Alexandre Léné

The personification of the service labour process and the rise of soft skills: a French case study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the consequences of the increasing prominence of soft skills, focusing specifically on the production of these skills and their recognition and recruitment.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on interviews conducted with managers in the service sector in France. Two types of services are covered: large‐scale retailing and hotel and catering services.Findings – The paper shows that the demand for soft skills has caused the service labour process to become highly personified and underline the risks this entails.Practical implications – The personification of the service labour process encourages the development of specific human resource management practices in the spheres of recruitment, pay and training.Social implications – The results underline the need for institutional mediation in the regulation of the labour market. The personification of skills has many social implications in terms of discrimination and policies on training and skill recog...

Skill-based pay in practice

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore how the employees and managers experienced skill-based pay (SBP) plans through the lens of the organizational justice perspective. The article investigates SBP plans and highlights the difficulties encountered in implementing them. SBP plans take a number of different forms that may diverge from the declared model. Design/methodology/approach – This study investigates the SBP plan implementation in situ. Following Yin’s case study design method, documents were collected, semi-structured interviews were conducted and observations were recorded in two different companies in France. Findings – The organizational justice concepts allow the authors to shed light on the mechanisms through which SBP implementation may lead to negative outcomes. First, the authors argue that injustice perceptions are a critical element in the SBP implementation. Second, they argue that the way SBP plans are implemented by front-line managers influence employee attitudes and behavi...