Proposal for an analytic framework of the compromises adopted by livestock farmers to improve their work organisation

摘要

Improving the work organisation of livestock farmers requires understanding both the concrete components of work organisation and the feelings of farmers about their work. Based on a theoretical study of the work approaches developed by animal sciences and psychodynamics science and on a multiple-job-holder case study, we developed an analytic framework of the work organisation on a livestock farm. This framework made it possible to analyse this work organisation as a compromise between farmers’ expectations about their work and their time constraints. It was composed of three entities: farmers’ expectations about their work, represented by the combination of five types of subjective rationalities of work, time and calendar constraints and four factors of work organisation determining the work to be done, the people involved and the time to do it. Each factor of the work organisation was analysed according to two points of view: to what subjective work rationalities and to what time constraints does each factor refer? After describing the analytic framework, we present its application to?two cases to reveal the power of this new approach to help in clarifying what compromises are made by farmers to cope with work and how they feel about it.