Femmes Fortes

Today French women are more likely to be in salaried employment than their male counterparts, albeit being overrepresented in low-paid, part-time jobs. This chapter argues that one of the most striking cultural manifestations of these shifts in the relationship between sex and employment has been the emergence of the highly ambiguous figure of the femme forte, the strong working woman. Recent novels and films by Éric Reinhardt, Laurent Quintreau, Philippe Vasset, Alain Corneau, Natalie Kuperman, and Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar offer examples of one iteration of the femme forte – the calculating, manipulative, ruthless senior female executive whose pursuit of her career goals requires she abjure all her maternal instincts to become a particular kind of femme fatale, an updated version of Lady Macbeth or the Marquise de Meurteuil. The films, novels, and reportage of Medhi Charef, Florence Aubenas, François Bon, and Robert Guédiguian, meanwhile, offer a different, apparently more flattering iteration of the femme forte – the middle-aged working class woman who, in the face of the loss of stable male industrial employment, bravely struggles to keep family and community together, personifying an embattled tradition of working class struggle. The chapter analyses the ideological implications of these contrasting representations of the femme forte.

Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study argues that such concerns are evidence of a profound shift in the French economy and labour market. In its first, theoretical part, the study engages with work in political economy and sociology, sketching a new interpretative framework, the better to understand the nature and implications of this profound shift. This shift has challenged certain fundamental French republican values, opening up a rift between the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordist labour and older notions of republican citizenship. In its second part, the study finds symptoms of this rift in a range of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary workplace, as these depict the dilemmas faced, the trajectories followed, and the geographical regions inhabited by French workers of different ages, sexes, classes, and ethnicities.

Farming, Gender and Aspirations Across Young People’s Life Course: Attempting to Keep Things Open While Becoming a Farmer

Drawing on life history interviews conducted in Indian and Indonesian study sites, we tease out the social production of aspirations in the process of becoming a farmer. We show the power of a doxic logic in which schooling is regarded as the pathway out of farming, towards a future of non-manual, salaried employment. Among rural youth this doxic logic produces broadly defined aspiration such as ‘completing education’, and ‘getting a job’. In the absence of clear pathways to realise such aspirations, young people seek to keep options open. Yet, the scope for doing so changes in relation to key life events such as ending school, migration and marriage and does so in distinctly gendered ways. We conclude proposing that young people’s delayed entrance into farming, among other things, must be understood as an attempt to keep open those futures that are considered closed by an early entry into full-time farming.

Applying self-determination theory to explaining differences in career commitment between self-employed and salaried employees

Purpose Based on self-determination theory, this study aims to examine the impact of satisfaction of basic psychological needs (BPNs) on the commitment to stay self- or salary-employed. Not only the entry of individuals but also their commitment to remain self-employed is important. Enterprises established by the self-employed can only survive longer if the owners are willing to continue in self-employment. Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted among a cross-country sample drawn from Germany, Kenya and Uganda. An online survey was conducted among self- and salary-employed individuals in Germany. In Uganda and Kenya, cross-sectional samples were recruited through their workplaces and business forums. These processes yielded 869 responses (373 self-employed and 494 salary-employed). Differences in the impact of BPNs on the commitment to self-employed or salaried-employment across countries were examined using PROCESS macro 2.16. Findings The findings revealed that the self-employed exhibit higher commitment to their current form of employment than the salary-employed. The satisfaction of needs for autonomy and competence were associated with higher levels of commitment to self-employment than to salary-employment across the three countries. The need for relatedness was also strongly associated with commitment to self-employment much more than to salary-employment for Ugandan and Kenyan participants; but not for the German participants. Originality/value Persistence in self-employment is essential not only for individuals to remain employed but also as a pathway to achieving career success. However, research has paid limited attention to persistence in self-employment. This research contributes to the understanding of antecedents for commitment to self-employment across countries, and therefore what should be done to enable particularly young individuals to stay self-employed. Moreover, the study also examines whether these antecedents have similar effects among individuals in salaried-employment.

Young entrepreneurs and non-teleological temporality in Portugal and the UK

The promotion of young enterprise is central to European Union youth policy, particularly since the financial crisis of 2007/2008. Expectations that young people need to be enterprising and eschew dependency on formal structures of salaried employment are a key narrative in European and national youth policies. These policy initiatives correspond with recent theoretical development of the entrepreneurial self as a managerial version of the governable individual. Endorsements of entrepreneurship implicitly promote a normative expectation that young people’s future orientations need to be innovative, flexible and creative. There is, therefore, an implicit temporality to youth entrepreneurship. This paper’s contribution to scholarship on how young lives are promoted and produced as entrepreneurial selves is to document how young people’s engagement with entrepreneurship fosters orientations to present and future. Conventionally entrepreneurs are assumed to be goal-orientated. In our qualitative study of young entrepreneurs in two European countries (n = 28), we find that this assumption of goal-orientation needs qualification. Young entrepreneurs in our study engage with the idea that being an entrepreneur is about being creative rather than seeking to maximise financial profit. Their focus on creativity, innovation and problem-solving is realised through a non-teleological commitment to what they are doing in the here and now, rather than calibrating their activities in relation to predetermined goals and worrying about the possibility of future failure.

Section 2

The first feature of the transformation described above consists in the dissolution of stable companies. Temporary and local coalitions took the place of stable teams of salaried collaborators (what used to be called “companies). These coalitions brought together around a defined project a group of individuals with their own independent artistic careers. The coalition model is both liberal and libertarian, in linking labor to the temporary mission and the circumscribed consent of the participants. Yet its presence in dance is not merely a response to economic pressures, as the dissolution of Mathilde Monnier’s company in 1999 indicates. This was not driven by real financial necessity (the company was well known and in receipt of funding as a Centre Chorégraphique National) but rather responded to the state of impasse generated by salaried employment within a company (what Monnier calls “family neurosis”) and to an acute consciousness that the reciprocal engagement of dancer and choreographer did not reach beyond mutual investment in particular projects. Precarity of labor thus became an internal artistic norm. The absence of permanent (or at least long-term) contracts for performers was no longer deplored; such contracts were shunned for reasons internal to artistic production. The regime of freelance work was no longer a poor substitute for coveted salaried employment; it became the social manifestation and indispensable accompaniment of dance artists’ acceptance and embodiment of economic liberalism. Boris Charmatz articulates the shift in exemplary fashion, defining freelancing as “accepting and embodying (social) precarity for the benefit of (artistic) exchange” (...

Participation of psychiatric nurses in public and private mental healthcare in Kenya

We studied the rate of participation of psychiatric nurses in mental healthcare in Kenya. A simple questionnaire was delivered to 50 nurses attending a mental health meeting of the National Nursing Alliance of Kenya in April 2012. Of the 40 nurses with psychiatric nursing qualifications, 19 worked specifically as psychiatric nurses; among those employed as general nurses, half their case-loads were mental health patients. Ten per cent of psychiatric nurses had run a private clinic (75% of them general clinics) and 15% were doing private locum work alongside salaried employment. Kenya would need to increase the number of psychiatric nurses 20-fold in order to achieve an internationally recommended ratio (for low-income countries) of 12 psychiatric nurses per 100 000. It appears psychiatric nurses are migrating internally to nursing positions in other areas of healthcare, aggravating the ‘brain drain’ in mental health.