Cutting work

Séverin Muller’s book offers original lighting on the challenges of setting up the sanitary model based on theHaccp : this system is “ above all a quality insurance protocol which consists in doing systemic analysis of the various operations to transform food products to better control them, with a view to their improvement (P. 80). From the point of view of S. Muller, theHaccp Corresponds to a managerial response (aimed at the reliability of processes with a view to economic performance) to public health problems, highlighting the tensions that this model weighs on work, organizations and their relationships with their environment. Also this book, based on a long -term ethnographic survey within all the services of a cattle slaughter company, goes beyond a visibility of work in a closed place and largely unknown to the public, even if this constitutes one of its qualities. The very rich material taken from this “ Transversal participating observation »In fact offers a new look at workers’ work and its constraints in current society and in a clinical manner the process of animal transformation into meat products. But this research is not limited to that. Conducted in the post “ Crazy Cow Crisis “, It relates two sets of phenomena: a history of the health order and that of a professional sector, that of slaughterhouses, phenomena which it strives to think of the Constitution in the same movement.

The author’s main thesis, reworked throughout the book, is that the emergence of the health model based on theHaccptraceability and self -control (by industrialists, which therefore involves a form of state withdrawal), by focusing risk management on managerial methods and a formalism of written evidence, profoundly transforms group work such as workers, executives and the management of the company, and veterinarians of the administration, as well as the relations between these groups. In particular, tensions between the imperatives of profitability and health security tend to exacerbate, thus generating new constraints on workers’ slaughter and cutting work. The implementation of traceability accentuates the effects of unpredictability and ruptures in work (as opposed to the industrial logic of continuity of work in the chain), which is translated (in the company studied by the author) by an increased appeal to interim work and a precariousness of employment. In the absence of redefinition of tasks and posts, workers must bear these new constraints alone and informly develop a “ collective game which consists in reducing or on the contrary accelerate the pace of work according to situations and constraints dictated by the product (P. 161). The ambivalence of traceability, a commercial specification tool as well as legal constraints, means that one goes from a mass production undifferentiated to a served production according to the demand of customers (p. 163). Apart from the slaughter and cutting work, the implementation of traceability is mobilized by the quality service to rise in power within the company and gain in legitimacy, while the commercial service, very marked by a tradition of orality and secrecy in negotiations with customers, is strongly destabilized. In the same way, the strengthening of health constraints paradoxically leads to a power relationship structurally favorable to the company in the face of the veterinary inspection, the logic of production of written evidence of the company being systematically favored in relation to the logic of statutory authority of veterinarians in a judicial framework. Thus, the profession of veterinarian, marked by a historic model of competence based on the inspection visual animals and carcasses, is also questioned by the model of theHaccp.

Thinking of the same movement an economic activity and a health order allows the author to go beyond the aporia of an approach to the company as an autonomous strategic player (cf. p. 227 and SQ.). The company appears here as immediately immersed in an environment, an environment which plays not as an external constraint but which is reworked, reinterpreted in an endogenous manner within the company which, thereby, contributes to constituting this environment. Thus, the author shows the links between the slaughterhouse and the distribution group to which it is attached, ambivalent links if the East, the distribution group being both a privileged partner, very prescriber with regard to the slaughterhouse, and a competitor of the other customers of the company. In the same way, come every day in the slaughterhouse of “ will try Who, legally, are not employees of the company but work nevertheless for it. Likewise, these inspectors of veterinary services, agents of the administration whose daily presence and the role within the slaughterhouse is not limited to a dimension of control and sanction, but which contribute to the capacity of the company to manage the health requirements. This analysis of “ blurred contours »From the company ultimately makes it possible to point out the faults of the current model of health risk management, which is based on a paradigm of the company as a coherent and autonomous player that is” transparency », In order to identify the place of possible failures. S. Muller apprehends on the contrary the company as an entity crossed by internal tensions (between its different services for example) and being part of an environment made of heterogeneous actors (customers-themselves competitors-, suppliers, administration, etc.) at differentiated waiting horizons, which eliminates an approach in terms of respect/ non-compliance with the rules, or the dichotomy between “ prescribed work ” And “ real work “:” The staff are subject to a plurality of standards that overlap and oppose the same space ». (This) “ led to questioning behaviors “ deviant And on the notion of failure in a system where, depending on the point of view, the same behavior is accepted or prohibited (P. 234).

In this regard, it should be noted that we have an impression of asymmetry between the part devoted to “ workers’ work And the other parts of the book. While in the rest of the book, the construction and implementation of the rules appear to be relatively open, because taken in powers of powers between differentiated actors, often renegotiated or reinterpreted according to the context or the partner to which one addresses, in the case of the description of the transformations of the work within the slaughter hall and the cutting workshop. external, to which workers have no choice but to adapt or adjust. But, if it is in this specific case of constraints, what is this external entity which produces them ? One may wonder if it is the legislator (as the author seems to indicate), the customers of the company or the management of the company itself, or of the three at a time. Indeed, even if the author does not use this word, one has the impression that traceability was the occasion of a “ flexibility Work. Also, is it traceability in itself which produces the observed effects, or traceability as it has been implemented ? In another passage from the book (p. 203 and SQ.) We see that the company voluntarily decides to set up a “ software package »In all of its services to manage the implementation of traceability in the company. We then see that traceability can appear not only as a constraint, but as a tool to transform the organization, and be the subject of interpretation and differentiated uses: “ Each of the three services claims to act in the interest of the company, and this is undoubtedly the case, but everyone interprets this common interest according to constraints and concerns clean (P. 201). This is not just a point of detail and underlines the fact that the work may have gained reflection on the way in which a rule of law is mobilized by the actors, beyond the question of the contradictory injunctions generated by the tangle in the same space of a plurality of rules. Indeed, if any rule requires an important interpretative work, if its effects depend on the concrete conditions of its implementation, it cannot be considered from the outset as an injunction to be made, as an exogenous constraint, but it must rather be considered as a reference for action. But then, conversely, from when and under what conditions can we consider that a rule or a set of rule actually plays as a constraint for actors, and if necessary ? And, ultimatelywhat is “ a good »Rule of law ?

The above remarks constitute less a criticism than an extension of the debate to which the author contributes, and which in my opinion opens to a “ political anthropology “Sanitary:” anthropology », Because the author shows that any health order is based on a conception of what men are, their relationships and their capacities for action ; “” policy Then because the institution of a health order (i) transforms or confirms power relations between social groups and (ii) consecrates values ​​and representations. In this case, S. Muller highlights the fact that the implementation of theHaccp tends to promote a kind of formalism of written evidence, to evacuate the skills of actors, especially those of workers and veterinarians. This result is in a paradoxical sense, because traceability supposes to function well (in principle at least), a vigilance of the citizen. The critical look in this book on the new risk management model based on a comprehensive work observation and usefully lights up scientific literature on the construction and implementation of the new risk management model from the institutions point of view. In an enlightening conclusion, the author advances the notion of “ preservation Populations and underlines the very problematic nature of assimilation which tends to spread in many sectors of activity between managerial risk management methods based on the principle of reliability and aiming for economic performance on the one hand, and the political question of collective risks on the other.