- Sociologie du Travail
- A sociology of work, associated with the writings of certain French sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s, which provided at the time a refreshing critique of the factory-bound perspective of mainstream (mostly Anglo-Saxon) industrial sociology. This literature re-established the links which Karl Marx had sought to forge between, on the one hand, changes in work organization, technology, and production; and, on the other, personal alienation, class, and socio-political relationships. Leading figures were Georges Friedmann , Michel Crozier, Pierre Naville, Alain Touraine, and Serge Mallet, many of whose works have now been translated into English. Mallet's work stimulated an important debate about the existence of a new working class , but like much Sociologie du Travail, its iconoclasm was limited by technicism and technological determinism . Its influence on left-oriented research and thought in English has now been considerably eclipsed by more recent debates about skill and de-skilling , the labour process , post-fordism , and flexible employment. Michael Rose's Servants of Post-Industrial Power? (1979) is an excellent English-language history and analysis of the movement's theories and work.
Dictionary of sociology. 2013.