Abstract
There has been renewed interest in France in the concepts of suffering at work since the late 1990s. A rising number of claims have been filed in this area. The media have often reported on people committing suicide at their workplace, on new legal mechanisms in this field, and on related issues. Many terms and names of clinical categories used when discussing suffering and ill-being at work are in fact foreign terms (mainly from North America) taken over into French. This chapter contains three case studies on stress, burnout and the concepts of psychological harassment, mobbing and bullying, and will look at the way French researchers and social actors took hold of, translated, and adapted these terms for the purposes of French national concerns. On each occasion, these terms and concepts were “sneaked in” by actors, organisations or mediation forums which acted as vectors or supported the new terminology. They acted as “moral entrepreneurs”, by popularizing and supporting the idea of a new pathology.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 10 for a focus on the Japanese context (Editors’ note).
- 2.
In 1977, two Canadians, Smythe and Moldofsky, suggested the term “fibromyalgia” (formerly Fibrosotis) to describe a clinical entity characterized by the existence of sore spots when pressing, and the coexistence of strain and sleep disorders.
- 3.
Spleen, stress, SPID: one can only be struck by the similar soundings of these three words, which is probably no coincidence.
- 4.
These three categories were chosen because they correspond to the foreign clinical categories mentioned the most in the French debate on mental health at work.
- 5.
The research work here is mainly qualitative (notes, archives and interviews), but concerning hospitals, it is quantitative also (see footnote n°10).
- 6.
The word “stress” was included in the two main French dictionaries (Le Robert and the Larousse) in 1950, with a definition which has since remained highly influenced by Selye’s approach. Some say the word “stress” was not imported and that its etymology is indeed French – from the old French workd “estrece”, which means tightness or oppression, stemming itself from the latin word “stringere” which means “to be tense” (Gonthier et al. 2005). However, this etymology does not really show that the word “stress” has entered contemporary French vocabulary as an English-language word.
- 7.
- 8.
According to these approaches, the individual assesses both the difficulties he must overcome, and the means available to do so. If he thinks that what is required is beyond his reach, the result will be stress. This approach assumes that an individual’s capabilities of adaptation and perception are stable characteristics.
- 9.
For a history of the psychopathology of work in France, see Billiard (2011).
- 10.
According to Dejours (1980), in order to cope with the gap between the work actually done and the work prescribed, which was the root of their suffering, workers set up individual and collective defence strategies specific to each working environment.
- 11.
- 12.
See Chap. 4 (Editors’ note).
- 13.
Also see Chap. 3 (Editors’ note).
- 14.
For a description of burnout in Quebec, see the chapter written by L. Kirouac. Some people in France have linked the term “burnout” to the old French expression “faire suer le burnous” from the Arab word “burnous”, a large fleece coat with a hood, which was initially worn by people from Maghreb. The term was then used in broader terms to refer to the people wearing the coat. This expression appeared in the early twentieth century and comes from the colonial era when the settlers had their indigenous employees work hard or even very hard – being indigenous, they would be wearing a burnous.
- 15.
According to a WHO study, 21 % of French people experienced depressive disorders whereas only 9.9 % of Germans did. This study was carried out between 2000 and 2005 and involved 89,000 people in 18 different countries. Participants were asked to answer a standard set of questions on the symptoms of a nervous breakdown: sadness, sleep cycles, and so on. The comparisons based on the ESEMeD (European Study of the Epidemiology of Mental Disorders), a study carried out between 2001 and 2003 involving people aged above 18 in six different countries, showed over one year twice the number of major depressive episodes in France (6 %) than in Germany (3 %).
- 16.
Also see Chap. 7 (Editors’ note).
- 17.
On this occasion, French MP Benoît Hamon (from the French Socialist Party) introduced an amendment to the draft law on social dialogue, advocating that burnout be recognized by law as an occupational disease. This reflects the ongoing conflict between the left-wing of the socialist party, which claims to be anti-establishment and favourable to workers, and the right-wing, to which the Prime Minister belongs. He is accused of being too much in favour of business interests.
- 18.
According to Philippe Zawieja (2015), the author of an important work in this area: “now the star of psychosocial risks, the word burnout is used indiscriminately, just like the word stress was a few years back”.
- 19.
This English word not only has a scientific connotation, but also sounds like something bursting or collapsing. It refers directly to professional fatigue and exhaustion; both popular issues in France (see Loriol 2000 and notes 6 and 13).
- 20.
In 1994, The British Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union defined workplace bullying as: “Persistent, offensive, abusive, intimidating or insulting behaviour, abuse of power or unfair penal sanctions which makes the recipient feel upset, threatened, humiliated or vulnerable, which undermines their self-confidence and which may cause them to suffer stress.”
- 21.
This expression stems from the concept of “sexual harassment”, coined by American feminist academics at Cornell university in the mid-1970s (Salah-Eddine 2010).
- 22.
PRESST study (“Health and satisfaction of Healthcare Workers in France and in Europe – Prevention of Early Exit”), French wing of the European scientific study NEXT (Nurses’ Early Exit Study), conducted in 2002 with 5400 nurses and healthcarers in France.
- 23.
This is comparable to the political situation in which Benoît Hamon was encouraged to take action on the issue of burnout (see note 15).
- 24.
Inspired by the American “psychosocial factors of stress”.
- 25.
In keeping with the trend in Anglo-Saxon research on well-being (Wainwright and Calnan 2011).
- 26.
In the course of my research on ill-being at work in French hospitals from the 1990s to the present day, I observed that the concept of stress was replaced for a short period by that of burnout between 1991 and 1996. Burnout was then replaced by the concept of harassment between 1999 and 2002. These three concepts, along with psychosocial risks, are nowadays used almost indiscriminately.
- 27.
See “La négociation collective d’entreprise sur les risques psychosociaux en Île-de-France : du stress au harcèlement et à la violence au travail”, BREF Thématique, n° 55, March 2015.
- 28.
See Chap. 1 for a similar recommandation on the basis of questionnaires elaboration (Editors’ note).
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Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank Camille Thompson for her translation from the French.
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Loriol, M. (2017). Appropriation and Acculturation in the French Debate on Mental Health at Work of Anglo-Saxon Clinical Categories (Stress, Burnout and Mobbing). In: Cassilde, S., Gilson, A. (eds) Psychosocial Health, Work and Language. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50545-9_6
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