The demand for meaning at work

The question of the meaning of work seems to be emerging in the social debate as revealed by these two years of health crisis in which the relationship to work has been deeply shaken (1) . But as with many latent contradictions, the covid crisis has served as a revelation or gas pedal.

As if before our 21 st century we didn't need a sense of meaning at work

This preoccupation is not the prerogative of this generation X, Y or whatever the registration.

So, is it a claim of a generation of haves? That of the children of growth, of the Glorious Thirty, who can afford the luxury of asking themselves this question? Or is it a vital question for which one is ready to take the risk of losing one's security?

Is it a symptom of a society where collectives are disintegrating to the benefit of the every man for himself, which becomes a general sauve-qui-peut? A society giving the injunction to each one to produce and determine himself, thus condemning each one to produce his own meaning without giving him the skills and the space to do so?

What is behind this claim that could seem insulting to those around the world who cannot survive from their work, preoccupied as they are with struggling in the primary levels of survival and for whom the top of the pyramid is always elusive and illusory?

Starting from the meaning of the word "work"

The meaning of the word work is eminently political. As Maëlezig Bigi (2) proposes, what puts work at the heart of social construction is that it has been constructed through a triple promise of social integration, economic integration, and individual fulfillment.

What remains of this promise in these times when technological evolution generates social earthquakes and leads us into an unthinkable and unthought-of reconfiguration of social relations and work? Would work no longer be able to fulfill its mission of integration?

Should we conclude that the demand for meaning in work is a clumsy way of demanding that work regain its mission? Thus there would be no resignation of the actors but a de-mission of work?

Let's start from the definition of work: M.A. Dujarier (3) proposes an etymology of "work" different from the commonly accepted "tripalium": Work would come from "traps" which is the structure that serves to contain animals in order to be able to shoe them, or trans: which refers to the idea of overcoming obstacles. We find here the idea of structure that puts energy under constraint to transform it into work. This is what characterizes organizations. The organization is indeed a system of constraint whose mission is to put under constraint the energy with which the actor comes so that it is transformed into work and becomes a production.

Thus technology would have made work lose, at least in appearance, its integrating mission.

The traditional structures of work that framed individuals and organized their social relations have exploded and the social organization is no longer containing and organizing.

The meaning of one's activity and one's belonging

One can see this claim of meaning as a claim of the affluent in a country where the assistance measures (RSA Unemployment etc..) intended to ensure social peace end up weakening the main motor of the individual to get going: the possibility of perceiving the effect of one's action on the environment that determines one's reason for being. We know we exist when we can measure the effects we have on our environment.

All the measures of work organization and job security end up decoupling activity from its meaning. If whatever I do I can't perceive how it has an influence in return on my economic life my purchasing power, then my activity has no meaning. If I have no idea what places me in the production chain and to whom and for what purpose my activity serves, I cannot find meaning in it.

We can analyze these claims to meaning as a way of talking about working conditions. Indeed, the work of J Gautier (4) and European surveys conducted by a European organization "euro fond" show that working conditions are rather less good in France. France is the country that has the worst indicators in terms of working conditions, work pace of physical conditions of work.

But working conditions are far from exhausting the subject of resignation.

Even very very difficult working conditions have never prevented the activity to verify its values and actors to be committed and proud of their profession. We see in the Silesian salt mines magnificent cathedrals that the workers had carved in the salt, which show that beyond the suffering of work in the mines, something of the order of shared meaning and spirituality exists. In a way, a celebration of shared meaning and belonging.

This is what we will also find in the health sector particularly in France where, feeling themselves to be at the service of a divine power, the nuns were able to accept working conditions that were often absolutely deplorable and even dangerous.

It is not, therefore, the difficulty and risks that engender disengagement but rather the sense of usefulness and belonging.

For the youngest who find it difficult to engage arises the question of whether they perceive their work as useful because there is undoubtedly a link between meaning and social utility.

As M.A.Dujarier points out: "Recent surveys show that actors in the company have the impression of doing useless or even harmful things, often saying "when I do this I don't work".

The dissociation between employment and the feeling of usefulness participates in the disorder. This situation highlights the obvious: The market value of work is not the social value of work.

Moreover for some professions, such as finance, the gap has increased between the economic value of work and its social value. Not that finance is in itself useless, but it becomes harmful when it is no longer at the service of the valorization of exchanges and energy flows and becomes an activity that self-produces its value independently of exchanges and flows.

The student movement at Paris Tech (5) poses this question of the difference or even the contradiction that there can be between the social value and the economic value of work. An ethical claim from a population that asserts that we destroy more collective well-being than we gain personal well-being.

Not just utility

On the other hand a job can have a high social utility like health jobs and at the same time the actors can feel an important loss of meaning. By the fact that the underpayment of caregivers sends a message of devaluation, the issue of remuneration and working conditions participates in this loss of meaning. But this does not explain everything.

Commercial constraints (financialization of health care), increased control of work (over-bureaucratization of the organization), management by indicators are all practices that dry up commitment and intrinsic motivation. Work is so controlled and processed that we can no longer do it consciously and that disengagement, escape then seems the only way to escape suffering or even destabilization (6).

For Marie Anne Dujarier, the notion of utility has changed for three reasons:

• We are at the end of the logic of a system that leaves the future in a very disturbing state.
• A world that produces more and more social inequality without the possibility of reduction;
• in a production system that tends to exhaust the actors.

For these ecological social and existential reasons, the question of progress and utility is posed.

The mental strain of work has increased. Too much market conception of work and control. And on the other hand, not enough medium to long term vision, not of his career but simply of his activity. Which employee can be sure that in 5 years he will still have a job?

The "disrupted" meaning

Then we see the appearance of forms of work that are both unthought of and not chosen and therefore not contractualized.

The irruption of digital tools has made professions disappear and atomized activities: buying your train ticket on your phone, scanning your products in the supermarket, commenting on the value of a company's service. These are activities that produce use values and exchange values and yet are not considered to have a work value.

So the quest for meaning is not in itself a novelty arising from a universe where the question of meaning had never arisen. What makes the meaning of work a concern is that this meaning is questioned by the breaking of the promise, the breaking of the implicit social contract that gave meaning to work.

This period of unbridled technological development is characterized by a series of tectonic movements in the field of work that generates a loss of reference points making this promise impossible to keep.

Illustration: DepositPhotos - VisualGeneration

Notes

(1) https://www.anact.fr/sens-au-travail-quelles-pistes-concretes

(2)Maëlezig Bigi sociologist lecturer at Cnam - Centre d'étude de l'emploi et du travail

(3)Marie-Anne Dujarier - Sociologist Prof université Paris Cité - Author of Trouble in the workplace - PUF
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/troubles-dans-le-travail-9782130804130.html

(4)Jérôme Gautier - Economist - Prof Paris 1 Panthéon

(5) Nos métiers sont destructeurs": le discours choc des étudiants d'AgroParisTech sur leurs formations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA4Dbg3RsaE

(6) We remember Henri Laborit's book: l'éloge de la fuite (folio essai) 1976
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/eloge-de-la-fuite-9782070322831.html