Employability and Industrial Mutations

9Reclassification and Employability: A Reading in Terms of Boundary Objects

The social support of corporate restructuring is a sensitive subject with high stakes in terms of responsibility. Little studied, this theme calls for a theoretical and methodological renewal (Beaujolin-Bellet et al. 2012¹), but access to data remains difficult. By proposing an original re-reading of old data, this chapter adopts an approach centered on the coordination mechanisms of the actors involved in a reclassification cell. The context of the social support of restructuring is complex and polyphonic: how do the various actors involved coordinate around a common objective, the employability of victims of collective redundancies, despite different universes of meaning and reference? To better grasp the conditions for the emergence of the collective actor necessary for the implementation of effective accompaniment (Beaujolin-Bellet 2003; Naulleau and Arnaud 2011; Beaujolin-Bellet and Schmidt 2012), we study the coordination artifacts between the multiple stakeholders, considering them as boundary objects. Boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989) are “poorly structured, material and procedural working arrangements situated between several social worlds or communities of practice” that allow “different groups to work together without prior consensus” (Star 2010, p. 19).

This chapter proposes to apply this analytical framework to the coordination mechanisms at work in outplacement units in order ...