Le télétravail des cadres : entre suractivité et apprentissage de nouvelles temporalités

Telework is often considered to be a means for making life at work and at home more compatible. Why do some wage-earners, in particular white-collar employees, choose it? Do they actually make a choice or simply adopt a solution “for want of anything better” in an organizational context with its limitations? In this case, what factors do they weigh against each other? Once they have opted for telework, how do these white collars manage to adjust their occupational and family lives? Is their aspiration to improve the balance between the two satisfied? Or do they run up against unexpected difficulties? Answers to these questions come out of two studies conducted among white-collar employees in different sorts of telework. Given the absence of institutional regulations governing the relation between life at home and at work, telework, far from leading to a more balanced life, jeopardizes the organization’s collective efficiency.     

L’adaptation des modèles de production dans les pays émergents L’exemple de l’industrie automobile en Argentine

How to test for the existence of a new model of production based on the firm lending an ear to customer demands and valuing the individual and collective intelligence of its work force? The facts for putting this model to the test of reality come from an analysis of two Argentinean automobile-makers, subsidiaries of Toyota and Volkswagen. Various aspects of their organization policy provide evidence of their capacity for making adaptations by “hybridizing” the parent firm’s model with the rationales inherent in the network of local actors (suppliers and labor unions, in particular). These firms are open systems with a narrow margin of maneuver. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Carrières et contradictions en sciences de la vie : réponses du corps académique aux transformations de la connaissance et de ses utilisations

Drawing on interviews with more than 80 scientists on two university campuses, we create a typology that offers insights into how transformations in the nature and locus of life science innovation influence academic careers and work practices. Our analyses suggest that a strong outcome of increased academic concern with research commercialization is the appearance of new fault lines among faculty, between faculty and students, and even between scientists' interests and those of their institutions. We argue that life science commercialization is driven by a mix of new funding opportunities, changing institutional mandates for universities, and novel research technologies that bring basic research and product development into much closer contact. The rise of patenting and commercially motivated technology transfer on U.S. campuses is altering faculty work practices and relationships, while transforming the criteria by which success is determined and rewards are allocated. Through close analysis of interviews with four researchers who typify a range of academic responses to commercialism, we demonstrate emerging patterns of conflict and agreement in faculty responses to commercial opportunities in the life sciences.     

Les rejetés de la modernisation

In Brazil unlike France two very split labour markets co-exist, the formal and the informal. On the formal labor market in Brazil, union rights prevail, and wage-earners are protected unlike in the informal labor market where none of this exists. Raising industry to an international level pushed many wage-earners out of the formal sector during the 1980s. Did they find jobs elsewhere? If so, in which branches of the economy? To provide answers, two files are crossed, their data having been made longitudinal. Dismissed workers’ trajectories from 1989 till 1995 in two branches and two regions are analyzed: the automobile industry in the São Paulo area and the petrochemical industry in the São Salvador (Bahia) area. These career trajectories shed light on how modernization has affected quite different labor markets; it also brings to the foreground the concept of a systemic restructuring of the labor market. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Les figures de la gestion du changement sociotechnique

Computers and software occupy an ever bigger place in an organization’s activities. Studying the social dynamics of their uses has thus become a major preoccupation for the social sciences. An overview of recent studies, in particular “structurationist” research, on this subject is presented; and a federative model, suggested. This archetypical model corresponds to three stylized situations of sociotechnical change (a neutral, regenerated and disturbed archetype) that, in some cases, can be aligned to reconstitute “appropriative trajectories”. This theoretical framework is applied to various sorts of information technology, in particular: enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, intranets and electronic messaging systems. Beyond merely understanding the social dynamics, the effort is made to link appropriative trajectories with the “logics of control” specific to them. The latter correspond to figures of management (the channel, facilitator and catalyst), which are described.     

Le travail des experts : analyse d'un dispositif d'évaluation des risques alimentaires

Following several crises, the French Food Safety Agency was set up in 1999 to solicit scientific opinions as part of assessments of health-related risks. The principle was retained to avoid a conflict of professional and economic interests in making assessments. Observations of how a committee of experts on prions operated has shown that its judgement is the outcome of a variety of resources and procedures (involvement in quite contextualized technical studies, a sharing of tasks with the agency's personnel, etc.). The actual work of the experts involved taking into account both the requirement of legitimation and a concern for examining the case presented and answering the questions that were set.     

Comment apprécier une politique policière ? : Le premier ministère Sarkozy (7 mai 2002-30 mars 2004)

How to assess the effects of the policy of Nicolas Sarkozy, Home Secretary in France from May 2002 to March 2004? An analysis of the statistics and, in particular, of the way they were construed reveals that the results were ambiguous, because law enforcement was centered on the state's duty to enforce the law while police services were being asked to show a decrease in delinquency so as to prove that the new policy was effective. On the other hand, an analysis of polls about how public opinion felt about law and order indicates that the minister's tough talk was effective to a degree, especially when feelings of insecurity were strongly politicized prior to presidential elections in April 2002. This analysis sheds light on the distance between the practical and purely political effectiveness of a policy of law and order.     

A general guideline for management of risk from carcinogens

A simple relationship is formulated that helps to discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable individual lifetime risks (RL) to populations that are exposed to chemical carcinogens. The relationship is an empirical one and is developed using objective risk data as well as subjective risk levels that have found substantial acceptance among those concerned with carcinogenic risk assessment issues. The expression sets acceptable levels of lifetime carcinogenic risk and is a function of the total population exposed to the carcinogen. Its use in risk assessment and risk management provides guidance in distinguishing those carcinogens that should be regulated because of the health hazard they pose from those whose regulation may not be needed.     

La victime et le policier : point de vue profane et point de vue professionnel sur la délinquance

Comparing surveys of victims with police statistics illustrates the differences between lay and professional views of crime. Victims’expectations and the police handling of cases do not always match. The determinants of victims’ decisions to report incidents to the police are briefly summarised; and the ways the police classify victims’account and handle their complaints, examined. This analysis is based on two sets of data: a victimisation survey of a sample of 10?504 persons aged 15 and older, drawn from the Île-de-France Region; the police statistics corresponding to the same area.     

À propos de l’article de François-Xavier de Vaujany, « Les figures de la gestion du changement sociotechnique »

The approach adopted by François Xavier de Vaujany draws from “structurationist” research in English-speaking social sciences, a current that shares with the sociology of technology a vision of the contextual and negotiated nature of the links between technical and organizational phenomena. Various trajectories in the way organizations use new information and communication technology can be compared; and the role, examined that specific mediators play in the appropriation process. This approach provides stimulating input in discussions about the impact of new technology on organizational change.