Le genre au travail dans la sécurité privée

• Main Author: Sébastien Bauvet
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: La Nouvelle Revue du Travail 2017-06-01
• Series: La Nouvelle Revue du Travail
• Subjects: private security officer; relationship to work; interpersonal skills; gender relations; masculinity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nrt/3051

Abstract : The article studies the experiences and relationships to work of private security guards in France, a professional category that has become increasingly visible yet which remains relatively unknown. Recruitment in this sector is largely based on default decision-making and driven by a need for urgent results. Conditions of “social insecurity” mean that actors are likely to accept a certain number of responsibilities even as they find themselves in a situation of “civil insecurity”. It remains that the struggle against uncertainty is inherent to work activities, often involving a search for recognition that takes place on the edges of what has become a security ideology today. The reality is that a host of restrictive legal constraints and new behavioural imperatives force private security guards to mobilise a range of interpersonal skills. Men often end up investing only partially in these competencies, if only because the main resources that they use to resist domination at work derive less from the force of their virility than from the other dimensions associated with masculinity.