Concentrating mostly on France, this paper considers the changing interests and the renewal of academic alliances in the sociology of work and labor over the last 50 years. Three periods result from the combined dynamics of sociology's internal agenda and societal changes: (1) analysis of blue-collar labor as the downgrading process of complete work in taylorist industry; (2) sociology of labor markets and employment, and analysis of the bargaining processes of rules, identities and the value of work; (3) reconciliation of work and labor in distributed and flexible organizations, based on mobile and involved workers.

Keywords: hidden agenda, interdisciplinary alliances, science and advocacy, shop floor, employment, work content.

Sociologists of work have at least one idea in common: work is not a standard factor of production, as capital or raw materials are. Management experts, social psychologists, specialists in ergonomics, as well as historians and some economists would also agree. The whole historical drama of capitalism is rooted in this idea. Organizational practices and scientific theories approach labor from two different conceptual angles (Biernacki 1995): either they try to reduce the labor of wage earners to a pure commodity status, or they consider it as the ex post action induced by an ex ante contract which promises the future delivery of a labor force. In both cases, labor involves three dimensions: skills, exchange value of skills, and work content.

The sociology of work and labor may be perceived as having developed in an erratic manner. At first sight it seems to have become more and more vulnerable to centrifugal dispersions of topics, methods, conceptual frameworks, and academic alliances, if not to parochial micro-debates. Observation nevertheless suggests that it has been and remains focused, that its agendas keep dealing with one major issue: the tensions between the two antagonistic or complementary facets of work and labor, namely, human work as personal creation, and labor as pain (for a seminal contribution, see Arendt 1958). According to the specific period considered, scientists, who are also influenced by the evolution of the real world around them, allocate more attention to one facet or to the other. Agendas can only be defined ex post. They are hidden because they emerge from composite effects involving economic, political, and social changes or innovations as well as endogenous conceptual and methodological creativity in scientific comm unities. Because they are historical sciences, social sciences develop knowledge under the combined dynamics of their internal agenda and societal changes.

Looking backwards and adopting a chronological perspective, I shall argue that hidden agendas have driven the sociology of work and labor as a domain over the last 50 years or so. Putting the emphasis mainly on French sociology (which has often been identified as critical and creative), I shall identify three distinct periods. From the 195 Os to the 1970s, social scientists questioned the reduction of creative work to labor disutility, by emphasizing the loss of skills involved in taylorist designs of work content. From the 1980s to the mid 1990s, they transferred their research interests from work content to exchange values of skills on the labor markets and employment norms. After the mid-1990s, they tried to reconcile work and labor, by handling the creation of skills, norms of employment and work content in integrated theoretical frameworks (Pouchet 2001; Jeannot and Veltz 2001). Though in different ways, each period raises the same set of basic questions already addressed many years before by Marx about industrial capitalism in its early stages. How far do hierarchies and markets destroy work as creation by handling labor as disutility? How do workers get organized to resist such a process of destruction? Are they able to overcome the asymmetric nature of authority in organizations or the pressure of markets? How do they protect or improve their working conditions, and how do they gain benefits from the organizations as wage earners or from the markets as independent workers?

1 From Work to Labor: Science and Advocacy

After the Second World War, in France as in most industrial countries, most sociologists dealing with work and labor embraced a Marxist perspective while concentrating on industrial blue-collar workers, the so-called 'direct producers'. Empirical research consistently linked labor conditions and collective action forms to the struggle between capital and labor, technological change providing the linkage by downgrading independent craft work.

In a capitalist economy, workers are postulated as being defined merely by the measurable quantity of human energy they contribute to direct production. Industrial organizations divide labor to favor exploitation by the extortion of the added value of labor by capitalists. They induce alienation of the workers, who are deprived of the meaning of their jobs (Marx 1857), and expelled from the core of society (Halbwachs 1912/1970). Blue-collar labor is reduced to the unavoidable pain of people whose only marketable resource is their physical strength. Capitalism is rooted in the antagonism between two classes. Alienated industrial worker and capital owner are struggling about the appropriation of the added value produced by the former and confiscated by the latter. Therefore, industrial organizations at the bottom line are the stage for empirical investigation. Nevertheless the theoretical target of sociology should remain the working class itself, not the firm or the market as specific social constructs. While the future of capitalism occurs within actual organizations, it can only be understood through the lenses of social production relationships, which determines the struggle between capital and labor from the outside of single organizations.

The large industrial firm (in sectors like mining, metallurgy, or automobiles) provides the single location, meant as the advanced post of modernity. Through the evolutionist lenses of Marxism, other types of organizations appear to be either archaic vestiges of a lost society (for instance small companies) or devoted to the organization of exploitation (for instance administrative units), thus supposed to be non-productive. Within large industrial firms, interest concentrates on the very center of the exploitation of labor, the workshop. Single time means that the actual situation of labor as observed within the workshop defines the empirical object of inquiry. The workshop is considered as a microcosmic settlement of modem exploitation and alienation. It provides the best location to observe the struggle between capital and labor. What happens at the level of the shop floor is relevant for society as a whole. Single action refers to the fact that analysis deals with the consequences the mechanical rationali zation of production generates for work. Sociologists therefore observe actual properties of industrial labor, such as the separation between conception and execution of work, the standardization of operation stations, the development of time-based payment and skill loss, feelings such as class consciousness, satisfaction or deprivation, behaviors like apathy, resistance or collective action, etc. Watching the physical locations where people interact with their environment through tools and machines, scientists are able to describe the inherent tensions between on one side the individual needs of workers and their rights, and on the other side the abuses or constraints their employers enact.

Such a posture induces ambiguous consequences. The sociology of work and labor relates to the rising demand for scientific results and approaches emerging from the organizations themselves, while scholars feel entitled, relying upon their scattered empirical observations, to discuss in a critical way the future of industrial society. This classic tragedy appears today as the prisoner of an old-fashioned framework. What was taken for granted by the sociological community even in the 1 960s appears today as rather biased. The cast of the social tragedy was made up of males, working in large industrial firms, mostly engaged in industrial manufacturing. The labor conditions that exist in the workshop at a certain moment in time are supposed to explain all of their feelings and behaviors. Women, skilled or non-industrial workers, clerks, white-collar workers, professionals, etc are left outside the frame. Supposedly they are not direct producers, therefore do not matter. Scientifically, they are not worthy of any interest.

Work is not a common factor of production exchanged on a market. Because they strongly endorsed such a postulate, early sociologists of labor and work simply dismissed the labor market as a legitimate field of inquiry. They settled in a vacuum left by economists and entered the black box of productive organizations. Their academic territory included four main topics or sub-themes: identities and changes of the working class as a social grouping, conditions of labor and social action, social psychology of needs, and excluded products and markets. Focusing on how skills were downgraded by technological development, they paid attention to the changing characteristics of both labor and commodity markets, but forgot about any theoretical alternative.