Contenu du sommaire : Les Jeunes et le Travail

Young job seeker contemporary market has been experiencing the French social and economic situation instability since the mid-sixties, i.e. at the end of the « Trente Glorieuses » (the 30 year post war boom). Besides, this market is paradoxical since, despite a high unemployment rate of young job seekers, some sectors do not achieve neither to hire, nor to retain their staff. In view of this situation, our research aims at analyzing companies and organizations' role in attracting and retaining young working force. Also, we examine the relationships between organizations and young job entrants, and their consequences on organizational performance. We consider as well the strategic axes that could improve attractiveness and retaining.

The deep changes of labour market affect the industrial world and its workers hard. Nowadays, the work's organization continues to be transformed and requirements of suppleness and polyvalency are increased. According to this, how the young workers and their elder perceive their job? Our analysis is based on about forty interviews with workers from 29 to 59 years old in five firms of a labour pool. Generation's splits are strong in different domains. Young workers are obviously more tied to have a job than have a special interest for their work while their elder defend their experience. Young workers are keeping at a distance from their working activity and make the split more than their elder between the professional space and the private space. Faced to a new management policy (autocontrol, flexibility, polyvalency, writing activities), the young workers show themselves more accommodating than the older even if they don't agreeing completely to the requirements of the firm. But those oppositions are not translated in opened conflicts. The labour group is nevertheless damaged by the industrial changes and the new work organization. But we notice besides that in specific contexts, generation's splits can be temporarily reduced in order to build a worker's group again.

Few companies consider domestic violence as an organizational issue. Nevertheless, the imprint of violence doesn't disappear out of home but it affects individuals' health and their behavior at work. They are indeed numerous professional implications such as physical and mental health deterioration, increase of absenteeism, decrease of motivation, negative effects on career and on job maintenance. In France, more than 1.5 million people are victim of such violence (OND, 2008). This article aims to explain why the companies should take more this problem into account and present courses of action.

The question of employee socialization is crucial in recruitment processes. The young generation is expecting more attention and effort from organization so to get them involved and loyal. The aim of our research is to understand the tactics that young people tend to develop according to the socialization process adopted by the organization. The initial problem raised in our research is the impact of socialization procedures on individual tactics and then in their loyalty and day-to-day involvement. We focused on the attitudes and behaviors of various actors regarding some specific situations. To do so, we used a qualitative method by interviewing young hired people with different profiles and in different sectors. In order to have a wider vision, we also interviewed human resource managers and business leaders.

The object of this paper is to demonstrate, within the French institutional setup, the existence of conventions of training and hiring. In the acceptation of the conventionalist program in economics and management, these conventions discriminate (Eymard-Duvernay et al., 2012) access to management professions, and particularly the strategic positions in corporate hierarchies. These conventions constitute a common knowledge (Common Knowledge) which refers to a commonly accepted representation of good academic diplomas, who reflecting the possession of good skills, for accessing decision-making in the organizations. The article explores the functioning and reproduction of this common knowledge.

This article introduces a comparative study of work attitudes between employees from two distinct generations. The unconditional reference to generation profiles arousing the authors' suspicion, they decide to point out the limits of the generation-focused researches and to use those considerations in order to turn them into a critical question. They study from a specific field, the Tokyo-based subsidiary of a multinational American group offering IT solutions, the various factors that may influence the generational characteristics. The working hypothesis set the attributes of the observed distribution unit against the most common generational problems (in other words, against attitudes that would characterized the younger generation), the least confirmed ones and also the least studied ones (such as influence of the hierarchical position, cultural influence, trajectories, activity or context switching). The survey is based on a mixed methodology, both quantitative and qualitative. Ten attitudes have been evaluated against a sample of forty-two employees that was composed of employees from the younger generation for one-third and staff from an older generation for two-thirds. The evaluation itself is based on unbiased indicators, with a measurement first taken at a specific milestone for all employees which allows a direct comparison and also through a continuous measurement over 4 years in order to follow the stability of the attitudes. The quantitative analysis allows the authors to confirm the impact of the generation (X and Y), the culture (Japanese or foreigner) and the hierarchical position (manager or technician) on the attitudes. Then the long-lasting observation enables to verify the change of attitudes triggered by external factors, trajectories, position change or company specificities ; parameters that quantitative studies do not integrate. Thus, not only this specific case study brings a contrasted perspective on the differences of attitudes between two generations (not all attitudes are stabilized within a same generation) but also a more dynamic view.