Franck Bailly

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...

The Training of Jobseekers by Non-profit Organizations: An Analysis Based on Data from the Upper Normandy Region of France

There is now an extensive academic literature on non-profit organizations (NPOs). The hypothesis that these organizations are different from for-profit organizations (FPOs) is one that is frequently adopted. Nevertheless, a number of recent studies have suggested that many factors may cause NPOs to lose their specificity. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of these variables empirically with regard to the continuing training sector. Our results lead us to conclude that, while some of these variables do indeed have an impact on the behavior of NPOs, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that they do behave differently from FPOs.

What Makes a Good Worker? Richard Edwards Is Still Relevant

Since the 1970s, developed nations have seen the rise of the service economy, and forms of work organization have changed radically. As a result, employers have new requirements in the form of worker autonomy and so-called “soft” skills. These changes seem to mark a break with the expectations of submission and conformity highlighted by Edwards’s analysis. Nevertheless, the changes in employers’ practices reflect not so much the disappearance of forms of control as a shift towards less authoritarian but equally powerful forms based on the shifting of responsibility on to employees and the internalization of organizational norms. In making this case, we draw more particularly on the example of front-line workers in retailing and the hotel and restaurant industry.

Wage differentials between conventional firms and non-worker cooperatives: Analysis of evidence from France:

The aim of this article is to investigate the wage differentials between conventional firms and non-worker cooperatives, which has seldom been done in the literature to date. Using French administrative data, the determinants of these wage differentials are analysed. This investigation is carried out across all industries and is then repeated for the banking industry. Taking all industries into account, conventional firms offer lower wages than cooperatives. Most of this pay gap is explained by differences in the characteristics of the employees, jobs and companies. If the focus is narrowed to firms in the banking industry only, it becomes clear that conventional firms pay higher wages than cooperatives but that this gap is explained solely by differences in characteristics. However, their impact is weakened somewhat by differences in the value attributed to these characteristics, which work in favour of employees in cooperatives.

THE RADICAL SCHOOL AND THE ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION

The economics of education gradually became institutionalized in the period following the Second World War. Human capital theory was the central pillar in this process. Nevertheless, it did not go unchallenged. The first challenges came from within the mainstream itself, but economists affiliated to other paradigms also called human capital theory into question. This applied in particular to the work of the radical economists. The aim of this article is to document this critical episode in the history of ideas in the economics of education. To that end, the nature of the radical economists’ critique is examined and it is shown how it connects to human capital theory.

What Factors Influence the Behaviour of Nonprofit Organisations? The Example of the Continuing Training Sector in France

Most economic analyses, in line with received opinion, assume that nonprofit organisations are intrinsically different from private (for-profit) or public organisations. A substantial proportion of the literature has sought to characterise these differences. Nevertheless, a smaller number of studies champion the idea that there are factors that may influence the behaviour of nonprofit organisations and cause them to lose their specificity. The aim of our paper is empirically to assess the impact of these factors. Our analysis differs from existing studies in three ways: (1) we seek to measure the influence of all these factors and not that of one of them considered in isolation, as is generally the case; (2) we do so by analysing an original database rather than drawing on case studies as much existing research does; and (3) we base it on an investigation of a key sector in knowledge-based economies—namely, the continuing training sector.