The book. This can allow you to meet your soul mate and form a couple, or to pursue the higher education of your choice. For others, it is a matter of accessing social housing or obtaining the expected medical treatment… Pairings between two individuals or between a resource and a person are present at different stages of our life course. They represent a major challenge: “Moments of bifurcation that shape individual trajectories, they constitute a new way of allocating resources and structuring inequalities. »
The fact that authorities make such associations is not new. What is, on the other hand, is the massive introduction of technologies in the service of this “matching”: this selection work is based more and more on multiple sorting operations, often driven by an algorithm, based on personal information and preferences.
How do these pairings work? What are the political and social implications? It is a long investigation at the heart of this new way of organizing our life trajectories that the collective work offers How does it match (Presses de Sciences Po), conducted under the direction of Melchior Simioni, doctor in economic sociology, and Philippe Steiner, professor of sociology at Sorbonne-University.
Among the themes studied, that of job search. The essay offers a dive into the heart of the French and German public employment services, whose work has been turned upside down by the arrival of technologies making it possible to “match job offer and demand, i.e. advertisements and applications”. Within agencies specializing in job search, we overhear conversations over the pages, we discover the multiple sociological implications of what constitutes, in the eyes of the authors, “a triangular relationship between advisers, unemployed people and employers (…) grossly unbalanced”.
Adaptability
In the triangle in question, the employers dominate. ” [Leur] evaluation by agents has little effect on matching, because the scarcity of offers gives great value to each of them”they explain.
For his part, the job seeker must, most often, demonstrate his ability to adapt. “As part of an attempt to match, it is the choices of the unemployed that are most commonly interpreted as an obstacle to the meeting”note the authors who insist: “The question asked is that of the concessions he agrees to make in the name of returning to work. »
You have 31.34% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.