Temporalités des cadres et malaise au travail

The CERTOP’s team achieved a research on executives and high skilled employees in France (in French: cadres) about their working time, their involvement in their professional life and their social temporalities characterizing their everyday life. This research has been financed by the national agency for research and carried out in seven companies and administrations. The approach is based on 100 interviews with a transcribed text corpus of 600,000 words. It is used to identify the existence of a complex ill-being at work. On the one hand, this ill-being appears around three major difficulties: stress, lack of symbolic recognition and social tensions within the company. On the other hand, this discomfort should be analyzed by taking into account the well-being that the high skilled employees still express concerning their activity. Overall the article describes the nuanced portrait of a social category that is characterized by its heterogeneity, but also by a desire to escape temporality constraints and time- urgency in order to find a quality of life that reinvests the private sphere.