| Abstrakt: |
The article discusses the social relation and control used by business firms in France and Germany. The article also refers to the interpretation on the study "The Production of Hierarchy," by Jean-Daniel Reynaud. The authors of the articel says that the differences observed between French and German firms cannot be reduced to "differences in values" which legitimated by entrepreneurs and wage-earners, are presumed to be- come "normative constraints," guidelines for "preferences," in the two countries. To raise the question of "the source of values" indeed alters the Mertonian paradigm substantially. For Reynaud values have no explanatory power in themselves; rather they have an instrumental role, as a means in the interplay of alliances or compromises between the various social actors. Thus the existence of a "qualification space" that is relatively homogeneous from the skilled worker to the graduate engineer in German firms, which in our opin- ion derives from an interaction between the educational system and the industrial system, would only be an effect of "joint control" on the shop floor around the values of Bildung and Leistung, legitimated both by wage earners and management. But if one accepts the approach of Jean-Daniel Reynaud, his pluralist perspective on society as a "totality, neither coherent nor continuous, of point-by-point joint controls by social ac- tors" in which he acknowledges the dispersion of interests, conflicts of values or rationalities, how then to account for the different means of control observed in France and Germany? |
