What Makes a Good Worker? Richard Edwards Is Still Relevant

2.1. The determinants of work organization

For mainstream economists in the late 1960s, work organization was scarcely worthy of analysis. Whereas related disciplines, such as management sciences and sociology, had already been analyzing work and its organization for a long time, many economists at the time still regarded it as a separate commodity and reduced work organization to the black box of the production function. The radical economists were opposed to this approach, in which technology played a deterministic role. In their view, “for any given technology, there are several possible ways of organizing production. These various organizational possibilities cannot be easily classified on the basis of a universally accepted efficiency criterion. For any given technology, therefore, there is, a priori, a degree of indeterminacy with regard to the organization of production. The range of possibilities is of course limited by the state of development of the forces of production, but technology now emerges less as a determining factor than as a boundary within which there is sometimes fairly considerable room for manoeuvre” (Tinel 2007: 20).

Within this boundary, the actual forms of work organization would be influenced by conflicts of interest between employers and employees, such that the radical economists “view production as a social as well as technical process” (Bowles and Gintis 1975: 75). This can be illustrated by the example of the putting-out system that Marglin discusses in his famous 1974 article (Tinel 2004). In this system, workers who have been supplied with raw materials are required to produce finished products in their homes, which are then bought back from them. The existence of such a form of work organization cannot, in Marglin’s view, be explained by its technical superiority and the advantages of specialization as identified by Adam Smith. For Smith the superiority of the division of labor is due to three factors. First, no time is wasted moving from one task to another. Second, it enables workers to “invent” solutions to the difficulties they encounter in their work. Third, workers are able to improve their skill and dexterity over time. According to Marglin, however, these three arguments do not stand up. After all, if a certain preparation time is required in order to carry out a task, this does not prevent a worker from carrying out several different tasks and therefore not specializing. It is enough simply for the task in question to be performed over a sufficiently long period for the preparation time to be insignificant relative to the total working time. The second argument also has limited explanatory power. Since the tasks workers perform are simple, their capacity for “invention” is reduced. Finally, this simplicity also makes the last argument irrelevant. In Marglin’s view, there is another explanation for the division of labor, namely the desire of those in possession of capital to interpose themselves between workers and the market in order to extract a profit. If workers had been able to combine the various tasks and make the product in its entirety, then they could have sold it and also extracted profit from it. However, with the putting-out system, workers continued to determine the hours they worked and the intensity of their work effort. Thus the development of the factory could be explained by a desire to overcome these constraints and employers’ desire to strengthen their control over the production process and not, once again, by purely technical factors.

2.2. The question of control

This idea that the conflictive nature of the employment relationship influences the organization of production was to be taken up by Edwards (1978) and applied to modes of work organization closer to our times. In his view, it was the contradictions of excessively personal management that led employers in the 19^th century to establish a form of work organization founded on technical control. Many firms in the 19^th century were managed by an entrepreneur assisted by just a few managers. The control they exercised was direct and personal. They intervened in the production process by specifying the tasks each worker was to perform and evaluated, recompensed, or punished workers in a discretionary manner, with the result that “workers were constantly subject to personal rule” (113). This form of work organization gradually became untenable as firm size increased. With thousands of workers, it was no longer possible for employers to exercise their authority directly and personally. This is what gave rise to the proliferating number of management levels. Nevertheless, those who occupied these positions (foremen, supervisors, superintendents, etc.) were not capitalists, even though they embodied their authority. They were still employees, whose interests could conflict with those who employed them. However, their position meant that they were also in conflict with workers at the bottom of the hierarchy. It was as a result of this “crisis of control” (114) that new forms of work organization were to emerge, notably through increased technical control. Employers exerted their control over the labor process and evaluated workers impersonally by relying on technology. Edwards provides a number of examples of production systems (meat cutting, car assembly) in which the task to be performed and the work rate depend on the machinery in use and its speed of execution. “The foreman in technical control is thus transformed into an enforcer of the requirements and dictates of the technical structure” and he “penalizes exceptions to the normal flow of work, rather than personally directing that flow” (117). Moreover, this reliance on technology means that employers are able to use low-skill workers. Since they are interchangeable, they can easily be replaced in cases of misconduct or breaches of discipline. However, this technical control has its own downsides that generate new conflicts, which may manifest themselves in sabotage, stoppages, or strikes. It was these limitations that were to make it necessary to put in place new forms of work organization.

In short, over and above these examples, the main idea that the radical economists were seeking to put across was that “faced with chronic resistance to their efforts to compel production, employers over the years have attempted to resolve the matter by reorganizing (…) the labor process itself” (Edwards 1978: 112).

2.3. The competences expected by employers: Compliance and submission

The radical economists’ analysis of the characteristics that employers value among their employees – what we will call “competences” although they do not use this term – is closely linked to the factors determining the form of work organization.

When work organization depends solely on technical considerations, as mainstream economists argue according to the radical economists, then the competences sought after and valued by firms will depend on technical considerations as well. In this sense, labor is not fundamentally different from the other factors of production. This is why earning functions ¹ measure workers’ competences in terms of skills, training, education, or IQ: “These characteristics are thought to augment, in some intrinsic technical way, the worker’s contribution to the firm’s production” (Edwards 1976: 52). Nevertheless, the small proportion of variance that can be explained by these models suggests that other explanatory factors are at work. If the form of work organization is not determined solely by technical considerations but is also influenced by the conflictive nature of the employment relationship, as the radical economists thought, then these other explanatory factors are linked in some way to this conflictiveness. It is true that mainstream economists consider that variables such as gender, age, and ethnic origin, which are not directly productive, count and include them in earning functions. For Edwards, however, this raises questions about the model’s internal coherence: if such variables are not directly productive, how can they be econometrically significant? The usual response is to declare these variables to be the consequence of discriminatory behaviors or the manifestation of a form of human capital that is productive but not measured. For Edwards, however, the fact that such variables, which do not directly affect production, are, nevertheless, influential, suggests that employers expect workers to be more than just productive. It is by analyzing the way firms are actually organized that these other expectations can be understood.

At the time Edwards was writing, the dominant organizational form in large firms was one characterized by “bureaucratic control” (Edwards 1978). In these firms, the work to be carried out was determined not by the technology in use nor the direct authority of the employer but rather by the firm’s internal rules (“firm’s law”), which laid down a set of work criteria for each job by which employees were evaluated by their line managers. However, these organizational rules were necessarily incomplete, since it was difficult to specify in advance precisely what work had to be carried out. Consequently, employers would seek out workers whose competences ² were such as to enable them to maintain their control: “What is at issue here are the characteristics consonant with the form of control, not with the actual content of the work criteria” (Edwards 1976: 57). More specifically, Edwards identifies three characteristics of the “good worker” sought by firms: 1/ adherence to rules (“rule orientation”); 2/ adherence to the spirit of the rules, with workers “transcending the particular rules to carry out the intent of the rules” (58); 3/ “loyal” and “committed” behavior that leads workers to identify with the firm by internalizing its aims and values. These three competences are not directly productive, but they do help production to take place by enabling employers to strengthen their authority over their employees. Edwards’s empirical tests show that these variables were actually rewarded by firms. They also indicate that adherence to rules, deference to authority, conformity, and belief in the legitimacy of managerial decision-making are a set of skills required on the shop floor and that higher up the employers are looking for workers willing to internalize the firm’s aims and values.

In order to obtain workers with the desired competences, employers could look to the education system. According to the radical economists, school influenced behavior and prepared pupils for the functions they were to fulfill in firms. In class pupils are used to being subject to and respecting authority. They are expected to show a certain degree of compliance and discipline, as the requirements for regularity, punctuality, and quiescence demonstrate (Gintis 1971; Edwards 1977).

3.1. A relative increase in autonomy

Work organization is currently undergoing changes that are often presented as a break with earlier modes of organization. Work is being transformed and is becoming an activity in which problems are solved against a background of change and uncertainty. In order to cope with this, workers are having to alter their cognitive frameworks and display initiative or even creativity. Employers turned to elements of workers’ participation in management as a means of revitalization, and to aid its competitive position in a more global economy (Gunn 2011).

The archetype of the worker that firms seek to recruit has changed as a result. This applies particularly to worker autonomy. The “new workers” are said to be similar to professional or freelance workers, in that they deploy their competences autonomously but are also responsible for the results of their work. It is true that, for the lower levels of the hierarchy, there was in fact a certain degree of “invisible” autonomy. It manifested itself in, for example, the gap that existed to varying extents between the work actually done and the work as prescribed. However, what was previously marginal and unsaid has become, in the new modes of work organization, a key element, now much in demand, that has spread to all levels of the hierarchy.

The European working conditions surveys (EWCS) that have been carried out every five years since 1991 by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions enable us to track the evolution of this phenomenon. Thus in the fourth survey, which dates from 2005, 30,000 workers in 31 European countries were surveyed. They answered more than 100 questions on various aspects of their jobs. This makes it possible, first, to track the evolution of the various forms of work organization and, second, to assess the degree of autonomy employees enjoy. Of the five indicators relating to autonomy at work, three reflect workers’ ability to exert control over the work process, what is described as procedural autonomy: (1) the ability to choose or alter the order of the tasks to be performed, (2) work methods, (3) work rate. The fourth indicator relates to workers’ influence over the choice of work colleagues, while the fifth concerns workers’ ability to take a break from their work when they so desire.

Overall, levels of autonomy at work are fairly high, according to the EWCS. Almost two-thirds of employees are able to determine or change the order of tasks, work rate, and work methods. To facilitate analysis, a composite indicator has been constructed by simply adding the individual indicators (Valeyre et al. 2009). This indicator shows that there are considerable differences between sectors. The highest levels of autonomy are found in financial intermediation services (3.42); in electricity, gas, and water supply (3.4); and in estate agency (3.34), while the lowest levels are found in hotels and catering (2.31) and manufacturing industry (2.4). This requirement for autonomy arises out of a particular work environment in which, for most workers, the work rate depends on customers’ immediate demands (according to more than 68 percent of European employees). This reflects both the service sector’s increased share in total employment and the wider diffusion of market-driven modes of corporate organization put in place in order to adjust production to market fluctuations and external demand.

In addition, service workers whose jobs involve direct customer contact are less constrained than others in the way they carry out their work (DARES 2011). They are just as likely as others to say they follow instructions, but these lay down the objectives they have to achieve rather than the way in which they set about achieving them, and in any case they are much less likely to say they apply them strictly. On the other hand, they are more likely to have sole responsibility for managing incidents at work and to cope on their own in difficult situations. Such phenomenon has also been observed in the United States through the gradual reduction in the percentage of supervisory personnel in growth segments of the economy for the period 1979-2008 (Gunn 2011). Both durable and non-durable goods manufacturing show little change, but in significant growth areas, such as leisure and hospitality, retail trade, and financial services, there are relatively diminishing numbers of supervisory personnel. In the hotel sector (Jones et al. 1997) and retailing (Rosenthal et al. 1997) studies tend to show that workers have to display greater autonomy in their work than in the past.

In the service activities the relational component is regarded as an essential element of service quality (Heskett et al. 1997). This quality is, after all, not determined solely by the tangible, material aspect of the service provided but above all by its intangible elements, including the interaction between employees and customers during the service encounter. This explains why employees in direct contact with customers have to be allowed considerable room for manoeuvre, what is known as “task discretion” (Felstead et al. 2004). If they are to satisfy customer demands, service workers have to be able to react quickly and hence to take the initiative. It is their responsibility to satisfy unexpected demands and solve problems as they arise.

One of the benefits of the EWCS is that it clarifies the nature of this autonomy and of the constraints to which employees are subject (Boisard et al. 2005). In general terms, procedural autonomy decreases with constraints of the type found in manufacturing industry (automation, vertical and horizontal norms) but increases with the constraints imposed by customer demand. The EWCS identifies five constraints: 1) automatic constraints associated with the automatic speed of a machine or the movement of a product; 2) target constraints, associated with the existence of numerical production targets; 3) hierarchical constraints, associated with direct control by the boss; 4) horizontal constraints, associated with the work done by other colleagues; 5) demand constraints, associated with direct requests by customers and the equivalent (users, passengers, pupils, patients, etc.).

The distribution of the five constraints varies considerably between occupational groups (see Table 1). Constraints of the “industrial” type (automatic and target constraints) primarily affect the various blue-collar categories (with marked disparities between them). Hierarchical constraints primarily affect blue-collar workers and, to a lesser extent, salaried employees. Finally, the constraints associated with demand apply mainly to sales and service staff (85 percent), which includes employees in the sectors under investigation here, and senior executives (83 percent), to approximately 50 percent of blue-collar workers but to only 43 percent of unskilled or agricultural workers.

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Table 1.

Work constraints and procedural autonomy by occupational groups.

		Work constraints				Procedural autonomy
	Automatic	Target	Hierarchical	Horizontal	Demand
Senior executives	14%	39%	26%	58%	83%	88%
Technicians	17%	24%	30%	46%	75%	74%
Clerks	14%	22%	42%	46%	75%	68%
Sales and services staff	11%	17%	34%	44%	85%	58%
Agriculture and fishery workers	23%	38%	44%	47%	43%	60%
Craft workers	35%	50%	50%	56%	52%	57%
Industrial workers	52%	54%	50%	54%	47%	40%
Unskilled workers (all sectors)	29%	30%	42%	42%	43%	53%
total	21%	31%	38%	48%	67%	64%

Source: EWCS: Boisard et al. 2005.

For example: 14 percent of senior executives declare that they are exposed to constraints of the automatic type.

Thus, blue-collar and unskilled workers have a low level of exposure to demand constraints and a low level of autonomy; conversely, executives and technicians work under heavy demand constraints but at the same time enjoy extensive autonomy.

One special case must be mentioned, however. Sales and service staff are the group most exposed to demand constraints but have only a moderate level of procedural autonomy. How do the EWCS survey results that show hotel and retailing workers to have only a moderate level of autonomy compare with studies showing that workers in these same sectors have greater autonomy than in the past? Turning more specifically to these services, it has to be borne in mind, as Korczynski (2005) stresses, that the starting point in these activities when it comes to autonomy is often very low. This is why workers in these sectors currently have only a limited degree of autonomy. Furthermore, studies show that this autonomy has increased above all in one particular area known as “service recovery,” which is when employees attempt to solve problems or deal with customer complaints (Bowen and Lawler 1995). However, autonomy has increased much less in other areas, such as planning and task and target selection. We should be wary, therefore, of overestimating the trend towards “empowerment” in service activities (Lashey 1999). We will return to this issue later.

3.2. A survey and a case study

In order to supplement the statistical data presented above and to gain a more detailed understanding of the nature of the autonomy enjoyed by front-line workers, we draw on original qualitative empirical material based on interviews we conducted with employers. Thirty-three interviews were conducted in two waves (2002/2003 and 2005/2007) in France. The areas of specialization investigated were retailing and distribution (supermarkets, large retailers, sports shops, fashion retailers) and hotels and restaurants (luxury and chain hotels, restaurants). The semi-structured interviews lasted between one and two hours depending on the interviewees. These individuals, whom for convenience’s sake we will call “employers” in the rest of the article, occupied management positions (head of department, HR manager, hotel/restaurant manager, etc.) that meant they played a leading role in HR management and, where relevant, recruitment.

The richness of this empirical material can be illustrated by the case of the supermarket manager in a medium-sized French town. Much of this interview was taken up with the case of a female employee who had been recruited as a check-out clerk after spending two years alternating between periods of study and work with the supermarket company. The qualities required of a check-out clerk, and which also apply to other jobs in retailing, were clearly identified by this employer. Workers have “to be able to make contact with people, be extrovert, be at ease with themselves, happy, extrovert, and therefore welcoming and friendly, both physically and mentally.” The other qualities expected of them relate to their ability to handle disputes with customers and, more generally, to take the initiative and “resolve problems without any assistance from their superiors.” Nevertheless, this employer recognized that this work is undervalued, arduous, and possibly repetitive and wearisome as well. However, the burden of adjustment has to be borne by workers, who must find within themselves the resources to cope with the lack of interest in their work. “They must constantly be challenging themselves, trying to move things on all the time.”

However, this autonomy is exercised within a corporate framework, with all its attendant control mechanisms. Thus check-out clerks are monitored on the basis of performance criteria, such as the number of items scanned per minute or the number of loyalty cards sold to customers. During the early stages of their time with the company, this employer acknowledges that “we watch them (the new employees) much more closely, (…) sure we monitor them more than the others during the first week.” The importance of the organizational control is also evident in the need to obey the rules on work schedules and dress, which is a major difficulty for young workers: “a stricter regime, more rules in common, that’s what seems to them perhaps harder than school. I’m not saying there aren’t any rules at school, but we have to lay down a lot of rules and regulations out of respect for the customers: dress, hygiene, cleanliness, and of course schedules to prevent them antagonizing colleagues – I can’t allow them to be late.”

If we look beyond this one firm and take account of all the interviews we conducted, we can specify in some detail what employers expect in terms of the autonomy their workers are supposed to display.

3.3. Increased autonomy reflected in personification of competences required by employers

One consequence of the autonomy employers expect employees to display is that it requires workers to have the ability to assess the situations they encounter and, in return, a high level of personal involvement in the work process. It manifests itself, for example, in employers’ references to curiosity, an eminently personal quality: “I like people in this job who are inquisitive. I think someone will succeed when he or she is inquisitive” (Mr. RT, supermarket). Employees are expected to have a wide range of personal competences. The first requirement is that they demonstrate the ability to communicate and interact with customers or members of the organization. However, they may also need qualities such as enthusiasm, the ability to interact socially, or even empathy with customers: “In our business, one essential quality is to be, to anticipate what a person might want. (…), to sense from a customer’s glance whether he’s annoyed or waiting for something, someone who’s waiting for something, a coffee or even the bill, all that’s something you feel” (Mr. AF, traditional restaurant). Relational work requires employees to understand customers’ problems, to put themselves in their shoes in order to calm them down and solve their problems while at the same satisfying the organization’s performance requirements.

Over and above the relational dimension, it is competences that might be described as emotional that are sought after. For example, Gamble (2006) observed this to be the case in retailing, while Forseth and Dahl-Jorgensen (2003) found the same in the banking sector. According to the latter authors, for example, a bank’s internal document they analyzed requires counter clerks to be “pleasant, cheerful, good-humored, conciliatory, and positive, to provide ‘that little extra,’ to be convincing, independent, and effective, to show empathy, to take the initiative, to tolerate stress and to be flexible….” These exhortations imply a variety of emotional requirements and an adaptable personality type. All in all, employees are being asked to become absorbed in their work and “to offer something of themselves” as they make this commitment. Taken to its extreme, this principle of personification may cause an employee’s physical characteristics to be regarded as a component of the service sold by the firm. They demonstrate that sales staff are absolutely part of their shop’s “brand.” The workers’ physical characteristics, their performance, and the product being sold are indivisible. Adkins and Lury (1999) speak of “corporeal performance,” Pietrykowski (2007) speaks of “performative labor”: the commodity sold is often bundled up with the feelings and personality of the worker selling the product. Service workers are keenly self-aware of the way in which their bodies and their demeanor contribute to the useful quality of the commodity consumed.

The developments outlined above amount to a redefinition of the notion of competence to include an employee’s actual personal characteristics, whether psychological or physical. Thus what we are observing is a process whereby the notion of competence is being expanded to include a set of “soft” competences that are usually impossible to distinguish from personal characteristics, attitudes, or behaviors (Payne 2000; Bailly and Léné 2013).

4.1. Resilient and obedient workers

The expansion by employers of the range of “soft” skills demanded of employees has also been accompanied by behavioral requirements, such as resistance to stress (Callaghan and Thompson 2002). The demand for such “capacities” can be seen as a desire to build up a disciplined, loyal, and reliable workforce, as the case of a call center described by Lloyd and Payne (2009) shows. Most of the workers interviewed by these two authors regarded their jobs as repetitive and boring, which was acknowledged by a manager, who was looking for “people who are suited to call centers and will stay working in them … that is, tenacious, stable individuals who are not troubled by the fact that they do the same thing all the time.” Gamble (2006) made the same observation in certain Japanese shops, where these characteristics are explicitly required. Workers have to be able to put up with a lot of trial and tribulations, have a hard-working spirit, and be obedient.

From this point of view, job applicants’ previous work experience is often scrutinized for evidence that they have the capacity to endure difficult working conditions, that they have the necessary discipline and determination. As a retail employer we met observed: “When we get the CVs, we look at what they’ve already done. It’s the arduousness of each placement, if you like, that enables us to see whether or not the young person in question has got what it takes. I’d even say that someone who hasn’t done a placement in retailing but who’s chosen a company where we know the work isn’t easy, it may be working on a production line, you see the sort of thing, that person suits us perfectly. (…) The fact of having worked in a factory, well it’s shift work, it means that person is willing to work any hours, do you see? For us, it’s the willingness to accept certain constraints that enables us to say that’s the one, that’s someone we want, that’s someone who’s understood that you have to commit yourself to your work.” Thus initial work experience is a trial from which only the most courageous young people will emerge, those who show real self-sacrifice. The ultimate aim for the employer is to find reliable individuals who will not be found wanting when faced with the constraints of the job (Lochard and Ughetto 2006).

However, firms do not confine themselves to selecting the “right” candidates; they also seek to inculcate in them the “right ways of doing things.” In many service activities, employees are asked to follow procedures that shape and standardize the behavior and attitudes expected of them, particularly those in direct contact with customers (Thompson et al. 2001). Many such attempts to standardize the service encounter have been made in the retail and hotel sectors. Van Maanen (1990) describes the case of retail workers who have to stand at an angle of 40° to the entrance to the store and greet customers with a smile as they come in. Gamble (2006) shows that in Japanese subsidiaries of retail multinationals, interactions with customers are regulated in a particularly prescriptive and detailed way (polite phrases, low bows, smiles) and are the subject of training sessions. What used to be left to common sense is now rigorously defined and controlled. The aim of these strategies is to make the customer relationship predictable.

Employers’ desire to have at their disposal “zealous,” “loyal” workers who “respect” the rules, as revealed in these studies, is not a new phenomenon. After all, the figure of the “good worker,” described by Edwards (1976) more than 30 years ago, arises once again here, with all his characteristics of conformism, discipline, or even submission intact. By focusing on the employment relationship and placing workers at the heart of the power struggle that characterizes that relationship, Edwards showed the extent to which the characteristics expected by employers reflected a desire to subjugate the workforce. It seems to us that this approach is as relevant today as it ever was. How else are we to interpret the following expectation voiced by an employer we interviewed: “Let them identify completely with the company, in other words let them have no demands of their own, no schedules, no influence, I mean let them be able to accept everything we ask them to do, so that they don’t say ‘Oh no, I don’t want to do that,’ that’s it above all” (Mr. L, hotel industry). It seems to us that the difference between the situation Edwards analyzes and employers’ current requirements is that today these requirements are concealed beneath the discourse around commitment and reduced to the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual workers.

4.2. Persistence of the relationship of subordination

The competences required by service firms and, more generally, the new forms of work organization are, as we have seen, compatible with the radical interpretation of competence, since the requirements for discipline and conformism seem to us to be still present. The present relevance of the radical economists’ analysis lies also in the fact that workers exercise their autonomy within a relationship of subordination that is far removed from the image of a work process that has been “liberated.” The personification of competences, a process whereby workers’ occupational identities are made dependent on personal characteristics that are a more or less innate or natural part of their make-up, tends to make autonomy a question of personality or character. Thus individuals are thrown back on themselves, having been made aware of their inadequacies, shortcomings, and faults. One consequence of such a vision is that it eliminates the organizational dimension from the question of autonomy. In our view, this fails to capture the full reality of the situation.

Indeed, the autonomy granted to workers is extensively monitored and highly relative. Worker autonomy is limited by increased demands with regard to quality, time limits, adaptability, and resourcefulness, as many studies on work intensification have emphasized (Green and McIntosh 2001). These demands are directly linked to the customer’s presence in the production process. Thus monitoring of the work process takes place not so much upstream (authority) as downstream (increased customer presence in the production process). This is the case, for example, with the shopping space itself, which can be regarded as an arena in which customers exert control over labor in addition to consuming (Pietrykowski 2011). This dual character of the shopping space involves forms of monitoring that go beyond the physical presence of supervisory staff. The pressure brought to bear on workers is reflected in the French data gathered by DARES (2011) ³ (Table 2). The deadlines that employees have to meet have become increasingly tight. Thus the share of workers who state they have to meet deadlines of less than one hour rose from 5 percent in 1984 to 25 percent in 2005. And the share who are required to respond immediately to requests from outside (customers or another department) rose from 28 percent to 53 percent. This time pressure is particularly intense in certain service activities, such as retailing, where this share exceeds 70 percent. In this regard, management control has intensified: 30 percent of employees say their work rates are subject to permanent monitoring, compared with only 17 percent in 1984. Moreover, while employees are required to solve problems by themselves, there has also been an increase in prescription: while in the past 15 percent solved problems by reference to pre-planned scenarios, the figure today is 20 percent.

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Table 2.

Time constraints and incident management.

			Percentage share of employees who state that their work rate is imposed by:			Share who state that they resolve incidents:
SECTOR		Numbers of employees (in thousands)	Deadlines to be met in an hour at most	An external request requiring an immediate response	Permanent monitoring by management	By themselves most of the time	By themselves but by reference to pre-planned scenarios
Agriculture	1984	260	1.5	7.4	13.5
	1998	321	14.1	26.9	22.9	47.8	14.6
	2005	256	23.9	29.0	25.1	42.3	20.1
Manufacturing	1984	4 705	10.3	15.8	19.5
	1998	3 990	37.0	47.4	34.1	51.4	17.3
	2005	3 973	38.6	47.5	36.5	48.5	20.4
Construction	1984	1 249	2.5	16.9	23.1
	1998	1 059	19.9	38.8	30.3	53.7	13.1
	2005	1 158	25.0	43.6	28.3	50.7	21.0
Services	1984	11 323	3.4	35.2	16.0
	1998	14 142	19.8	57.7	27.7	57.4	15.8
	2005	16 790	21.9	55.7	28.3	52.9	19.7
Of which the following sub-categories	1984	2 308	4.2	52.1	13.1
1/ Distribution and	1998	2 455	22.0	73.9	29.6	57.4	15.7
repairs	2005	2 716	23.3	70.8	32.9	53.2	19.7
2/ Financial	1984	715	1.6	43.0	17.7
activities	1998	671	20.2	73.1	34.6	65.0	13.7
	2005	711	15.6	65.7	31.1	57.6	17.7
3/ Personal	1984	952	4.1	41.2	12.4
services	1998	1 423	22.0	55.0	22.7	61.3	13.3
	2005	1 719	28.3	53.4	22.8	59.8	16.0
All employees	1984	17 602	5.2	28.3	17.4
	1998	19 517	23.2	54.0	29.1	55.9	16.0
	2005	22 251	25.0	53.2	29.7	51.9	19.8

Source: DARES (2011).

Studies of the activities of middle managers have also helped to put into perspective the nature of the changes taking place in firms (Hales 2005). Organizational changes have not in fact led to any fundamental changes in these managers’ role. Even though their functions have been extended somewhat to include more responsibility for commercial and financial matters, their monitoring activities have been strengthened. Direct supervision remains a key element in corporate monitoring and control systems, despite the claims made in the management literature, and middle managers’ work is itself largely prescribed and constantly monitored, as Grugulis et al. (2010), for example, note in the case of the distributive trades. According to these authors, the empowerment rhetoric is employed all the more by managers since it does not equate to any tangible reality. True, managers tend to highlight aspects of their activities such as “encouraging,” “galvanizing,” and “motivating” the workers for whom they are responsible, but in reality the main purpose of their practices and their work is to ensure obedience and adherence to instructions.

5.1. From control to the normalization of behavior

While the contemporary model of the firm can be seen as embodying the end of hierarchies, surveillance, and control, the requirement for obedience has not in reality disappeared and actually remains fundamental to today’s firms. What has changed is the form that organizational constraints take, with flexible constraints taking the place of direct command (Courpasson 2006). Controlled autonomy is one of the ways in which authority manifests itself and is legitimized in firms apparently based on initiative-taking and the shifting of responsibility. The new forms of control are “participative-consensual” (Gunn 1994). The principles of subordination are based on the “implicit normalization” of individual behavior rather than on overtly authoritarian discipline. When a firm finds a way of creating commitment to the organization among its employees, then it has at its disposal a very powerful control mechanism (Lincoln and Kalleberg 2003).

However, this “involvement” has to be constructed by the organization. The rhetoric around competence and autonomy has an important role to play in this process. It encourages the emergence of a norm based on behavioral requirements that is then used to judge and evaluate competence. The aim here is to create a new archetype of the “good worker”: a person whose behavior is compatible with the objectives of the organization, whose norms each individual will have internalized. Workers are no longer regarded as simply obeying orders or responding to external stimuli. Rather, it is their internal motivations, values, and cast of mind that explain the ways in which they interact with others (colleagues and, particularly, customers). Thus effective control can be exerted upstream of the work process itself by shaping their mental representations.

Thus the internalization of behavioral norms and acceptance of the rules of the game become a prerequisite for the establishment of autonomy at work. Edwards mentioned the need for employees to have workers who identify with the company. However, his analysis seems to have been taken a stage further, with discipline no longer concerning simply employees’ actions and operations but also their representations, and in particular their self-representations. It is a self-disciplinary form of control.

5.2. The myth and its function: Shifting of responsibility on to workers

Although the increasing emphasis on social competences or so-called “soft” skills is widely presented as a key part of corporate strategies, it is also, it seems to us, an element of managerial discourse that is intended to change the way in which employees conceive their roles within the firm. This rhetoric, which revolves around competences, autonomy, and employee initiative, makes it possible to put in place forms of control based on the shifting of responsibility on to individuals who have internalized their company’s workplace norms. These norms and values stress the importance of individuals acquiring and exhibiting more “market-oriented,” “proactive,” and “entrepreneurial” attitudes and capacities. The achievement of “excellence” necessitates the production of certain types of people, namely autonomous, self-regulating, responsible individuals (du Gay et al. 1996). This “entrepreneur of the self” necessarily emphasizes the new competences required by the newly empowered roles of workers, in which they are required to “own” and to be accountable for their own performance. If an employee’s performance is failing, this is seen to be a problem with his or her own values, personality, or identity (Fleming and Sturdy 2009).

The obligation to achieve results is transferred to employees, in exchange for a relaxation of direct control. To be responsible is to be accountable for one’s actions. Employees are thrown back on themselves, since they are considered to have sole responsibility for their work, for its successes as well as its failures. Thus workers’ acceptance of this responsibility intensifies the control exerted through the requirement on each individual to be exemplary: in their discourse, in their behavior, in the way they dress, etc. However, the responsibility they have accepted is of a particular kind. They are not responsible for their own interests, as a self-employed worker might be, but rather for the interests of the firm for which they work, or for those of its customers. It is in this sense, in our view, that the changes in the competences required by firms have modified the forms of subordination.

The differences between the modes of employee control discussed here and those identified by Edwards (1979, 1984) stem directly from the fact that the activities investigated here involve the provision of a service in direct contact with the customer. In retailing and the hotel and restaurant industry, technical control tends indeed to be somewhat lax, precisely because it is difficult to monitor the relational component of the work by technical means. This being the case, it is not difficult to understand why it is necessary to institutionalize corporate values and set workers’ implicit behavioral norms. The emphasis is on having the right “attitude,” both in terms of respecting hierarchy and the existing power structure and delivering customer service.

5.3. Employee resistance: Some possible limitations of the new modes of control

As Edwards’s analysis demonstrated, firms’ decisions with regard to work organization have historically provoked reactions and resistance from employees. So is it possible to identify any such reactions to the new modes of control outlined above? We suggest some leads. The interviews our colleagues Elisabeth Chatel and Yamina Bensaâdoune conducted with young workers in retailing and hotels and restaurants sectors (Bailly et al. 2008) show that there does not seem to be any protest on their part. Only very seldom do the young workers interviewed challenge the validity of the constraints to which they are subject. They internalize the company’s norms, in terms of personal commitment for example, and make them their own. Other authors have noted how resonant this phenomenon of identification with the company could be in services involving direct customer contact (Williams and Connell 2010).

Nevertheless, over the medium term, employee behavior may well change. This is particularly the case when employees believe that they have really committed themselves to the company but that they are not being duly recompensed in terms of pay or career progression. This gives rise in turn to a form of deep-seated but implicit resistance on the part of individuals who were once very involved in their work, leading them to adopt concealed withdrawal behaviors (neglect). Leaving the firm (exit) is another way of expressing dissatisfaction. Labor turnover rates are indeed particularly high in these sectors. Finally, phenomena such as work-related stress, burn-out, and even musculoskeletal problems can also be analyzed as a “passive” or unconscious form of reaction on the part of employees. Since the new forms of work organization affect their very beings, they express themselves through their bodies.

The reactions described above are individual in nature. The young workers in retailing and the hotel/restaurant sector made no mention when interviewed of collective forms of resistance. This is surely due to the fact that they were at the beginning of their working lives. However, it may also be explained by more structural factors. Employees in service industries find it difficult to organize collectively. Trade unions do not have a strong presence there (Freeman and Rogers 1999).