The interwar period was characterized by the emergence of a “rationalization” movement in French industry and other sectors of the economy. While the actual extension of the various rationalization doctrines remains a matter of debate among historians, this article focuses primarily on the reactions of workers in the workplace. The relationship between new forms of work organization and workers’ working conditions has been studied in a variety of ways; the present study focuses on four elements in particular: the development of timekeeping practices and the responses they provoked; industrial discipline; boredom at work; and finally, the application of these new organizational methods in some commercial enterprises. Rather than opposing blue-collar and white-collar workers, the aim is to emphasize the similarities between their work experiences and to offer a vision “from below” of the rationalization of French companies in the interwar.
The article examines the creation of the Paris municipal police in 2021, focusing on the strategic use of history and temporalities of reform within the political debate. Rather than reconstructing an “objective” trajectory, it shows how political and administrative actors produce competing narratives that organize the past, frame the present, and shape possible futures. Drawing on interviews and archival analysis, the article identifies several registers in the ways narratives are used to make sense of and legitimize reform. It thus contributes to a discursive sociology of policy change, showing that “path dependence” operates less as an institutional constraint than as a strategic resource, produced through narratives that legitimize reform and redistribute responsibility.
As a professional group, farmers are characterized by a strong pattern of occupational inheritance through intergenerational farm succession. However, pathways into farming and the profiles of those entering the profession today are becoming increasingly diverse. Drawing on a national quantitative survey of more than 3,000 individuals who entered farming in 2018 or 2022, as well as a qualitative interview study with 23 newly established farmers, this article analyzes the steps preceding entry into the profession and their temporalities. Using sequence analysis, it highlights the diversity of pathways into farming, reflecting the fact that new entrants come from a variety of experiences, both within and outside agriculture. It presents a typology of these trajectories, then proceeds to show how these routes into the profession are more broadly embedded in life-course trajectories.
Based on two studies, involving biographical interviews with managers of wine-producing and equestrian structures, this article explores the similarities in the temporal regime of job, which determines the perceived struggles and impact on health. It demonstrates that the temporal arrangements of tasks performed are more important than their formal characteristics in determining the conditions of work sustainability. More specifically, the analysis reveals that the work organisation of the two categories of managers studies combines and interwines three common temporal environments: the ‘living’, the ‘market’ and the ‘structure’. Although these managers have autonomy at work, an imbalance in these environments creates the perception of densification of tasks, blurred boundaries between social and working time, and cognitive overload. This results in fatigue, which transforms these perceived struggles into risks of accident.
Goat dairy farms in Corsica rely on rustic animals that graze on areas of spontaneous vegetation to produce milk, which is then processed into cheese and sold locally. Farmers, working alone or in pairs, face time constraints in carrying out all of these tasks. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted in ten recently established farms, we highlight these pressures and the solutions implemented to reduce some of them. Farmers are reducing the amount of time spent on some tasks and introducing flexibility to organize their time on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis. We also identify the principles that structure these time constraints. The organization of marketing, the coordination of professional and private time, and the passage of the herd through the milking parlor in the morning and evening are at the heart of this structure. Regulating these time constraints requires planning, but this is disrupted by the vagaries of the weather, health issues, and above all the behavior of the Corsican goat breed. These disruptions are accepted by farmers as characteristic of their breeding practices.
