"When the Humanization of Work Makes the Employees Sick"

by Linhart, Danièle (2015)

Abstract

This article seeks to show that modern management has retained one of the essential dimensions of Taylorism: the disqualification of the professionalism of employees in order to remove any legitimacy on their part in wanting to leave their imprint on the organization of their work. This continuity is hidden by the fact that modern management calls for a humanization of work, depicts men and women with their affects, their emotions, and their desires, and claims to manage, on a strictly individualistic basis, both their strengths and their weaknesses. To do this, it has recourse to two strategic orientations: an ethical, ideological, and narcissistic offer aimed at convincing and seducing the employees on the one hand; and, on the other, a subjective insecurity created by the practice of permanent change in order to weaken them and to lead them to rely on management tools conceived for them in the framework of a quest for short-term profitability. This subjective destabilization launches the employees into an exacerbated quest for self-realization according to a logic that requires them to conduct themselves in strict conformity with the methods and objectives that dominate them.

Keywords

Linhart, Sociology, Meaning Of Work, Blue Collar Work, Female Work, Management, Female Blue Collar Work, Taylorism, Gendered Labour, Division Of Labour, Ethics, Subjectivity, Precarity, Humanisation, Self-Realisation

Themes

Linhart

Links to Reference

• https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CNX_103_0049--when-the-humanization-of-work-makes-the.htm
• http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/cnx.103.0049

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