How important is the liaison between professional work and family work? The case of women bus drivers

Objective: This article is based on an exploratory study in occupational psychology.

Participants: The participants were French female bus drivers in 1996.

Methods: The qualitative approach of the study, based on interviews with and observation of some 40 drivers, stressed their difficulties in managing two occupations, professional and familial. In fact, the job involves work in shifts that change every week for every driver.

Results: The management of family duties, still planned by the majority of the women, requires of them extremely complex strategies of reconciliation. The real dynamics of such reconciliatory work is not ever taken into account in studies undertaken in occupational psychology or in ergonomics.

Conclusions: This article is therefore intended to stimulate researchers concerned in particular with women's work to think about a methodological approach pertinent to analyzing the activity of reconciliation. This activity does not consist a simple proximity between professional and familial tasks but demands, rather, a mental and material linking of the two occupations that remains for now only implicit in women's work. Our task is to render it explicit in order to identify it.