Adam Piotrowski is enrolled in a PhD program in Sociology of Work, under the supervision of Pascal Ughetto. It is a Cifre thesis at EDF R&D, where he is supervised by Jérôme Cihuelo, following two research internships at the company.
As part of his thesis, he is interested in teleworking and, more broadly, in new workspaces (flex offices), from the perspective of the arrangements created (and to be created) by companies and individuals in their practice of remote working.
Thesis summary
In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, work is set to evolve and frequently take the form of remote working for a significant proportion of employees. The consensus is such that we are seeing company stakeholders (HR managers, middle managers, employees concerned, etc.) reflecting on how to organize these new ways of working. The period ahead, according to the hypothesis that inspires this thesis, is one of individual and collective work necessary to arrange all these elements in order to combine them as effectively as possible, i.e., to enable both productive organizations and individual employees to reconcile distance and presence, the immediate and the mediated, the formal and the informal. This thesis therefore posits that what is at
stake are arrangements—between legal frameworks, materially organized spaces, technologies, forms of collectives, but also the locations of employees, the configuration of their housing and family life, etc. These arrangements should be studied in terms of their trajectories of invention or development, which could imply that, rather than a once-and-for-all establishment of new frameworks, we are dealing with learning processes.
Abstract in English
Thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, work is expected to evolve and frequently take the form of remote work for large proportions of employees. We see company stakeholders (HRD, middle managers, employees, etc.) reflecting on the organization of these working methods. According to the hypothesis that inspires this research work, the period that is now beginning shows us that individual and collective work is necessary to organize all these elements in order to associate them as best as possible with each other, with a view to allowing productive organizations and employees to reconcile in the least unstable way the distant and the present, the immediate and the mediated, the formal and the informal. This thesis formulates the hypothesis that arrangements—between legal frameworks, materially organized spaces, technologies, forms of collectives, but also the locations of employees, a configuration of their home and family life, etc.—are being created. These arrangements must be studied in their trajectories of invention or elaboration, which could imply that we are dealing with learning processes.