Patricia Vendramin

Sustainable work and the ageing workforce

Socioeconomic conditions: Around 40% of women and 10% of men aged 55–59 work part time, a slightly higher number than among those aged 50–54. Among those over 50, 10% of men and 15% of women have fixed-term contracts, and a quarter have less than five years’ seniority in their current organisation. Feelings of job insecurity increase among women during their 40s and among men between 45–49 and 50–54.

Work in the Digital Economy: Sorting the Old from the New

This paper sets out to analyse the digital economy and changes in work by sifting elements of continuity from others that are radically new. Aspects examined are: genuinely new features encountered in the digital economy model; major instances of technological change observable in the working environment; new forms of work in the digital economy; distance and employment relationships; challenges entailed in regulating a labour world shorn of its customary structures. The study concludes with some considerations on the meaning of work in environments characterised by an increasing interplay of the virtual and the real.

Digitalisation, between disruption and evolution

This article questions the disruptive nature of the current process of digitalisation from a retrospective point of view. Four aspects of this process are considered: digitised information as a strategic economic resource; the nature and pace of industrial revolutions; the contested nature of the link between technology and employment; and the shift from flexible work practices towards virtual work. The article reviews some salient research findings from the past three decades and confronts them with recent publications concerning the future of work in the digital economy. It argues that the current wave of digitalisation combines, on the one hand, continuing trends in the analysis of the information society or knowledge-based society, and, on the other hand, significant breakthroughs the scope and impacts of which must be carefully assessed, avoiding any return to technological determinism.

Générations at work and social cohesion in Europe

Work has always been and remains a powerful integrator in society. It gives places, duties and rights and distributes the individuals on a scale of social prestige. However, on a long period the sense of work has changed. It gets more diversified and it is now a matter for high expectations, of different kinds – instrumental, social, symbolic – that do not replace each other. In post-industrial societies, work and identities are still strongly intertwined despite a progressive distance vis-a-vis work (if work is considered as a value per se). Work remains a social integrator but it has no longer a hegemonic value. There is a generational component in these changes, both in the subjective meaning of work and in its objective conditions (status, trajectories, security…). Do such generational differentiations unavoidably lead to fractures in social cohesion? That is the key question of this book.

The High Expectations of Work

We looked in the last chapter at the long history of work and at the categories, tools and resources relevant to grasping people’s relationship to it. In this chapter, we present the most important results of our consideration of the data sources available. We first analyse the place of work in the life of Europeans, examining the reasons for national differences and for the distinctive situation obtaining in France in particular. That importance is attached to work tells us nothing of the hierarchy of values or of the relative importance accorded to different activities or areas of life, and it is to these matters that the remainder of the chapter is then devoted. Is work central, or does it find itself in competition with other areas of life—other objects of emotional investment or means of self-realisation—that might make the relationship to work perhaps more intense but less exclusive? The intensity of individuals’ expectations of work calls for some exploration of their nature, and we shall thus spend some time on the opposition between instrumental and expressive dimensions. While everything seems to indicate an unprecedented growth in expressive expectations of work, those features thought to reflect a more materialist attitude—such as the importance attached to pay or to security of employment—have not for all that disappeared. The countries of Europe display different types of trade-off between the two types of relationship, with one or other taking priority. The non-instrumental dimension, evidenced not only all over Europe but also in Quebec, where a detailed survey was carried out on the subject of our present concern, is not one thing, but comprises several elements relating to the content of work or to relationships with others at the workplace, which vary in importance by country. We end the chapter with a consideration of what we call, following Lucie Davoine and Dominique Meda, “the French paradox”, that is to say, the ambivalent relationship to work characterised by both emotional attachment and rejection. While France may appear distinctive in this respect, it exemplifies tendencies at work in several other European countries, combining still important instrumental expectations with the ever stronger expectations of self-expression and rewarding relationships that characterise the young and above all the more highly educated.

The Coexistence of Generations at Work

There is nothing new about research and debate on young people’s position in the labour market, either in the work of sociologists of labour or in policy debate, nor about concern for the future of European pensions systems. Yet an intergenerational approach to labour-market participation has only recently emerged, either in sociology, policy discussion or human resources management. Until then, studies had looked at different age groups separately, motivated on the one hand by a recurrent concern for young people’s position in the labour market, and on the other by worries about demographic ageing and the future of pensions systems. It was the latter that would eventually prompt synoptic consideration of the different cohorts’ place in the labour market. Over the last decade or so, articles, colloquia and discussion meetings on age management in business have multiplied. The issue for human resources managers has been how to prolong the careers of workers over 50. At the national and European levels, on the other hand, the motivation to reflection has been the demographic challenge. Recent protest movements among young people in Europe and elsewhere have, furthermore, alerted public opinion to the younger generation’s unhappiness at its place at work and on the labour market, which notably does not at all reflect the growing proportion of graduates, especially among young women.

Expectations Frustrated by Changes in Work

The relationship to work and the meaning attached to work are shaped by individuals’ experience of the labour market and of employment: the way in which they have found or failed to find employment, their sense of job security, their position at work, the style of management, ways of working and modes of evaluation, the type and degree of knowledge and skill required, the scope for negotiation and so on. The nature of the experience is intimately related not only to individual characteristics, notably gender and socio-economic status, but also to age in that this can entail considerable differences in the encounter with the realities of work and employment. The meanings individuals attach to work and to their participation in it are intrinsically linked to their own experience of a world of work that has undergone profound transformations over the last three decades. Very few of the key features that characterised the Fordist firm of the post-War period remain in place. Ways of organising production, conceptions of the individual at work, the power relationship between workers and employers: all have changed radically.

A History of the Value Accorded to Work

The notion of work as an activity through which human beings transform the world in which they live, remaking it in their image and finding in this process one of their most important ways of participating in social life, is a recent and eminently modern idea. Since Antiquity, work has gradually come to occupy a more and more central place in societies, to the extent that it is possible to speak of “work-based societies”. Over recent centuries, new layers of meaning have accreted to the idea of work, expanding individuals’ expectations of it. Work is at one and the same time represented in economic calculation as a “factor of production”, to be utilised as efficiently as possible; seen as an opportunity for individual self-fulfilment; and treated as a basis for the distribution of income, rights and welfare. In those societies where the expressive dimension of work has come to be salient, the different, contradictory meanings attached to work all coexist, generating tensions. There are different approaches that can be taken to try and grasp people’s relationships to work: one can look to the major European surveys, which enable comparison but also have their limits, or engage in in-depth, face-to-face questioning. Either way, understanding relationships to work is a complex matter.

The Meaning of Work through the Prism of the Generations

The SPReW research we make use of here was intended to determine to what extent different age groups were able to work together in mutual understanding, in the process putting to the test the hypothesis that young people have a more distanced relationship to work than their elders. This is an idea often advanced by members of the older generation confronted by young people’s behaviours and attitudes with regard to work. In seeking to determine whether the young were indeed distinctive in this respect, we adopted, amongst others, a comparative generational approach. In this chapter, we explain first of all the significance of the generational approach and justify the choice of age groups for the purpose. We then propose a classification of types of engagement with work in terms of the instrumental/expressive dichotomy on the one hand and individual life course on the other, before going on to consider in what way young people may differ from their elders and the way they position themselves in relation to other generations. This leads us, in conclusion, to argue that we need a new model of the relationship to work.