The test The Care of Things. Maintenance policies is a dive into the world of maintenance, analyzed by Jérôme Denis and David Pontille, respectively professor of sociology at Mines Paris-PSL and director of research at the CNRS. He has just been appointed to Thinking about Work Prize 2023. The authors explain its contribution to the world of work.
In your book, you talk about “taking care of things” as a subject neglected by businesses and research, but crucial for the future of our societies. How does maintenance fit into the news of the 21st century?e century ?
Jérôme Denis: Faced with the environmental crisis, maintenance provides a solution to “make it last”. Student architects are building today in a problematic situation. Making buildings last, for example, appears to them to be an answer. Maintenance is a topical issue in rich countries, particularly for large infrastructures (roads, bridges, water networks). Many things are aging, without maintenance having been taken into account. In this work, we developed the question of “making it last”, the encounter between beings and objects and the question of their weakening. Maintenance makes us sensitive to the damage occurring, and attention to traces aims to capture each phenomenon in its singularity.
How did you become interested in this subject?
David Pontille: It was during an investigation started in 2007 into the renewal of signs dedicated to Paris metro users. At the end of one of our last meetings, the person responsible for standardizing all of the RATP signage suggested that we see “the maintenance guys”. This is how maintenance emerged as a research topic that was taken seriously. Previous works in sociology and ergonomics existed on the subject from an organizational point of view, with the prism of risk, but said little about the work itself, the action of maintainers.
J.D. Many players from very different professional worlds, in health, energy or defense, are urgently asking the question of the promotion of maintenance. Maintainers have a form of close expertise with things that cannot be completely formalized. There is teaching linked to the subject itself. If we want to take maintenance into consideration, we must take into account the maintainability of things. There is also another issue, that of giving maintainers some leeway. They know how machines react. Outsourcing, for example, can pose a high risk of loss of expertise.
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