The labor sociologist Nadège Vezinat, author of the work Public service prevented (PUF, 272 pages, 24 euros), highlights that, faced with degraded working conditions, many agents have the feeling of losing the meaning of their mission.
In your book you describe a “impeded” public service. What are the mechanisms that make it difficult?
Nadège Vezinat: Throughout the work I have distinguished three processes that affect public service.
Firstly, European liberalization developed by an increasingly important supranational regulatory body. It will encourage the establishment of a logic of competition.
Second mechanism in operation: the commercialization of the general interest, with the development of a profitability requirement. It invites us to have a purely economic reading grid of the public service, with a short-term approach, which makes invisible the quality of the service or the indirect effects of the action carried out – preventive treatments for a pathology can, for example, ultimately allow save money.
Finally, a third process is underway: privatizations, which impact the status of organizations. We are observing a confusion of the boundaries between the public and the private, which contributes to the public service losing its uniqueness.
As a result, a gap is created between the objectives assigned to public service agents and those of users…
This is what American interactionist sociology calls the “social drama of work.” “The urgency is greater on one side of the fence than on the other”summarizes sociologist Everett Hughes. A user who has waited several hours in a prefecture or emergency room wants to benefit from special attention, while the agent who faces a long queue will have to deal with his case in a very limited time. Sometimes you can even be limited by indicators that measure the time spent on each user and indicate when another file needs to be processed (by, for example, a flashing color).
You believe that along with this growing gap between the agent and the user there also appears a rupture between this same agent and its hierarchy…
Agents no longer understand what objective they should pursue and have the feeling that managers far from the field impose sometimes aberrant guidelines. They have the impression that they are no longer at the service of the user – what they consider their main vocation – but rather of an institution that works in reverse, where its missions are perceived as costly.
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