The volunteer is a worker like any other. In America as in France, he wants to do useful work, and find a position that is not given, and he must deal with organizational logic and managerial techniques. At the center of these processes: the diverse meanings of the term “ professionalization “.
In recent years, research on associations and activism has been renewed through an approach consisting of seeing them as places where we work. Maud Simonet provides an example with Volunteer work. Volunteering is promoted by various actors (politicians, civil society, researchers) who see it as the expression of a desire for commitment to the city, a gift of self, an impulse of generosity. The work shows that these commitments cover statutory issues, more or less rewarding work content and forms of subordination. Alongside associative commitment as a form of citizen participation, there is also a whole “ infra-employment potential » (p. 214).
Volunteering is not just work but, Simonet maintains, “ it has not been sufficiently studied as such » while “ there is something to be gained in our knowledge of this practice, but also in our knowledge of the work » (p. 14). In fact, in the surveys carried out by the author, volunteers do not only talk about civic engagement but about their work ; the associative world is now concerned with the management of volunteer human resources ; there are also volunteer strikes. The author approaches the question using a research position at the crossroads of the sociology of associative commitment and the sociology of work, accompanied by a comparison between the two shores of the Atlantic. .
In France or America, doing useful work
The first part is devoted to the social uses of voluntary work. Volunteers or volunteers have things to say about these uses, such as their feeling of being used to do work at a lower cost where they would like to feel useful and see the result of what they do. These may be young people volunteering, agreeing to do real work for a small fee but on the condition of doing something other than “ serve as labor “. Or an older man who, made redundant and also receiving a disability pension, applies to an association and nevertheless leaves, frustrated. of never having had a clearly defined and clearly supported mission within the service. » (p. 22).
Maud Simonet sees careers in these routes. Entry into a career, often treated as a call, an inner voice, in reality owes a lot to mechanisms of co-optation, to pressing requests. Then comes entry into the role and, subsequently, developments: “ Both more open “horizontally” and less constructed “vertically”, the volunteer career offers a much more complex horizon of changes in position and employment than professional careers. » (p. 34). Certain responsibilities are sometimes assumed only temporarily before becoming “again”. simple field volunteer “. We also sometimes have to review our commitments that have become too numerous. There are invisible careers. For some, these are second careers, after retirement, or parallel careers, or even pre-professionalization. This possibly contributes to the official career, through the resumeor makes it possible to close the gap in relation to an ideal not otherwise achieved.
In all cases, the issue is to “ feel useful “. In France, we will say “ be useful to society “, in the United States “ give back to the community », a sign, for the author, that voluntary practice meets a social norm, a civic standard of work. Society/community, being useful/giving back: between France and the United States, two different civic work ethics manifest themselves. In both countries, state policies seek to intervene in voluntary practice, anticipating a positive effect on citizenship. The second part retraces in a comparative manner the defense and development of these policies.
In America, intervention in voluntary practices is the business of presidents. Republicans see it as promoting private effort and initiative, as an alternative to the interventionist state. For Democrats, state funding contributes to compensating citizens and supporting their social rights. In France, we have sought to establish a status of volunteers since the 1980s. Representatives of the associative world actively participate in its construction. The volunteering model is becoming clearer: full-time volunteer for a fixed period, compensated and benefiting from social rights. But we make sure that he is not confused with an employee subject to labor law. If there is a difference in modalities between the United States and France, there are also transfers of practices (Unis Cité transposing City Year, volunteering through which young Americans can devote a year to a civic cause). In France as in the United States, according to the author, what is akin to “ to the status of semi-public worker » (p. 119), largely financed by the State and with priority sectors defined by it. This semi-public worker is not “ neither completely public nor fully recognized as a worker, (and) the fruit of the meeting and collaboration between the associative world and the State. » (p. 119).
In a third and final part, Maud Simonet addresses the way in which associative organizations, which mobilize voluntary work, concretely transform commitment into work. The aim is to show that, far from being opposed to employment, volunteering has gradually borrowed organizational logic and managerial techniques from it. As with a real job, the access path, far from being anarchic, follows circuits which include a motivation questionnaire, an interview, an integration process, training and role-playing sessions. Associations are all the more concerned with supervising and formalizing the roles of volunteers as they are in regular and close contact with the beneficiary public and/or with other workers, and in particular salaried professionals (workers social workers, doctors, etc.). We are also witnessing the rise of reflections on the management of volunteers borrowing from theses HR of the company, reflections that associations sometimes initiate on their own. Likewise, if, legally, the volunteer is not a subordinate, the association, particularly when it operates in the territories of institutions (school, hospital, etc.), must generally require its volunteers to respect regulations, schedules, and obey an authority. There is therefore more of a continuum than a break between salaried work and voluntary work.
Rethinking the sociology of work
Wanting to make oneself useful in one’s work and realizing this desire is a problem that affects both voluntary work and what one could call classic or professional. From this point of view, the book opens up promising avenues. To do this, it must be considered in the context of the recent renewal of the sociology of work, through a sociology and a clinical psychology of activity. Also useful is the psychodynamics of work, whose founder, Christophe Dejours, highlights the importance of “ judgment of utility » and “ beauty judgment » for the appropriation of their activity by the workers.
There is a clear transversality of the results presented in the work with work situations “ classics », and the sociology of activity can suggest ways of interpreting the organizational and management problems encountered in voluntary work. Thus, if there is a judgment of utility and beauty, it is because working requires deciding between possible positions, questioning what should be the norm in an activity, and even more so in the service relationship as the one in which the volunteer is located. Carrying out an activity means facing challenges, action located in an environment which equips more or less, which offers conventional support for the action. This creates in those who act the need to organize themselves and have an environment that reduces dispersion and offers opportunities. This is the whole meaning of the formalization and supervision of roles by associations when there is, for example, psychological listening, dense relationships with the public, requiring the establishment of a “ just distance “, neither too intimate nor too distant.
This is, and the point is important, a problem shared by the volunteers and the organization, which believes that it cannot let everyone do as they wish. What Maud Simonet rightly calls the risk of relational incompetence exists from the point of view of the organization which bears responsibility and the volunteer who is afraid of not being able to cope. Thus, organizational and management concerns are not placed exclusively on the side of a rise in managerial concern on the part of associations. Referring to a volunteer listener, Mr. Simonet notes that she talks about her relationship with users “ based on a typology of “calls” to “manage” (…) clearly illustrating these processes of categorization of events (…) analyzed by Everett Hughes » while seeming to link this categorization to a “ organizational process of learning and controlling the role of the volunteer, inspired by the world of salaried work » (p. 156). At Hughes and his students, the professionals do not wait for any hierarchical authority to feel this need and we clearly feel this process at work in the use described in the work of categories of calls such as “ the jokes » (calls which are not to be taken seriously), « pure questions » (people who ask for specific information), “ the obsessives » (which is more difficult to get rid of). The question then is to know whether the organization intervenes in these typification processes by substituting its own categories, orthogonal to those of the professionals, or whether those it proposes will make so much sense for them that they will end up incorporating them. .
From this point of view, when associations borrow from the managerial universe of companies, the criticism to be made is not to conceive management problems, but the use of the ready-made thoughts and methods of companies and business schoolsradically indifferent to the concerns of work. In the company, an overabundance of management often coexists with a cruel insufficiency of work management. Managing work means, for example, as the author alludes to, clarifying and distributing roles, to avoid situations of ambiguity, conflicts, dispersion, etc. In voluntary work as in work “ classic “, we can thus exhaust ourselves in many efforts to try to take control of what needs to be done. We can fail to bring order to the way we tackle tasks if we deny that they require skill. On this point, the author asserts that it is wrong to designate “ the procedures (…) of the term “professionalization” of volunteering » (pp. 157-158) “. It can also be argued that becoming professional means having more and more professional skills in the sense of an ability to understand and interpret the problems that arise, and to have rules for organizing work and avoiding wasted energy. In this way, the service relationship exposes workers of all kinds (employees or volunteers) to dilemmas which can only be resolved by increasing their ability to resolve them, guaranteeing greater self-confidence. The associative environment, like that of businesses and researchers, continues to struggle with very diverse meanings of the term professionalization.