The unthinky of the work

Primordial vector of socialization, even moralization, work is commonly considered as the foundation of the social identity of individuals. This conception, shared by a large number of researchers in social sciences and widespread beyond the academic world, is at the principle of calls for a “ work value “That it would be a question of restoring, under penalty of dissolution of the social bond. To this “ work value “Unique, which he considers as a” social artifact », François Vatin opposes the plurality of the modalities of apprehension of a work conceived as act technical liable for valuation economic and inscribed in an organization social. This recall of the different dimensions of work constitutes the beginning of a project by which the author intends to break with the “ archaic patterns »Who are associated with it.

Reintroduce work in production

These reducing work representations are of several orders. The sociological conception of work as a factor of social integration leaves aside its materiality. “” To say things brutally, if we pay people, it’s to “produce” »(P. 180): Such a reminder has the appearance of a truism. There is nonetheless an aspect of the work too often neglected. Above all, work is an act and a means of production and as such involves intervention on matter, nature, the environment. However, when the possibilities of transformation of this environment are more important than ever, the “ symmetry report (To use the author’s expression) between man and nature is largely abandoned in reflections on work.

The disappearance of this material dimension of the work of the reflections which take it as an object is understood first of all in connection with the development of activities making this impact of human activity less obviously obviously on nature – tertiarization of the economy, increase in mediations between the worker and this environment which he transforms, etc. Among these elements, François Vatin is hosting a special place in the question of automation, which he shows that it has changed the work, far beyond the simple substitution mechanisms of man by the machine. The concept of industrial fluidity allows it to highlight that, in industries whose ideal-typical model is now less in the mechanical industry than in the chemical industry, the productive segments that can “ Normally There are more and more human intervention by any human intervention. The action then only overcomes possible dysfunctions of the machine and sometimes takes the paradoxical form of the on -call, in which the work is identified by availability alone, and can therefore no longer be thought in terms of the effort. Such transformations have contributed to the obsolescence of perceptions of work which make it an energy expenditure, the consequence of which would be both in the natural and human register. The fainting of work, the feeling of his “ loss “Are ultimately only the result of the growing inadequacy of the usual categories of thought with the contemporary reality of work.

Less indebted to an analysis in terms of energy expenditure, and its impact on nature which has become less obvious because it is less direct, in short, in short of its materiality and which has become an end in itself (rather than a means of production), work would be the foundation of the social bond. This is evidenced by the policies carried out in recent years, which are the subject of the conclusion of the work. If we can regret that there remains unexplored the role of the mobilization of the category ofjoband its substitution for that of work In the speeches and practices associated with this public intervention, the author highlights how the policies carried out, from right and left, are finally based on similar conceptions of work. These policies, which embodied in two distinct places of the political spectrum the “ work more to earn more “Of candidate Sarkozy and the 35 -hour reform led by the Jospin government, are based on a certain metric of work, which apprehends it in the manner of a greatness that it would be possible to distribute, increase or divide. Such a conception, inherited from the indexing of work on energy expenditure, does not account for the productive dimension of work, and reduces its multidimensionality to a single rating.

Work, at the heart of scientific questions

However, François Vatin’s work does not only have the ambition to underline the limits and deficiencies of the thought schemes from which work is apprehended. More broadly, through the convocation of the history of ideas, it aims to trace its genesis. The analysis then focuses on a long XIX^e century, during which “ The industrial revolution has not yet broken the old awareness of the naturalness of work (P. 12) and work, as a study of study, has not yet become the exclusive prerogative of the social sciences. The work is followed in its wanderings through the scientific disciplines which have successively seized it.

The reader thus attends progressive crystallization in these ways of thinking about work. The work of conventional economists (in particular, Smith, Ricardo and Marx) will thus make work the foundation and measurement of value, but also to see a commodity likely to be exchanged. The term then designates its result as much as the process which makes it possible to succeed. This ambivalence of work also characterizes engineering research such as Coulomb or Burdin whose ambition is to achieve optimal use of mechanical forces (whether those of men or those of machines), that is to say to build an economy of physical expenditure in a productive context, according to methods recalling the economic calculation of optimization under constraint. With the advent of the steam engine, which augurs that of thermodynamics, the concept of work is supplanted, as the cornerstone of physical thought, by that of energy, of which it is now only a form. However, this displacement does not mean renouncing an economic type problem. However, as the development of certain labor sciences inspired by the experiences of Coulomb and Lavoisier (and which give birth to notions like those of “ physiological work At Jean-Baptiste Chauveau), reflection moves from work in its duality to the only expense, apprehended by fatigue. A fatigue that he also becomes always more tempting to measure.

The work thus draws bridges between economy and physics, but also between biology and sociology. The reflections of biologists as a trembley, also guided by the concept of efficiency, aim at the understanding of living organisms whose organization is brought closer to that of true societies. The interest of an Edwards HM for the “ Physiological division of work “, Then the emergence of social organicism, allow the concerns of biologists to join those of social philosophy. This articulation appears particularly explicit in the case of Edmond Perrier – which François Vatin recalls that it is, after count and Spencer, the author most quoted by Durkheim in the Social Labor Division (1893). The work then returns from the biological sphere to a sociological world in gestation, in which Durkheim makes use of biological theories “ solidarists Edwards to oppose both an economic vulgate of Smithian inspiration as well as the liberal organicism of Spencer. From Durkheim, the work is considered the base on which the social bond can be erected, “ An idea that will become trivial among sociologists, to the point that they will sometimes forget the primary productive function of work (P. 99).

At the end of this journey, it is a singularly modified concept of work which fails on the shores of an emerging sociology of work: assimilated to the only energy expenditure liable for a simple metric, its vocation hardly seems to be production but much more cohesion. The history of scientific reflections on work thus appears to be that of the gradual reduction of this notion to a small number of aspects which are not enough to account for it. Thus, in filigree, an intellectual history of the sociology of work, inscribing it in a succession of scientific work approaches. It highlights how the project of this sociology of work arises from the difficulties encountered by these disciplines in accounting for work in its different dimensions and at the same time inherits some of the concepts and notions that have been forged within them. But François Vatin especially invites us to take a critical look at this sociology of work and his intellectual foundations, which according to him should be rethought, in order to grasp the work as a whole.