Since the reorganization, I began at 6: 30AM, about ten minutes before the official start of my workday. 15).Ĭonfronted with the prescribed work rhythm, Jounin quickly realized that he was not meeting expectations: “what was most disconcerting was that even by working poorly, I could not keep up with the schedule. He describes his on-the-job training-or rather trainings, since new postal workers are often immediately “brought into contact with multiple practices” (p. Building on studies of postal workers by labor sociologists such as Marie Cartier (2003), Didier Demazière and Delphine Mercier (2003), and Paul Bouffartigue and Jacques Bouteiller (2020), the book asks: how and to what extent do these strategic and organizational changes transform the activities of postal workers and affect their work conditions? Yet whereas Demazière and Mercier’s work was financed by La Poste and conducted in cooperation with the directors of a specific center, Jounin’s is an immersive investigation that was conducted undercover: he showed up at the human resources department and was hired as a postal worker without his recruiter or his colleagues knowing who he was. His work belongs to a trend in narrative sociology that has developed considerably in recent years and which emphasizes the “power of narratives” in analyzing reality (Laé, Madec, Murard, 2016).
Jounin introduces the reader to the world of a post office, seen through the eyes of a recently hired postal worker. The case of the postal service is exemplary in that it involves the rationalization of work through an algorithmic tool (the “Metod” program) that exists in similar forms in other organizations. He explains the succussive difficulties encountered on his route (rain, speed, the number of mailboxes, mistakes, and so on) as part of an ethnography of postal work. Jounin’s book revolves around the meaning of this injunction and its exemplification of the extreme “rationalization” to which postal workers are subject. His book opens with a striking image: an order received from his boss to “get rid” of his mail before returning back to the distribution center. These injunctions are central to Nicolas Jounin’s immersive fieldwork at a mail distribution center of La Poste, the French postal service, where he was hired as a postal worker. These incidents also call attention to the ambiguity of professional injunctions directed at workers more generally. Recurring stories about postal workers burning their mail, hoarding it, or throwing it into the garbage and forests raise many questions about their working conditions.
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