Passionate about the stock market

From personal commitment to passion

While On the winning side announces itself explicitly from the subtitle as A sociology of uncertainty on labor markets, the illustration chosen for the cover of the book, which represents the hustle and bustle of an auction on a stock market, indicates that the Stock Exchange constitutes the backdrop for the research reported in the book. François Sarfati studies the representations that employees invest in their work and the commitment that results from it, taking the case of customer relations employees of online brokerage. Online brokerage is a recent activity which emerged thanks to the meeting between the development of computer communication technologies, a transformation in the organization of financial activities and a phase of stock market expansion. Online brokerage companies act as intermediaries between stock markets and individuals who manage their own stock portfolios by transmitting their purchase and sale orders for financial securities via the Internet to these companies.

Thanks to a survey which combined the analysis of questionnaires completed by a high proportion of individuals within the population considered, ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with certain employees, repeated two years later, the author has appreciable empirical material that includes a longitudinal dimension. He defends the thesis according to which the condition for success in the customer relations professions of online brokers is based on a set of resources which includes a form of personal commitment that employees interpret as a passion: this is passion for the stock market.

The first chapter sets the scene and shows that employees of online brokerage companies work in conditions that are objectively reminiscent of the organization of call centers. Nevertheless, these employees develop a relationship with work based on a representation of themselves which emphasizes the proximity between their work and that of others. traders employed on the trading floors of corporate and investment banks or by established brokerage firms that cater to professional investors. Generally qualified, but poorly qualified, online brokerage employees are kept away from the traditional and most remunerative professions in finance. Their gaze is nevertheless riveted towards the latter, with whom they identify while the adoption of this reference group is part of an effort to distinguish themselves from call center employees. They thus develop a “ edge identity ”, which is supported by the liberties they take with a regulation which prohibits them from advising the stock market transactions of their clients. In principle sanctioned, these freedoms are tolerated by employers who recognize, in addition to an element of autonomy favorable to the satisfaction of employees in the work and therefore to an intensification of their productive commitment, a potential for improvement of the service provided to the customer base and therefore a competitive advantage.

Struck by the enthusiasm characteristic of the relationship with work of online brokerage employees, Sarfati remarks in the second chapter that such enthusiasm cannot come solely from the monetary compensation for the intense commitment required of them because they are not remunerated commensurate with “ working rich » which they take as a model. Furthermore, the issue of increasing profits (what we could call, using Aristotle’s term, the chrematistic dimension of their work) is morally charged with negative values, which Sarfati interprets, by combining Durkheim and Simmel , as a manifestation of the impure side of the sacred character of money (the pure side being represented by the fact that money is the universal medium of exchange). To escape the moral disapproval to which their profession exposes them, online brokerage employees strive to distance the sacred nature of money and offer an interpretation of their work characterized by the promotion of its playful and intellectual. Indeed, their work puts these individuals grappling with the financial translation of the events that make up the world around them.

An enchanted relationship with work

Reference universe responsible for representations of success whose golden boys of the 1980s-1990s are the mythical image, and place of playful and intellectual engagements, the Stock Exchange is for online brokerage employees the object of a passion. Sarfati then shows in the third chapter that it is possible to extend the concept of “ passion at work » beyond the noble professions (art, science and politics) where such a form of intense commitment has been identified. Indications of stock market passion are found in the personal practice of a stock market activity outside, or to the detriment of, working time. Thus, online brokerage employees have a propensity to manage a personal portfolio that variables such as their age, their socio-professional category or their level of income cannot explain, and which does not depend on their level of remuneration. . They assiduously seek financial information, even outside of work.

To account for the stock market passion which underlies the relationship to the enchanted work of online brokerage employees, Sarfati shows in the fourth chapter that it is part of a system of social relations between individual and society, based on the conditions of the job market. Indeed, the careers of online brokerage employees reflect changes in the job market. Since 1973, frequent job changes have become the norm, whether caused by individual promotion strategies or, above all, due to the fact that companies that consider work as a factor of production no longer hesitate to get rid of superfluous workers. They reserve this possibility by resorting to specific forms of employment relationships such as internships, temporary employment or fixed-term contracts. Made up of a succession of precarious employment positions and imposed or negotiated job terminations, the careers of online brokerage employees reflect the lability and uncertainty characteristic of such employment relationships.

In such conditions, stock market passion corresponds to an expression of the managerial culture characteristic of “ new spirit of capitalism », to which online brokerage employees adhere. This membership is in addition to the resources traditionally necessary to succeed and remain “ on the winning side » on the job market (diploma, professional experience, age, gender or ethnic origin). The fifth and final chapter therefore shows that stock market passion constitutes a way of being through which young employees who have never experienced full employment and who do not consider a career that would only take place in a single company, activate the resources at their disposal. It is the condition for their success in the labor market and the reproduction of these resources. Together, these resources and disposition enter into a self-sustaining reproductive cycle.

The making of economic habitus

On the winning side offers an example of the “ manufactureshabitus economic “. The ways of being, thinking and acting of the Kabyle peasants studied by Bourdieu were forged in social conditions of existence from which they were brutally removed and they come into conflict with the objective structures of their new conditions of existence . The contradiction between the incorporated habitus and the new social framework prevents these individuals from forming the anticipations that would allow them to reason over time and adopt the behavior that this new framework requires of them. On the contrary, online brokerage employees, born after the era of full employment, have the institutional and incorporated resources which allow them to be, if not the absolute winners of a social competition which takes place on the labor market, at least “ at the edge “, Or “ on the side » of the winners. Perhaps Sarfati could, however, have better underlined the sacrifices that online brokerage employees must make for this, in particular by renouncing, even if only temporarily, other dimensions of entry into adulthood. as employment, like the founding of a family, which are only briefly mentioned.

By mobilizing Hirschman’s classic categories (defection, speaking out and loyalty), the work offers interesting analyzes of the concrete manifestations that uncertainty relating to employment takes in the professional sector studied and what strategies individuals implement to fight against the blows of fate or to progress in their career. However, they have not been the subject of the same effort of bringing together those which concern the link between “ passion at work » and uncertainty in the job market. However, they constitute rich material for the study of the individualization of salary relations and the conditions for resorting to collective action in employment relations. Collective mobilizations are relatively rare and, although employees sometimes form coalitions in order to establish a favorable balance of power against their employer, these are ephemeral and dissolve as soon as individual advantages are obtained. Such a phenomenon could be explained by the fact that the individualization of the careers of mobile employees (by strategy or by force of circumstances) undermines the bases on which solidarity between employees could be based. Devoted to transformations in the salary relationship, On the winning side through these scattered analyzes therefore opens up a study of the transformation of solidarity between workers.