Lean: Thoughts and oversights in respect of relentless activity. Lean production has made a comeback in businesses since the mid-2000s, triggering much debate about its impact on working practices. This paper seeks to highlight the manner in which "lean" conceives work. However, neither Ohno, who devised the method and its tools, nor Womack, Jones or Roos, its theoreticians, actually provide us with very much explicit theory. The key idea is to combat waste in the day-today operation of workshops. This may lead either to a reassessment of employees' working conditions or to an obsession with reducing "unproductive" work time by forcing human beings to constantly adapt. This relative uncertainty is all the more important insofar as its implementation outside the automotive sector means that it may be applied in very different productive contexts.
Research on interactive service work has paid close attention to how organizations and frontline employees deal with the inherent complexity of the customeremployee-employer triangle. This raises questions about the agency of interactive service workers with respect to the indeterminacy of service interactions.Our meta-narrative review finds that the theorization of worker agency in service interactions remains underdeveloped in the two dominant research streams of mainstream management and labour process theory studies. Implicitly or explicitly, these streams either subsume agency under managerial prescription or view it through the binary polar of control and resistance. There has been less focus on service workers' efforts to overcome practical difficulties in everyday service interactions. To address this lacuna, we offer a conceptual framework that draws on a less prominent, third research stream, which we label pragmatist. This stream includes scholarship largely unfamiliar to the international Englishspeaking community, published mainly in French and German academic journals. We propose three contributions in this paper. First, we contribute to the interactive service work literature by mapping the theoretical plurality within and beyond the English-speaking community. Second, we problematize established streams of research by articulating the intellectual axes of the field; this allows us to present a new research area to account for the concrete dynamics of service interaction and to capture frontline employee agency. Third, we propose a pragmatist research framework coupled with a future research agenda more attentive to the embeddedness and materiality of frontline workers' situated actions. This way, we address the indeterminacy of interactive situations.
La crise sanitaire est réputée avoir provoqué une rupture dans le rapport au travail de beaucoup de salariés, qui en auraient tiré les conséquences à travers une inflexion marquée de leur parcours. L’article interroge cette hypothèse en se basant sur quinze récits de salariés d’entreprises privées et publiques belges, collectés au début de l’année 2021 dans le cadre d’une recherche transdisciplinaire. Il appréhende le rapport au travail et les choix effectués par les individus dans leurs parcours en les inscrivant à la croisée des normes organisationnelles, professionnelles et familiales que les individus s’emploient à accorder. Nos résultats montrent que, si elle a pu constituer un choc, la crise sanitaire a surtout amplifié et précipité des réflexions qui s’inscrivent dans des temporalités plus longues en matière de rapport au travail. La distance avec l’entreprise et la fréquentation continue des membres de la famille a imposé un poids accru des normes familiales et forcé à la recomposition d’équilibres avec des normes organisationnelles, désormais davantage obligées de composer avec les premières.
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AbstractMuseum curators are rarely the subject of analysis as scientists. By contrast, there is a whole literature on their propensity to give priority to the scientific knowledge of collections over the effort to communicate with different audiences and make museums accessible. This article examines the Late Raphael exhibition at the Louvre (Paris) and draws on the exhibition texts (catalogues, artwork labels, wall texts) to explore the practical activity and preoccupations of the museum curators concerned: the exhibition is simultaneously material for the scientific demonstration of a thesis -part of a debate on the value of the artist's late works -and for communication aimed at both fellow specialists and the wider public. Communication is not distinct from scientific research and handled with less respect. The two are directly interwoven and communication represents a practical activity with its own difficulties.
KeywordsCommunication, curator, museum, scholarship, scientific activityFor at least a century, museums have been the focus of conflicts over the definition of their role and the legitimate activity of their staff. Curators in particular have come under fire for their conception of the museum and their professional practices. They have been
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