followed in chain restaurants and explains that those are impossible to follow such numerous and complicated they are. Procedure is stuck in a 500‐page book which employees call the “bible.” In the geriatric service, death and suffering have become taboo such the satisfaction of patients is primordial. As well, costs are reduced at the same time as demand increases. In service organizations: “the norm has became ideal and ideal has became the norm.”

Under such a pressure, employees are often accused. In fact, decisional levels palm responsibilities off on each other. From the board of director to the proximity managers, decisions are delegated. So it is to those who are directly in front of the client to resolve contradictions of prescriptions. The subject has, so, “to perform alone the work of a collective organization that was unable to create a task adapted to him.” Still with a very vivid language, Dujarier shows which harmful effects on work this can have: mistreatment of patients, simulation and denial of work or the rise of borderlines.

To face this ideal norms, the author distinguishes four possible attitudes: “heroic” ones who submit themselves to the norm because they have faith in it; the “practical” ones who know they would never be able to reach ideal and find shelter in routine in order to stop thinking; the “enchanters” who are represented by the headquarters which decide what others have to do; and the “resistants” who criticize organizations and who are considered as deviant and finish to be evicted.

But she comes to the conclusion that this prescription of ideal is difficult to contest. Employees finish believing it is normal. Ideal has lost its sense because it is considered as possible. Only one solution can be thought to restore work's value:

… to accept the fact that production of service is “only” satisfying would be more functional than demanding it to be ideal. So, to consider organization of work with abandoning the social norm of ideal would be the most optimal thing to do. We literally have to get at work, which means to accept to name the limits, uncertainties and contradictions of an activity, to confront with it in order to build, by summoning up all one's creativity and intelligence in action, a possible and human sized solution. Abandoning its status of norm, ideal could so get back to the one of model or project, which is essential to work daily.

This book completes the Courpasson's one since both analyze the contemporary management as it can impact on individuals. We warmly recommend the lecture of L'ideal au travail so more it is written in a very readable French.