The importance of the working environment, the uniqueness of professions, the rehabilitation of gestures, this is what the three works nominated for the Thinking about Work prize tell us: The Second Corpsby Karen Messing (Ecosociety), Rushed workby Corinne Gaudart and Serge Volkoff (Les Petits Matins) and The Care of Things (The Discovery), by David Pontille and Jérôme Denis.
In a certain way, the 2023 edition of the management book of the year prize co-founded by Sciences Po and The world celebrates the complexity of the world of work and the importance of observing it closely to preserve its quality. What would be the point of working ever faster and ever more intensely if it is to the detriment of the quality of the work and the health of those who do it?
Methodology: six selection criteria
Co-founded by Sciences Po and The worldthe price Thinking about work is the culmination of a year of cross-reading by Sciences Po management master’s students and debates with HR managers and journalists from World on the production of publishing houses in essays, manuals, surveys and other testimonies on the world of work.
The nominees and the 2023 winner were selected from some eighty works from the previous year (2022) on six criteria: the novelty of the subject, the quality of the argument, the scientific basis, readability, the contribution to reflection of course, and finally relevance for action, to which human resources managers are particularly attentive.
Sciences Po management students who spent their master’s year debating all the works published in 2022 in their specialty understood this well by preselecting these three finalists out of some eighty works. The clinical approach to work common to the three nominees highlights the breaking points and the deterioration of working conditions at work as soon as they appear.
Whether they are ergonomists, sociologists or biologists, the authors invite us to follow them in their field surveys in construction, banking, museums, businesses, with nurses, teachers, engineers, etc. to see the sources of gender inequalities emerge, the mechanisms of work acceleration, and the role of maintenance in preserving the quality of work.
Unsuitability of equipment
In her essay, Canadian bio-geneticist Karen Messing, professor emeritus at the University of Quebec, addresses the issue of occupational health through gender. It starts from the inequalities observed in the workplace to seek the most effective way to improve consideration of women’s health. It develops the unsuitability of professional equipment for women’s bodies. She points out that the physical demands of women’s work are often invisible, unlike those of typically male tasks, and demonstrates how “hiding biological differences linked to sex can exacerbate inequalities and harm women’s health”.
She compares the daily working conditions of women to those of their male colleagues in different professional environments over several decades, and thus demonstrates the need to adapt environments to the diversity of bodies, the work environment having been designed for the bodies of men.
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