Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to analyze the work as it is undergoing evolutions, and on the other hand,
to connect the knowledge of human resources with the knowledge of
production. Reflections about courses of work - as we have defined them
above - cannot take place without connecting these pieces of knowledge
together. Yet, they are dispersed within various functions of the company
- human resources, occupational medicine and production. Work demo-
graphics (Molinié and Volkoff, 1998), in the sense that they combine data
related to age, seniority and features of work-related evolution, are a fun-
damental tool to plan the relationships between work and health, and to
understand the selective effects of work. They are also a tool to plan the
future, since they allow the use of projections as intermediaries.
Transmission as a process aiming to regulate
mismatches between temporalities
The point above aims to ensure that the past becomes present, and that
the managerial temporality is given a form of situated memory, to open
up a debate about the meaning of actions carried out in the past. This
implies that a developmental approach to courses of work, whose goal
would be to support past experience in the present time of activity, should
remain a key stage to plan the future of those courses.
Transmission - which we will define here as a process of mutual
sharing of trade-related knowledge and know-how between new and
elder workers - is a second potential means to open up courses of work
to the future. Development also means being able to turn constraints
into resources. In this sense, the baby boom generation, which is often
presented as a negative influence on organizational performance, might
instead be viewed as an opportunity for the design of courses of work.
Ageing in this generation, as it is currently happening, has made it pos-
sible to consider the diversity of ages at work that it has produced, to plan
courses of work in a different way, that is, to replace retiring employees
with newer employees, whether these new employees are young or not,
but also to deal with the issue of the extended duration of professional
life. Therefore, this diversity in the age structure can become a resource,
provided there is some form of support on the part of the managerial tem-
porality to ensure a link between past, present and future.
Following this view, the work collective plays a fundamental part in
this process. In a gerontology ward in a hospital (Gaudart and Thébault,
2012), the arrival of a new nursing auxiliary in training led to a dynamic
exchange of views regarding the rules of the trade - here, specifically,
about how to deal with an elderly patient. This went far beyond the
integration of the newcomer, which typically occurs in the form of two-
person teams that include a new and a senior worker. The work collective,
that had been renewed following the departure of several senior nurses
