February 2011
Summary
Réalités industrielles
Changes in work and the place of engineers
Complete issue
This issue was coordinated
by Marie-Josèphe Carrieu-Costa
This issue was coordinated
Editorial
By Pierre COUVEINHES
Avant-propos : un nouveau rôle pour l'ingénieur ? par Marie-Josèphe Carrieu-Costa,
By Pierre COUVEINHES
Amble-Consultants
Work: Changing conceptions and practices
Work, employment, activity — Social history
By Annie FOUQUET
Inspectrice générale des Affaires Sociales
Work, employment, economic activity… these three words have been used variously depending on the context. The shift from “work” to “employment” helped generate the model of a steady, full-time job during the thirty-year boom after World War II — a dream model that disintegrated even as it was being conceptualized.
Working… or measuring work?
By Marie-Ange COTTERET
Docteur en Sciences de l’Education
Anne-Marie BREUIL
Directeur régional des Télécommunications
et Danièle BRETELLE-DESMAZIERES
Maître de conférences au Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Paris
Work holds a dominant place in people’s lives and in society. It is subject to several forms of evaluation and measurement, which serve to make decisions in management or politics. In the current world of work, topsy-turvy owing to factors specific to our times, it is hard to precisely quantify the abstract processes involved in performing a job. Metrology, designed for physics, has shown that the fundamentals for obtaining reliable measurements have not yet been mustered. Its scope of application has been expanded through the attempts to find ways to improve the precision of the means for subjectively measurements of the reality of work.
Controlling work: From verifying the conformity of operations to blocking initiatives
By Philippe ZARIFIAN
Professeur de sociologie à l’Université de Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée
We now observe a thoroughgoing transformation of the control of work in big firms and a change in the way of understanding work itself and, therefore, of answering a simple question: what does “work” mean? Based on long- term research in big corporations, the argument presented herein maintains that we are witnessing a shift from a disciplinary Tayloristic control (based on the concept of an operation) to a type of control calling for commitment and involvement (based on the concept of an initiative).
The subjective precariousness of work?
By Danièle LINHART
Sociologue, Directrice de recherches au CNRS, GTM-CRESPPACNRS Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense
By imposing a rationale of individualization that, based on criteria related to profitability, systematically places people in competition with each other and calls for setting personalized objectives, managerial modernization has often turned work into an individual test, or feat, where each individual is caught up in a solitary quest for meaning and values. This change entails the opposite of well-being at the workplace — an ill-being that might, we fear, reach out into the whole of society.
Information and communication technology and the contents of work
By Christophe Elie-dit-Cosaque
Maître de Conférences en Sciences de Gestion, Université Paris Dauphine, Dauphine Recherches en Management – UMR CNRS n°7088
As information and communication technology is being integrated in work-related practices, questions arise about how it is molding not only work but also social and human interactions inside organizations.
What if work were explained in terms of gift-giving?
By Laetitia PIHEL
Maître de Conférences, Institut d’Economie et de Management de Nantes IAE / Laboratoire d’Economie et de Management Nantes Atlantique (LEMNA)
The principle of contractualization — give-and- take in a win-win relationship — now lies at the center of exchanges with wage-earners. This rationale for codifying relations at the workplace entails a negation of the idea of social ties (wanting to give, the pleasure of doing, social utility). The memory of the gift-giving chain of relations (based on gifts and countergifts) is thus distorted, a phenomenon accentuated by the many changes affecting the corporate environment.
The gift paradigm, a critique or a lesson in management?
By Norbert ALTIER
Université Paris Dauphine
Adapting firms to change relies heavily on the small initiatives taken by operatives in the field or on the line. A group ingenuity is thus produced that can be interpreted in the light of the theory of gift-giving, whence a major issue for management: how to take advantage of unremunerated activities (“gifts”), in particular by recognizing their value? For reasons more cultural than economic, a firm’s management often fails to “receive” such gifts because the reception implies knowing how to give something back.
Work and engineers: Yesterday, today and tomorrow
Mining Corps engineers and changes in occupational safety in mine work during the 19th and 20th centuries
By Jean-Louis ESCUDIER
Chargé de recherche C.N.R.S./LAMETA
The act of 21 April 1810 and its enabling decrees conferred control over the mining industry in France on the Mining Corps. The engineers in this corps were assigned a key role in preventing and analyzing mining accidents. During the second half of the 19th century, the executive and legislative branches of government often asked them to play a part in drawing up a welfare system for miners. The influence of these engineers, though indirect, was also important in the diffusion of know-how. They were involved in training not only engineering students but also foremen and engineers in the mines. Furthermore, the activities of the Conseil Général des Mines and of certain engineers proved decisive in research on safety in both privately and publicly owned mines.
The changing role of engineers
By Emmanuelle VERGER
X Ponts 1993, Chef de Projet de l’EPR de Penly – EDF
What role do engineers play in French firms? This account comes from an engineer with a career in the corporate world. Neither historian nor sociologist, she invokes the major figures of the engineer-entrepreneurs of yesteryear and of today in order to place changes in the engineer’s role in perspective.
What kind of engineers does the state now need?
By Fabrice DAMBRINE
Ingénieur général des Mines, président du Syndicat des ingénieurs du corps des Mines président de la Fédération des grands corps techniques de l’Etat
The birth of the state engineering corps is often said to date back to the 17th century, to Vauban and the army corps of engineers. As we see, the grands corps of engineers have roots reaching back into the French administration’s past. But do they still have a raison d’être during an era when the state, despite its highly centralized tradition, is decentralizing by transferring a growing share of national sovereignty to the European Union and abandoning its role as founder, industrialist and public service operator for a new role as regulator, controller and facilitator?
The jobs of engineers, a source of innovation in Europe
By Philippe BRUNET
Chef de Cabinet de Mme Vassiliou, Commissaire européen à l’Education à la Culture, au Multilinguisme et à la Jeunesse
et Fabrice Comptour
Membre de Cabinet de Mme Vassiliou, Commissaire européen à l’Education, à la Culture, au Multilinguisme et à la Jeunesse
Europe is undergoing one of the worst recessions in its history. But this economic situation has a major catalyzing effect, since it has proven how indispensable the European level has become. Europe is neither an option nor an alternative, but a necessity. This is all the truer with respect to educational policies. The European level turns out to be even more necessary for training engineers. What is important is not to redo what has already been done (i.e., develop national tactics for asserting influence at the European level) but, instead, to work out a genuine European strategy about the knowledge that will lay the grounds for growth tomorrow.
The reality of the engineer’s work and changes in it
By Claude MAURY
Ingénieur général des Mines, animateur du Comité d’études sur les formations d’ingénieur (CEFI)
Today as yesterday, the identity of engineers is based on control over technical specialties and on the ability to conduct processes for realizing technical objects. Nowadays, engineers are experiencing in their work the new constraints weighing on firms: fiercer competition (which brings pressure to bear on the organization) and clients (who are harder to please and fickler). Given this context, corporations no longer always deem indispensable the production of new technology. Nonetheless, firms generally want to maintain direct control over their policy of innovation, which tends to represent the principal requirement for interventions by engineers.
Training engineers in school and on the job
By Cyril FAURE
Ecole nationale supérieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne, délégué aux formations sous statut salarié et aux relations entreprises pour la formation, directeur de l’ISTP
In a complex, moving environment, firms face a vital question: how to adapt their activities, organization and skills to the new socioeconomic situation? Given this context, an engineering education based on alternating periods in school and in on- the-job training might prove to be a precious tool for helping wage-earners to develop skills and helping the firms where this training takes place to improve their competitive edge. These training periods also form relationships for facilitating the transfer of technology, thanks to the operational relations that the new engineers have with research laboratories in their alma maters.
Engineers, stakeholders in the changing world of work
By Pascal FOURNIER
Directeur de l’Ecole Polytechnique Universitaire de Lyon1
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, companies can decisively improve their competitive advantage by devoting more efforts to research, taking risks in emergent technology and investing in it at the right time. To do this, they need engineers. French engineers, whose quality in scientific and technical matters is recognized, must now accept taking more risks and being open to innovation.
The era of the finite world has opened…
By Thierry GAUDIN
Ingénieur général des Mines
We have left behind an industrial civilization based on matter and energy. We are entering a cognitive civilization with a new relation to living beings and, given the rapidly circulating information, to time. Engineers must devote thought to the part they will play during this new era…
Appendix
Work through history and texts
By Jean Boissonnat, « Le travail dans 20 ans » et Commissariat général du Plan,1995
None
Miscellany
IN MEMORIAM : Maurice Allais
By Marcel BOITEUX
Membre de l’Institut, Président d’honneur d’EDF
None