Workplace interventions should be based on elements identified by many nurses as being problematic.

In a society in which stable employment remains the reference, one might presume that an insecure job situation would represent a threat to a person's well-being. In this qualitative empirical research based on the narrative method, the authors documented the career paths of 22 men and 30 women. Their goal was to understand how intermittent work is experienced by people and how it affects life and perceived health. At the time the authors met with them, the intermittent workers had no continuous employment ties with an employer and 60 percent of them had worked, off and on, for six months or more during the year preceding the interview. The people interviewed considered themselves to be available and able to work. Almost a third of them had once held a stable full-time job for many years. The results confirmed the importance of paid work and the central role that it plays in terms of social recognition and self-esteem. The participants assigned great value to having status as workers and to being integrated into a workplace on a regular basis. Some of these intermittent workers said that their poor working conditions and the investment required by the constant search for work as well as the repeated adaptation to a new working environment decreased their motivation at work, eventually causing them to distance themselves from the paid labour market. Others, however, are increasingly willing to accept compromises in order to secure a stable position in the labour market. They concede that this puts them in conflict with their own values in terms of what work means to them and they have difficulty accepting this contradiction. The effects of intermittent work on well-being are as damaging as those of unemployment due to a range of factors that are not restricted to the financial difficulties it creates. When employment fails to allow an individual to achieve self-fulfilment, develop his or her capacities and enter into relationships with others, it becomes, in some respects, `non-work'.

In the risk society, managing health risks underlines a social tension between a logic of rationalization and a logic of subjectivation. In the former, techno-scientific thought dominates and induces a certain form of dependence on scientific experts while, in the latter, the individuals tend to be seen to make independent choices to protect their health. This article examines the logics of the actors in the risk management process from a constructivist perspective. According to Dubet's sociology of experience, social experience is structured around three logics: the logic of integration, i.e. the social world seen through the membership group, role and social relations; the strategic logic, i.e. the social world seen as a market; and the logic of subjectivation, i.e. the ability to be a subject, to distance oneself from the surrounding world and to give meaning to one's actions and decisions. Our qualitative research involved the analysis of the discourse of workers and employers in relation to the risk for pregnancy of work activities. The study was conducted in Quebec (Canada), where employers are legally obliged to protect the health of pregnant workers and the latter have the right to safe working conditions without prejudice. The results show that scientific experts do not have a determining impact on organizational changes and the representations of risk held by employers and women workers. Scientific controversies about work risks for pregnancy are used by employers to maintain the status quo while, for workers, the climate of employment and economic insecurity plays a significant role in how they deal with work-related health risks. Based on the theory of the risk society, the results bring out the complex interplay between scientific rationality and social rationality whereby risk is defined according to the interests of the actors involved. But, not consistent with certain tenets of the risk society thesis, they also reveal one's ability to be critical of institutionalized risk.

Quebec legislation in occupational health contains a measure that gives pregnant workers the right to demand healthy and safe work conditions so that they can continue working while they are pregnant. About one-third of pregnant workers exercise this right every year. Nonetheless, even though the legislation's goal is to favor continued employment, more than 75 percent of the female workers who are eligible for protective reassignment are, in fact, not reassigned to other work stations or tasks, and instead must stop working. The results presented here stem from research intended to improve our understanding of the difficulties that arise in the workplace when the organization of work has to be reconciled with pregnancy. In telling us their experiences, the 51 pregnant workers we interviewed gave us their definition of "reconciliation." They did this by identifying the elements and areas of their occupational and family responsibilities that hindered or favored this reconciliation. They thus brought to light the predominant role that social relationships play in these situations. The comments of the women we met shed light on work conditions and organizations whose characteristics, once identified, suggest some of the changes needed to make this reconciliation possible.

Malenfant et Michel VézinaSchizophrénie, délires et thérapie cognitive Volume 24, numéro 1, printemps 1999 URI : id.erudit.org/iderudit/031589ar