Abstract
This chapter redefines conceptually what constitutes services today by including an analysis of the nature of the organization of the production and labour. The chapter illustrates this by differentiating the service relation (company employees/customers), the service itself, and the role of the back office. The application of the above theses to the SNCF (French National Railway Company) and to job centres shows how work is partially “invisibilised”. This leads to a managerial myopia when skills development take place. After a critique of methods and principles of evaluation using concrete examples (from the matrix assessment practices in universities) this chapter shows the real function of evaluation agenda: to inculcate corporate and managerial values amongst workers.
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Notes
- 1.
A distinction can be made between tangibility (palpable items like durable goods) and materiality (since some material manifestations are not palpable, like the connection between ducklings and their mother duck).
- 2.
In and of itself this theme already merits in-depth analysis. According to Jeremy Rifkin (2000), it explains the transition from an age of ownership to an age of access, or capitalism’s shift from being based on purchases of durable goods to the organisation of the way their qualities and advantages are used. One example is someone renting a complete worldwide individual transportation service instead of purchasing a car. Another is being able to guarantee constant building temperatures instead of buying heaters or air-conditioning.
- 3.
It is regrettable that the excellent descriptions of different accelerations proposed by Hartmut Rosa (2010) in relation to contemporary capitalism (so-called belated modernity) were not tied to the current economic and financial crisis. The present book considers that the accelerations that Rosa scrutinised constituted solutions to crises, accelerating (or deepening) all of them. At the same time, they also offered a prospect of escape.
- 4.
For a rigorous and in-depth critique of French-style interactionism, see chapter in Durand (2007) entitled “The urgency of transcending interactionist vulgarisation”.
- 5.
The objective here is not to revive the debate about how non-commercial services might become a vehicle for a better understanding of service activities in general (Harribey 2013, 365). At present both categories are relatively similar to what happens elsewhere, certainly in terms of their dominant managerial logic, effects on working conditions or quality of the service relationship. This is because nowadays state authorities or the other actors funding non-commercial services tend—for macro-economic reasons relating to the dominance of the neo-liberal economic paradigm—to faced similar constraints with limited human resources and with work far too often being considered as a cost instead of as something that creates value.
- 6.
- 7.
The following results are from a study that the Centre Pierre Naville carried out on behalf of SNCF’s Public Transportation Department: Evolution des métiers en contact avec la clientèle, Université d’Evry-SNCF, 2007. With input from Frederik Mispelblom Beyer and Alain Pichon, the research focuses on regional and intercity train lines. More broadly, it looks at the transformations that SNCF went through over the past 30 years.
- 8.
Being a public service like this state-owned transport company that is broadly subsidised by regional authorities, the term “user” is more applicable here than “customer”, which the present book nevertheless maintains because it is the terminology that some companies actually apply nowadays. These semantics attest to the transformations and changing purposes affecting the company’s basic vision.
- 9.
The euphemism that SNCF and RATP use to describe suicide attempts.
- 10.
These delays and cancellations, like many technical incidents and serious accidents (for e.g. in Brétigny in 1993), can be explained by insufficient maintenance of tracks and signals, especially since the 1997 creation of the Réseau Ferré de France (RFF) rail track company, which has always been very under-capitalised. A study undertaken by a Swiss consultancy in 2003 predicted that 60% of all tracks would be unusable within 20 years. The train driver strike of 2014 focused on the mistakes made after the European Commission’s erroneous decision to separate the ownership of tracks from the SNCF services operating on them, while opposing the transfer of much of RFF’s debt to SNCF—thereby worsening the company’s situation and, above all, causing a serious deterioration in employees’ working conditions.
- 11.
This term was suggested by J. Boutet (2005), who spoke about attenuation rhetoric in reference to the linguistic upskilling of experts aimed at preventing customers’ marginalisation by widening the gap between their level of knowledge and that of their counterparts.
- 12.
Delays and cancellations have had a not insignificant secondary effect on SNCF’s internal operations. Drivers or ticket controllers are often unable to return to their original stations, meaning that other trains must be cancelled or delayed (since a train cannot leave without having the controller to ensure safety on board).
- 13.
Office figures in early 2016 showed that the whole of France (including overseas departments and territories) had about 3.8 million unemployed. However, the number only included category A jobseekers (individuals with no employment the month previous). On top of this, there were another 1.7 million category B and C jobseekers (people working fewer than 70 hours the previous month) for a total of 5.5 million unemployed. Additionally, there were RSA Income Support beneficiaries not registered at PE, often young persons who had not gone to the effort of signing up (or elderly who fell out of the statistics). Finally, there were also people benefiting from all kinds of training programmes, on top of those prescribed by PE, but not required to positively seek employment. The total number of unemployed persons in France therefore ranges from 6 to 6.7 million at the time of writing.
- 14.
Data and analysis which follows are derived from action-research undertaken with Joyce Sebag for CHSCT (Comité d’Hygiène, de Sécurité et des Conditions de Travail) with support of the Pôle Emploi (South-West of France). Because the people interviewed have been known by the management, we have retained their anonymity.
- 15.
Including death threats or reprisals against the person’s family, something they never forget. The traumas that interviewees described explain the fear that some consultants feel when performing their professional duties. There is a special vocabulary used to refer to the most violent jobseekers issuing threats against consultants and their families (for example: “I’m going to find out where you live, bust it up and sort out your family”). Note that directors and senior managers tend not to be on the receiving end of these threats. In other words, the risks in question here are specific to frontline personnel (especially customer contact staff).
- 16.
This is distinct from Marie-Anne Dujarier’s approach (2012), which sees the work ideal as something constructed relatively unequivocally by senior corporate (or public administration) managers whose technical aptitudes are strengthened by the support they get from a multitude of sources, including consultancies.
- 17.
Examples include librarians sharing deep thoughts online about how to construct their professional ideals. See Bibliothécaires in prospectives: http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/culture/deps/2008/pdf/tdp_bibliothecaires.pdf.
- 18.
See tax officers’ construction of their professional identities, c.f. Florence Osty (2010, 118 and ss.) along with teachers, social workers, advisers, etc.—all akin to the activities carried out by Pôle Emploi advisers.
- 19.
According to the author, another explanation is that the variances in question are caused by the fact that,
Figures are inaccurate benchmarks, specifically because they are targets, i.e. they do not take people’s perceptions into account. Companies prefer to rely on figures instead of subjective (but very real) feedback information coming from customers, employees, shareholders or suppliers. (Loquen 2003, 36)
- 20.
It is worth recalling that senior management is cut off from its base because middle managers, for the aforementioned reasons, manifest a great deal of objective solidarity with operatives and do not always keep their hierarchical superiors informed about what is happening in the front lines.
- 21.
See issue 4 of Nouvelle Revue du Travail: “Financiarisation et travail”.
- 22.
This partially disqualifies modern economic science, with most publications today representing orthodox schools of thought looking at internal criticisms of the models used in analyses of economic phenomena instead of analysing and deconstructing said models themselves.
- 23.
Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information in 1960. Today this belongs to Thomson Reuteurs, one of the world’s biggest information agencies (specialising in finance and science), which also publishes Journal Citation Reports, a compilation of information about scientific reviews worldwide.
- 24.
Interview with Jacques-Alain Miller in Le Nouvel Âne, n° 8, February 2008. This special issue tries to mobilise the psychoanalyst community against partisans of cognitive-behaviouralist psychology, over-represented in the national ministry responsible for this area of activity and likely to undermine teaching of psychoanalysis and any university research associated with this.
- 25.
Le Nouvel Âne, February 2008, Issue 8, p. 55.
- 26.
See Sauvons la recherche or Sauvons l’université, which had only a relative and temporary success, with the slow science movement resonating only slightly in France.
- 27.
Les Echos, October 2005, p. 57.
- 28.
D. Roy’s article is a fantastic text about normative and normation violence. The author, a factory worker, tried to modify local representations of the profession performed by George’s son-in-law, featuring a cessation of all the social games that accompany work (in particular, what he refers to as “banana time”).
- 29.
At the same time, there are some groups (despite being less affinity-based and more “artificial” as a result of systematic interventions by management) where normative violence is not unequivocal. Conflicts of norms arise and the traditional values like solidarity, which are at the origin of these norms (c.f. H. Becker, op. cit), continue to dominate. New research should be able to clarify why this happens.
- 30.
As mentioned previously and in other texts (Durand 2007), this does not prevent social games from existing at work in the interstices between imposed constraints or rules. Social games make work acceptable. Having said that, the constrained games associated with appraisals (because they cause clever adjustments) differ from the kinds of social games that give immediate partial meaning to work.
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Durand, JP. (2019). The New Worker in Service Activities. In: Creating the New Worker . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6_5
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