“This is no place for apprentices”: a study on the work and knowledge of workers in the electrical sectorAbstract
This article presents the results of a study conducted with workers at a power generation and transmission substation of a Brazilian electrical company. The objective was to analyze work situations and understand the knowledge required, mobilized, and constituted by operators in the performance of their professional duties. Grounded in the sociology of work and in ergology, the field research was conducted through interviews, observations, document review, and the use of the instruction to the double method. The findings highlight complex, high-risk work situations that, despite being strongly regulated, do not dispense with the knowledge that workers constitute, mobilize, and share in their daily work.
Keywords
workers’ knowledge; electrical sector; human activity; ergology; education
Resumo
O artigo apresenta os resultados de uma pesquisa realizada com trabalhadores de uma subestação de geração e transmissão de energia elétrica de uma empresa do setor elétrico brasileiro. O objetivo foi analisar as situações de trabalho e compreender os saberes requeridos, mobilizados e constituídos pelos operadores no desenvolvimento de suas atribuições profissionais. Fundamentada na sociologia do trabalho e na ergologia, a pesquisa de campo foi realizada por meio de entrevistas, observações, consulta de documentos e uso do método de instruções ao sósia. Os resultados evidenciam situações de trabalho complexas e de alto risco, mas que, apesar de fortemente normatizadas, não prescindem dos saberes que os trabalhadores constituem, mobilizam e partilham no cotidiano laboral.
Palavras-chave
saberes dos trabalhadores; setor elétrico; atividade humana; ergologia; educação
Resumen
Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación realizada con trabajadores de una subestación de generación y transmisión de energía de una empresa eléctrica brasileña. El objetivo fue analizar las situaciones laborales y comprender los conocimientos que los operadores requieren, movilizan y construyen en el desarrollo de sus funciones profesionales. Con base en la sociología del trabajo y la ergología, la investigación de campo se llevó a cabo mediante entrevistas, observaciones, consulta de documentos y el uso del método de doble instrucción. Los resultados destacan situaciones laborales complejas y de alto riesgo que, a pesar de estar fuertemente reguladas, no prescinden de los conocimientos que los trabajadores construyen, movilizan y comparten en su trabajo diario.
Palabras clave
conocimiento de los trabajadores; sector eléctrico; actividad humana; ergología; educación
Introduction
Ordinary representations of modern work commonly associate it with factory workers performing repetitive movements in response to the rhythm imposed by machines throughout the production process. This is what Rot and Vatin (2022) point out in a study on monitoring and control work in the chemical and nuclear industries. However, as the authors emphasize, what men and women in this sector-continuous-flow process industries, in which automated systems play a central role – actually do is unintelligible if we are guided by ordinary representations of work. If so, understanding work in this type of productive process becomes more difficult, both because of the complexity of the processes underway (inaccessible to those without training in chemistry or physics) and because of the absence of cognitive points of reference about what it means to work in such industries. This issue is of direct interest to the present research since our central concern is work in the Brazilian electrical energy sector.
With the aim of analyzing and understanding the in situ work of operators in power plants and substations that generate and transmit electrical energy, the research reported in this article examines the work situations of these operators, asking what they do, mobilize, and constitute, individually and collectively, in the course of carrying out their work activities. Competent acting is not a given but a question (Schwartz, 1998). From this perspective, the relationship between work and knowledge takes center stage. This is so, as we will underscore below, for two compelling reasons.
First, because, following Yves Schwartz, we are aware that work situations are, so to speak, traversed by knowledge and by a history. In any work environment, every human activity “encounters knowledge accumulated in instruments, in techniques, in collective devices; every work situation is saturated with norms of life, with forms of exploitation of nature and of human beings by one another” (Schwartz, 2016, p. 180; our translation). Second, because, if we consider the conceptual pair at the base of the ergonomics of activity (prescribed work and real work) and the distinction at its foundation (the recognition that there is always a gap between the two), the act of working involves something akin to creation on the part of those who do it. In short, accomplishing what must be done requires the arbitrations of activity, and the latter is of an irreducible complexity1.
The scenario we are describing takes on particular relevance when, alongside the complexity of human activity in work situations, it also becomes evident that the contemporary world of work adopts management practices that are often harmful to that which they aim to manage (Théry, 2010; Clot, 2010; Alves, 2014). Moreover, as in the case of the electrical energy sector, we are dealing with public institutions or companies, or with regulated public services (Idec, 2019), whose functions and goals are affected by neoliberal ideology. Entrusting regulation to the market – or looking to it for guidance – has consequences for all those employed in the public service. The workers of the company in which we conducted our investigation know this well: it was being privatized at that very moment, with various consequences for the operators and their work collectives.
What we have just emphasized poses a problem in which a singular organizational context becomes entangled with structuring socioeconomic elements that bear on the very substance of the company’s productive activity. This allows us to return to what we noted at the start of the text: the question of what is distinctive about continuous-flow process industries and the complexity of human activity. Thus, on the one hand, we have a strategic sector of great importance for Brazil; on the other, we have a complex work environment in which workers carry out their professional duties and which needs to be better understood. The investigative effort we undertook in this research seeks to make a contribution in this regard.
This research aims to understand the knowledge required, mobilized, and constituted by the operators of a power generation and transmission substation of a Brazilian electrical company. This proposition, broad in scope, aims not only at understanding the nature and dynamics of the knowledge needed to perform the role of substation operator but also at investigating how this knowledge is mobilized, transformed, and constituted in the context of the current organizational changes and the contemporary challenges faced by the electrical sector.
In what follows, we will first address the theoretical and methodological aspects of the investigation. Then, in the second section, the aim is to situate the socioeconomic and organizational context of the company at the time the research was conducted. In the third section, we will analyze the nature and complexity of the work of operators in power generation and transmission substations. In the fourth section we will discuss the operators’ competent acting, pointing out the individual and collective aspects that constitute it. The fifth section takes up, discusses, and analyzes what has been presented, placing the set of issues addressed in dialogue with the theoretical foundations of the research. Finally, we present a synthesis of what has been developed in the text and outline the conclusions of the investigation.
Theoretical and methodological aspects
This research is grounded in two theoretical pillars: ergology and sociology of work in the Navillean tradition. Ergology is an approach to work initially developed in France by the philosopher Yves Schwartz and his collaborators in the early 1980s. Mobilizing and broadening the founding conceptual pair of French ergonomics – the terms prescribed work (what must be done) and real work (what is actually done in the concrete situation) – ergology examines the complexity of human activity and what is constituted in the experience of life and work of men and women in their professional settings, thereby raising theoretical, epistemological, and political questions2. Ergology’s contribution affords us a fine-grained understanding of what takes place in the work environment.
Regarding the sociology of work, our orientation takes as its reference the perspective of Pierre Naville (1904–1993). Considered one of the fathers of French sociology of work, Naville authored a body of work notable for its detailed analysis of technical changes in production and for situating these changes within the broader framework of wage labor – the contemporary form of work management in capitalist society. Between 1958 and 1959, Pierre Naville was tasked with carrying out a broad study of automation across different productive sectors in France, from the biscuit industry to the petroleum industry. The result of these investigations was published in 1963 in a book titled Vers l’Automatisme Social? (Naville, 2016), a work that has become a classic and is indispensable for those who study continuous-flow process industries.
Pierre Naville’s perspective inspired the studies developed by Rot and Vatin (2022), who also form part of the theoretical basis of the present research. These theoretical perspectives are highly pertinent because they align closely with the object of our investigation, especially since they enable a refined understanding of the dynamics of the interfaces between human beings and the technical devices of production, bringing out what is characteristic of continuous-flow process industries and what is proper to the human in highly technological or machine-mediated work environments.
This research consists of a qualitative case-study investigation conducted at an electrical substation located in the state of Goiás (Brazil), with the participation of eleven professionals: nine operators, one supervisor, and one manager. Table 1 characterizes the profile of the research participants, which reveals a predominantly male composition, with ten male operators and one female operator3:
To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the operators’ work, we used three different techniques for data generation: semi-structured interviews with all research participants; on-site observations carried out by accompanying several work shifts at the substation (documented in a field notebook detailing routines, shift changes, events, and so on) and the instruction to the double method. The latter had to be adapted because the number of operators had decreased as the company underwent transformations stemming from the privatization process. As a result, the instruction to the double sessions were conducted in pairs with the operators and individually with the manager. Even with these adjustments, they played an important role and provided access to details and nuances about the work and the act of working that would have been inaccessible to the researchers by any other means4.
The organization and analysis of the data drew on Bardin’s (2016) content-analysis method and followed three stages: pre-analysis, analytical description, and inferential interpretation, with constant back-and-forth movements across the material as a whole. In the final stage, a process of interpretation, the drawing of inferences, and the presentation of the results were carried out. To this end, we worked from four dimensions of analysis defined on the basis of our contact with the field and the research data: (1) the regulations that govern operators’ work; (2) the knowledge and resources mobilized in practice; (3) the collective relationships and implicit rules shared by the group; and (4) the elements and values that characterize a “well-done” work. Finally, in the synthesis and interpretation stage, we systematically elaborated the categories and presented the results based on the overall data of the investigation.
In accordance with Resolution No. 466 of December 12, 2012, of the Brazilian National Health Council, this research was submitted for review by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) and registered on Plataforma Brasil. The fieldwork and analyses were conducted between August 2022 and December 2023, respecting all established ethical procedures.
Socioeconomic and organizational context of the substation
The substation investigated, a key piece of the energy infrastructure of the Brazilian Center-West, was inaugurated on October 28, 1972. Its strategic location (218 km from the Itumbiara hydroelectric power plant and 196 km from Brasília) enables optimizing the flow of energy, ensuring the stability of supply for the metropolitan region of Goiânia and the Federal District. The substation’s history dates back to the creation of the institution to which it belongs, in 1957, by decree of President Juscelino Kubitschek, with the aim of solving the energy crisis that was threatening the supply for the country’s main socioeconomic centers.
Originally under state control, the company expanded significantly, encompassing facilities in 15 Brazilian states and the Federal District. Its integrated system comprises 22 hydroelectric plants, 2 thermoelectric plants, and 1 wind complex, in addition to an extensive transmission network and substations. The substation studied, one of the company’s 72, operates with high-voltage equipment (230 and 345 kV) and is considered the second largest in the state of Goiás. Its infrastructure includes five transformers with a total capacity of 1,125 MVA, two bus bars, four transmission lines, five interconnection lines, a capacitor bank, and two line reactors, along with complete auxiliary systems.
In September 2022, the initial period of the empirical investigation, the substation had a staff of 23 professionals distributed across management, supervision, operation, maintenance, and general services. Of this total, 11 employees (47.8% of the workforce) participated in the study, all from the management, supervision, and operations departments.
Starting in 2021, substation workers faced a scenario of uncertainty due to the approval of Provisional Measure No. 1,031 of February 23, 2021, which culminated in the privatization of Eletrobrás in 2022. This privatization process deeply affected the work environment, introducing an element of instability that challenged the established relationship between the operators and their professional duties. The resulting organizational transformations affected not only the practical aspects of the profession but also the meaning that workers attributed to their work. The tension between the value they assigned to their work and the new realities imposed by privatization became evident during the research.
Insecurity regarding replacement and the feeling of professional devaluation emerged as central themes in the operators’ accounts. Operator 1, for example, while expressing himself with a certain regret, reported that in the current context the experience and knowledge accumulated over decades did not in any way guarantee his permanence at the company: “I always saw myself as an indispensable figure. But as time goes by, you realize that you are replaceable, at every moment, at every instant…” (Op. 1).
This perception is corroborated by the account of Operator 9, who seems to consider himself disposable and devalued by the company:
Today I don’t feel important to this work. I feel like… more like I’m being tossed aside. As if the work I do isn’t important anymore. As if the company is trying to show that we’re not important, that we can be swapped out at any time, right” [sic] (Op. 9).
These accounts signal a kind of reversal in the relationship between these operators and their work – that is, a complete inversion of the relationship of meaning they had established with their professional duties. In short: the operators seem to perceive themselves not as central figures within the company but as being swept along by the profound changes underway, in the face of which their work no longer seems important to their employers.
Thus, the narrow business logic focused on cost reduction appears to override the recognition of the value of the knowledge and experience accumulated by workers, which is not without negative consequences for the very effectiveness and efficiency of companies, as shown by studies in different sectors, from petrochemicals (Lima, 2007) to the metal-mechanical industry (Rosa, 2004).
The accounts of the workers who participated in the study reveal that privatization not only affected the practical aspects of their profession but also deeply impacted the meaning they attribute to their work activity. The lack of motivation and the feeling of not belonging to the company expressed in their accounts evidence the subjective impact of organizational change, converging with aspects also observed in other research (Clot, 2010; Daniellou, 2010; Salvagni & Veronese, 2017), which points to a problematic combination of high responsibility and potential for serious accidents, added to organizational uncertainties and uncertainties about professional futures—a formula that amplifies invisible risks (such as stress, anxiety, and fear) that affect both the performance of work and the workers’ own health.
Demands and complexity of work at a substation
Operating with high-voltage equipment (230 and 345 kV), the substation we studied presents a complex work reality with a strong component of risk of serious accidents, yet strategically central for companies and for the citizens of Goiás. Work at the substation involves the establishment of routines and the performance of periodic inspections, all articulated with the efficient coordination of shift changes.
Work in productive systems operating in continuous flow has its own characteristics. One of these specific characteristics is the requirement of shift work. In the case of the electrical substation investigated, the organization of work across the different shifts – morning, afternoon, and night – presents specific demands and tasks that constitute a significant challenge for operators, both because of the difficulty of anticipating when the work shift will take place and because shift work affects family life. As the operators themselves report:
When you work in this role, you must know going in that you’ll work all sorts of hours and that the shift rotates and alternates. You’ll work at night, in the afternoon, and in the morning, including on weekends. Because of that, you miss out on social events, family birthdays, commemorative dates, Christmas, and even your own birthday (…) because operations run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And you find that out really fast, in the first few years, by the second or third year you know whether you can handle it or not [sic] (Op. 2).
The most frustrating thing about continuous shift work is not being able to establish a normal routine “sleeping every night in your own house.” Today I’m here, tomorrow I’ll be here in the afternoon, the day after tomorrow I’ll be working at night. (Op. 8)
Each work shift imposes specific challenges, with the morning shift standing out as the most intense, when the maintenance team and external service providers begin their tasks, suppliers deliver equipment, and operators are responsible for opening, monitoring, and closing the documentation of all activities. The afternoon shift presents challenges related to the continuity of operations, requiring a quick grasp of the status of every ongoing task. As one of the operators puts it: “on the afternoon shift, you take over tasks already in progress. Especially when there are shutdowns and so on. You pick up the work while it is already underway” (Op. 10). What he refers to as “in progress” concerns the investigation of possible equipment problems and maintenance actions, which are primarily assigned to the daytime teams. The night shift, in turn, although it rarely involves scheduled work–maintenance, swaps, testing, and so on–imposes other significant demands. Sleep deprivation and the fatigue stemming from monotony and physiological cycles make this one of the most challenging shifts, as Operator 2 emphasizes: “you need to develop emotional resilience to withstand the loneliness. To endure that time when silence is deafening. The silence of the early hours, the silence of holidays, of weekends. That is deafening, isn’t it?” [sic] (Op. 2). Operator 10 explains:
[…] as the hours go by, the fatigue comes on naturally. (…) When there’s an explosion, an urgent need to act, the adrenaline is so intense that sleep vanishes. The big problem, sometimes, is that the reasoning can’t keep up with that energy. You even have to monitor whether your actions are appropriate. Because the thinking slows down.
This is an interesting point about work in industries that operate in continuous flow, since it is work that takes a physical toll and, in its own way, induces a fatigue that is hard to measure, especially in monitoring and operations-control roles. It is a formula that collides with ordinary representations of work and of working, as physical mobilization and the energy expenditure produced by movement are not at the center of the work processes underway; what is central are attention and cognitive dispositions, while, as Rot and Vatin (2022) show, production becomes inversely proportional to the direct work expended.
From the workers’ point of view, nothing is simple. On the night shift, as one of the operators said, “you even have to monitor whether your actions are appropriate” (Op. 10), knowing how to deal “with the passing of the hours” when the job consists of watching monitors. As another operator put it, you have to withstand the loneliness in “the time when silence is deafening” (Op. 2).
This feature, characteristic of work in continuous-flow productive systems in which the work routine sometimes consists of watching monitors and “waiting for something to happen, or, in other words, monitoring so that nothing happens” (Rot & Vatin, 2022, p. 28; our translation), is experienced ambiguously by workers. We can say, following Bidet (2011), that, in the face of ordinary representations of work, this work seems to dissolve in the eyes of the workers when computerized systems and technical devices take charge of production, and also in the eyes of those outside this work environment. The professionals who participated in our research show that they understand they perform a job that is demanding in many respects – professional acts that they themselves value and that are considered of great social relevance5. On the other hand, these workers do not fail to notice, not without signaling a certain discomfort, that this is a professional practice whose representation clashes with the usual ways of conceiving work and working: “some people ask: what is it you actually do for work? Why is it that I never see you working” (Op. 9); “it’s really hard to know that other people think you’re idle, that is, that you’re not producing” (Op. 3).
Remarks like these, which we have just highlighted, are quite revealing of the conflicts of representation surrounding work. They were frequent during the research, showing how work in this kind of productive system needs to be better understood by society and also signaling the relevance of investigating in greater detail the work process underway. That is what we will attempt to do in the next sections.
A strongly regulated, high-risk work environment
The knowledge required of operators in the Brazilian electrical sector is grounded, essentially, in mastery of the core knowledge gained through electrotechnical training and in a rigorous regulatory framework that reflects the high-risk nature of the profession. As Rot and Vatin (2022) noted, in work environments in which any error can lead to very serious human and environmental consequences, regulation becomes particularly demanding. This highly codified work context establishes clear guidelines aimed at ensuring both worker safety and the reliability of system operations – in this specific case, the national electrical system.
The regulatory framework to which we refer is defined outside the work situations and is established, to a large extent, by three entities: the Brazilian National Electric System Operator (ONS), responsible for coordinating operations; the Brazilian National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL), which regulates the sector; and the Brazilian Ministry of Labor, notably through the Regulatory Norms (NRs). These are, as we have indicated, regulations external to the company.
In parallel, internally, the company itself develops specific regulations in the shape of Normative Instructions (NIs) and Operational Manuals (OMs), which define how facilities are to be used and the specific operational procedures. Additionally, also in line with the characteristics of the productive units, the companies are guided by the Electric Power System Operation Norm (NOE). Taken as a whole, these norms constitute an integrated set that guides and standardizes operational activities. In general terms, for operators and managers, this is a strongly regulated kind of action.
To ensure mastery of the required knowledge, a continuous triennial recertification process is established, demanded by the ONS, which involves comprehensive tests and assessments that gauge the operators’ technical knowledge. The workers’ statements reveal the centrality of codified knowledge and norms in their professional practice, evidencing very narrow margins of maneuver: “operations work is work that is built on rules, on norms. You have to execute the norms” (Op. 8), in which the operator must be assertive. As Op. 5 told us, there is no room to hesitate, because “in our service, in our role, you don’t need your own conviction; you must follow the rules. What is written down to be done” [sic] (Op. 5).
As can be seen, the operators strongly internalize compliance with the regulatory aspects that frame their role and their practices, configuring an important element of their professional identity – something the recourse to the expression “in our service…” helps to measure. It is a responsibility of conduct that seems to be assumed at the individual level by the operators and by their professional collective, and that is essential for acting on incidents and avoiding accidents, as well as for acting on them should they arise.
Operating a large-scale electrical system reveals its maximum complexity at moments of disturbance and emergency. It is at these critical moments that operators’ knowledge is truly put to the test, requiring not only technical knowledge but also emotional control, the capacity for quick decisions, and the management of the psychological pressure inherent in the responsibility of maintaining the energy supply for thousands or millions of people. In this respect, it is worth citing the operators’ own testimony:
If a general disturbance happens, you can bet you get butterflies in your stomach. It’s like professional singers who, before going on stage, feel that chill down their spine, that knot in their stomach, until they can finally take a deep breath and get into the zone. The responsibility is enormous! An entire city, a state, several cities can be left without power depending on how you act, on your decisions, on your knowledge, and on your ability to stay calm. Because in a general disturbance, everything goes dark, the alarms go off, it’s a frightening scene. Some [operators] may panic, feel like crying, like hiding” [sic] (Op. 1).
Even after 27 years of experience, when an alarm goes off, my heart still races (…). Acting under pressure, with all the alarms sounding, the energy fluctuating, you need to think and act fast, with the adrenaline way up there (Op. 5).
To summarize what has been pointed out, the findings of our study show that codified knowledge, norms, and instructions set ex ante to work situations constitute, in the first instance, a kind of backbone of the electrical sector, establishing and fixing the foundation of the technical knowledge needed to carry out tasks. We can say, then, following the founding distinction of the ergonomics of activity, that prescribed work occupies a cardinal place in this productive sector that operates in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electrical energy. However, as we will show next, this is only part of the matter.
Inside the work process: from required knowledge to mobilized knowledge
Our research reveals that, behind the codified and highly regulated knowledge, other types of knowledge also take place and acquire decisive importance for the energy sector’s technical system to function without breakdowns or major incidents. The interviews with operators, the analysis of the work, and the field notes allow us to better understand this issue, which involves scrutinizing the operators’ real work.
As we have sought to show, the electrotechnical training required of the operator marks only the beginning of a long trajectory in which their qualification is built, with work experience and certifications that attest to the operator’s aptitude to perform the role. The synthesis of this convergence is the competence of the operator, enabling them to act collectively, perform shared actions, and, in situ, respond at the level of the demands of their duties, whose risks of accidents with human and economic harm are of great magnitude. As one of our interlocutors stated: “the person has to be trained. They can’t just be thrown in, because this is no place for apprentices” (Op. 9).
Over the course of the process mentioned above, in addition to the strictly technical characteristics formalized in the manuals and operating norms, the workers develop their own perceptions of what their role effectively requires. Based on the individual interviews and considering the emphasis and frequency of the participants’ remarks, it was possible to categorize these perceptions into four types of characteristics required in performing the operator role. Quite fittingly, we will call these characteristics, which are attuned to professional action, competence.
The first comprises a set of characteristics strongly emphasized by our interlocutors and that we have grouped under the label of emotional control. This was the most cited and emphasized competence by the workers, including the supervisor and the manager. Indeed, given the nature of the task carried out, this is something central. As one of the operators told us: “in the moment of disturbance, what stands out most is emotional readiness rather than technical preparation” (Op. 7).
Alongside the competence mentioned above, communication and relational skills were also strongly emphasized. These concern teamwork and its intrinsic demands – collectively conducting a common task – and in which interpersonal relationships appear to occupy an important place, especially in the case of teams that work in shifts, since this is a mode of organizing the workday in which coexistence is prolonged and takes on a singular shape.
On the other hand, surprisingly, the technical competencies of the role – that is, its formal, specific corpus – although they form the fundamental base of the operator’s role, were not in the foreground of the remarks made by operators and managers, appearing with less emphasis in the statements and in the frequency of mentions. To be precise, they appear in the manager’s speech and in five of the ten operators. Even so, although less emphasized, these technical competencies do appear, whether in reference to the necessary knowledge of operating and safety norms, or in the need to possess critical judgment – understood as the ability to assess the situation and make grounded decisions – and refined attributes such as sight, hearing, and smell. These aspects that we have retained from what our interlocutors reported, and which we call technical competencies, are all in accord with what is recommended in the Operational Manuals (OMs) that guide the operators’ acting.
Finally, the operators, the supervisor, and the manager mentioned scattered and seemingly less tangible characteristics that are nonetheless operational work in their shared environment. This is what we call situated professional attitudes. These involve ethical components, values, and modes of conduct constituted within the professional collective, such as responsibility and commitment, elements identified as fundamental values for these workers.
In the same vein, interest and curiosity were emphasized in relation to the need to remain in a permanent search for knowledge, as was adaptability, notably in the face of work composed of rigid routines and shift variations, the latter entailing complex difficulties in reconciling professional and family life. Thus, in the operators’ view, in the course of carrying out their professional duties, competencies of various orders take their place: emotional control, communication and relational skills, technical knowledge, and professional attitudes (commitment, responsibility, and so on).
Considering all of the above, two points stand out. The first concerns the fact that all our interlocutors emphasize the emotional component of the work performed, granting it a kind of primacy in the context of a professional practice in which quick decisions must be made in a complex environment and which therefore demands strong emotional control. One should not infer from what has been said that the participants downplay technical knowledge – specific theoretical knowledge, technical norms, and so on. What appears to be the case is that real work requires the incorporation and mobilization of various forms of knowledge, in which technical knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition for accomplishing what needs to be accomplished. It is presupposed in the operation, but it is not to be confused with it.
The second point is related to the first. In the performance of work, various forms of knowledge are present in the operator’s acting, and it is in this domain that the problem of competence properly appears. Human competence is a synthesis of complex ingredients (Schwartz, 1998) in which certain components are more evident and can even be measured – such as theoretical knowledge or the mastery of a technical norm – while others prove harder to grasp, as is the case, for example, with the capacity to mobilize more general elements in the face of the singular case. Is it not in light of this last criterion that it is often argued whether a professional is or is not competent?
However, there are also ingredients of competence, to return to Yves Schwartz, that cannot be measured and that admit no external criterion of measurement. This is the case of values. Are they not what traverses the participants’ accounts about the importance of effort, responsibility, and commitment? Even the constant pursuit of learning – is it not itself a value relationship6? Following Schwartz (2004), a value appraisal cannot be delegated, nor can it be deduced from outside the work situation; it lies at the heart of a dialectic between the use of the self by oneself and the use of the self by others. For example, in the face of collective work, do I hold back or do I get involved? The value here is not measured by market temporality but by ergological temporality – that is, by the temporality of human activity itself. The value appraisal thus refers to the point of view of those who carry out their professional activities in a given environment of work and life. Canguilhem (2009) would not say otherwise.
Mobilized knowledge: the creative dimension of activity
Codified knowledge – technical knowledge – is especially important in this kind of complex productive system that carries a high risk of severe environmental and human harm. Nevertheless, in work situations nothing goes on its own.
The passage from what must be done – prescribed work – to what is actually done demands and requires the mediation of the workers’ activity, embodying in work situations the abstract norms configured ex ante and inscribing them into something of the order of history (Schwartz, 2016), as, similar to history, what will happen in the work environment cannot be fully anticipated. If prescribed work is, then, a necessary but insufficient component for accomplishing work in a concrete situation, this means that something like a kind of creation takes place in the work environment, in the sense of enacting something novel in response to what already exists. It is activity that arbitrates between one point and the other. Let us look at all this more closely.
As described in the opening sections of this article, the operators participating in the study work in a substation where they must follow the operation of the systems, perform maintenance, and carry out various procedures involving checks and tests. This is certainly a routine, but one in which the unpredictability and complexity of the systems create a particular dynamic in that work environment, in which the risk of accidents is always lurking. External factors such as extreme weather conditions and fluctuating demand on the grid combine with unforeseen occurrences of the system itself, which the operators must keep in its normal operating state.
Indeed, in the face of the work situations experienced at the substation, unpredictability seems to be the keyword the operators use to describe their daily work:
When we arrive at the substation […] you start running through your mind: “What will I face today?” “How will today turn out?” “What are the problems?” Because each day is a day that may be different. Different problems. (Op. 10)
The operator’s unease in the face of the unpredictability of situations is expressed in his reflective questioning about the volatility of his everyday work: “What will I face today?” “How will today turn out?” Far from being a paralyzing factor, this uncertainty lead workers to continuously mobilize their knowledge, their values, and their experience to build what we may aptly call the singular fabric of their daily duties.
In the singularity of this fabric, to work is not to execute. In a work environment, to work is not to react but to interpret what is happening, to anticipate, to address others. Thus, in an incident we witnessed in the control room, one of the pieces of equipment suddenly emitted an audible and visual signal indicating a fault, which was quickly addressed by one of the operators. Once the episode was over and when asked about it, the operator explained the incident and, pointing to a small display, made the following remark: “notice here (pointing to the light signal) – the equipment talks to us” (Op. 2). But can all the operators in that work environment take part in that conversation? Is what is being “said” there clear to everyone? Ideally yes, since the operators’ formal qualifications attest to that; however, in a work situation things may unfold quite differently.
In our field notebook we recorded a quite illustrative case: an outsourced operator, experienced in distribution substations but new to transmission substations, while walking around the facilities and performing his routine actions, noticed a light signal during an inspection. Worried about a possible abnormality, he reported the problem to his shift colleague. However, the colleague pointed to a marking, the letter “N” written onto the (already old) equipment with a pen – and explained that the light signal was expected and recognized by all the operators. Although it was not described in the formal manuals and procedures, the workers had marked that warning light as something normal, an action stemming from the adjustments and adaptations they had collectively built. As one can see, the work environment has a history woven by a professional collective, a history that must be appropriated by those who intend to fit into it.
These aspects give us clues about the density of what takes place in work situations; they also reveal both the necessity of what we earlier called codified knowledge and its insufficiency. In work situations, the variabilities of contexts and people demand more than the application of directives. The operators say as much:
In real work, things stray from theory. Because in theory it’s, “look, the equipment works like this, it was planned, designed to work this way.” But when it is time to act, whether here or at other stations – old substations that already have obsolete equipment – replacement parts no longer exist. So we use a lot of workarounds to make things work. (Op. 10)
There is always a way for us to do it, isn’t there? To improvise, so to speak, that strays from the norm we work with – in other words, that departs from the standard. That is the basis of operation and, I believe, of all activities. For example, the standard maneuvers are essential for us to act quickly and protect ourselves, but we often have to deviate from those maneuvers. We have to deviate. Why? Otherwise it won’t work. (Op. 2)
These aspects we have just highlighted comprise what Schwartz (2004) calls renormalizations (in Brazilian Portuguese, renormalizações), signaling the worker’s active orientation toward the work environment and the way in which a diversity of elements present in it – rules, protocols, technical devices, management practices, and so on – are reworked by the individual and collective activity of the professionals. In effect, a complex alchemy of experience, knowledge, and values.
Some reflections on what has been presented
The preceding sections highlight aspects that, given their relevance, warrant further discussion. The first concerns the recognition of a mode of work organization that, de facto, collides with ordinary representations of work and working. Common sense and learned representations often associate work in a large industry with fragmented or “parceled-out” work – work “in crumbs,” to recall the title of one of Friedmann’s works (1956), which found an important audience – in which the rhythm of executing movements in the productive act is commanded by the machine. However, in productive systems operating in a continuous-flow process, things unfold differently
The central aspect lies in the fact that there is no direct work upon the matter to be transformed but rather a professional act that is increasingly mediated – by technical devices, panels, computer keyboards, signs, and so on – in which work often consists in interpreting and taking the necessary measures to maintain the normality of the process. Pierre Naville identified the essential trait of this form of labor, in which “man limits himself to interpreting the signs of signs” (Naville, 2016, p. 97; our translation) and occupies central posts of monitoring and control, with a view to keeping all operations running. The cardinal element in all this lies in automation, the central object of Pierre Naville’s research at the end of the 1950s, which, according to him, tended to become a general operative principle7.
Automation raises an important question: that of the place of the human being in the productive process. The question is not trivial. It has haunted the social and human sciences for a long time and was already of direct interest to the first liberal scholars of the labor process in modern industries. To make production flow without human intervention is an old capitalist ambition. Let us recall someone Marx often cited, the Briton Andrew Ure (1836): “the most perfect manufacture is the one that can entirely do without the labor of the hands” (p. 1; our translation).
Nevertheless, in concrete situations, how do things really unfold? In fact, with automation, immediate work declines and is displaced. Yes, it is also true that production ceases to correlate with the volume of immediate work expended. But this does not mean, in any way, that the systems run on their own.
As a kind of echo of all this, human work reappears as a productive act in which the human brings what is proper to humans. Human work offers what the machine cannot offer: not a simple action, “but an act, that is, a reflected, motivated, and intentional action” (Rot & Vatin, 2022, p. 27; our translation). In our research this aspect was very evident; it informs the meaning of the operators’ conduct over the system as a whole at the substation. However perfect technical systems may be, they exhibit malfunctions and incidents that cannot be fully anticipated and on which the operators are called to decide. It is not an action in response to a reported problem but an act in the face of a contextually situated problem.
If the human act has such a character, it makes sense to ask what constitutes it. We are speaking of professional acts. Acts constituted by workers who received training and who, together, shared a professional environment. Our investigation evidences the complementarity between these two sources. The training received in the electrotechnical training program, and the trainings and updates on legislation and regulatory norms, become operationalized, so to speak, through the operators’ work activity, and this activity is filled with experiential knowledge developed – individually and collectively – in a certain professional environment that itself bears a history.
It is professional experience that allows an operator to go beyond what is determined by standard actions and what is set out by the norm. As the operators themselves said, “in real work, things stray from theory” (Op. 10). However, a point must be flagged here: as decades of research in ergonomics have shown, there is a gap – greater or smaller – between prescribed work and real work. There is a difference between what is asked and what the task itself demands. The worker, therefore, has no choice. Arbitrations must be made in carrying out the task, even in a barely visible dimension.
In the case at hand, we are dealing with a professional environment with high-risk components, which places an even greater constraint on the performance of the operators we investigated. It is precisely at this point that experience enters as an important component, since it functions as a kind of collective memory about the work and about working. It is knowledge at work, in Santos’s (1996) terms. This collective foundation is what allows each operator to prove competent in the face of a critical situation and to respond effectively to the singular configuration of the unfolding event.
What we have just said gives us clues for understanding how human competence is constituted in the work environment, but it also provides us with elements for understanding what makes it wane. The company’s management policy plays a central role at this point. With privatization, a progressive dismissal of operators favored the dismantling of the work collective, whose erosion did not go unnoticed by the operators.
In that work environment we were able to observe, as the dismissals progressed, that the perception of the dissolving common work weighed heavily on those professionals, signaling a collective history, its importance for the professional competence they had achieved, and its non-place in the company’s future. These workers were aware of the high demand of what they did in the company’s daily routine, but then how is one to work while feeling superfluous to the new management? Let us return to the testimony of the operator already cited: “today I don’t feel important to this work. I feel like… more like I’m being tossed aside. As if the work I do isn’t important anymore” [sic] (Op. 9). If we follow what scholars of the relationship between work and health say, we see that, in conditions in which work seems to lose its meaning for those who perform it, one is a step away from the psychopathology of work and from significant crises in the organization (Lima, 1998; Davezies, 2010; Clot, 2010; Cau-Bareille, Lhuilier & Viviers, 2021).
We would also like to add another point about the company’s management policies and practices. Our study found something little discussed in the literature on continuous-flow process industries and that deserves to be underscored: the issue of work intensification8. This finding is not without paradox, since, when it comes to nuclear or petroleum industry, the relationship between the volume of production and the engagement of the workforce takes on very particular nuances. As we have already discussed, in this type of industry the volume of production does not correspond to direct work.
At the electrical substation we studied, things unfold in the same way: under normal conditions, a greater or lesser volume of electrical energy circulating in the substation’s systems does not imply an increase or a decrease in the operators’ movements; nor does it necessarily imply a reduction or an extension of their work shifts. Yet we found that the management practices since the company’s privatization, together with an active policy of reducing staff levels, have produced a direct overlap of functions and tasks placed upon the remaining operators. For example, the inspection routine – previously done at the pace required by the task itself – now competes with other simultaneous demands: “I didn’t do it… I did [the inspection routine], but it was done like that, faster, and I have to finish it tomorrow. I didn’t do it fully, the way I should, because of the demand that had been thrown at us” (Op. 4). The overlapping of tasks induces an overload that is hard to manage and in which professional acts risk falling apart, as reported by Operator 8: “I started doing a task one day and didn’t finish it; I left it for the next day, and I came in to work in the morning. (…) Then they called me to deal with another demand at the entrance signaling. So I had to stop, it interrupts your train of thought…”
A blind pursuit of cost reduction, driven by a narrow conception of management, does serious harm to workers and work collectives at this point, putting the very métier on the line – in the sense of a knowledge, a know-how, and a common, shared culture. These are typical management practices that benefit no one, neither the company – whose risk of harmful incidents and accidents increases – nor the workers themselves, yet on which managers persist, to take up the terms of a remarkable expert on work environments, the ergonomist François Daniellou (2010).
Final considerations
The guiding thread of the aspects we have brought forward and of the reflections presented concerns the differences between mass-production industries and continuous-flow process industries. As we said at the start of this study, ordinary representations of work and of working sit on the side of the former, not the latter. They thus end up positioning the mass-production worker – especially in the automobile branch – as carrying out repetitive work, as the typical worker of our time, previously subjected to Taylorism-Fordism and now also to Toyotism. But, if the spotlight shifts toward these aspects pertaining to forms of production organization and remains fixed there, is the nature of the technical processes demanded by what is being processed – making screws is not producing energy in a nuclear plant – and its implications for the interface between humans and machines not lost from view? Following the perspective opened by Pierre Naville, our study sought to attend to what is at stake in this question.
Naville (2016) observes that automation plays a cardinal role in continuous-flow process industries. These are processes whose principles are very old, such as heating something and letting the change of state of the matter – as in the industrial production of alcohol since the nineteenth century – cause the product to circulate through hoses, pipes, tanks, and so on. However, what is most relevant to us here concerns what Pierre Naville found, in his investigations at the end of the 1950s, in various sectors in which automatisms were more important. According to the sociologist, automation led to a decoupling between the time of the machine and the time of the one who operated it, in such a way that an inversion (a symptom of important changes) was taking place in the productive process. This inversion can be summed up in a well-known formulation by the author: “in short, the stopping of the classical line, above all, immobilizes the men, whereas the stopping of the integrated line mobilizes them” (Naville, 2016, p. 155; our translation). This is precisely the case of the workers we investigated.
Watching the monitors, observing the signals, identifying oscillations, inspecting the normality of operations – these are actions that make up the core of the work done by the substation operators. This work of monitoring and control, in which the operator remains more as someone who accompanies the productive process than someone who acts upon it, is, however, reversed in critical moments when significant incidents or accidents occur and demand the active response of the operators. As one of them, cited earlier, mentioned: “even after 27 years of experience, when an alarm goes off, my heart still races” (Op. 5).
As we have seen, this is high-risk work, whose professional practice is strongly regulated by legislation and by general and local technical norms. These normative elements are, at one and the same time, essential and insufficient for accomplishing what needs to be done. The passage from prescribed work to real work requires more than the strict application of directives; hence the relevance of understanding human activity and its complexity in work situations. Our research was concerned precisely with this aspect. On this point, we believe we have contributed to advancing knowledge about contemporary work, about the specificities of work in continuous-flow process industries, about the relationships between training and professional practice, and, connected to the foregoing, about the theme of workers’ knowledge.
Finally, we would like to note that the investigation contributes to bringing to light a drama of our time: the dismantling of work collectives and the dismissal of workers. It was not because of incapacity or incompetence that some of the study participants lost their jobs. This is an inherent contradiction of a society founded on wage labor, which progresses “through the most gigantic waste of individual development” (Marx, 2017, p. 126; our translation).
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Support and Funding:
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Goiás (FAPEG).
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Research Ethics
The research was submitted to and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Goiás (CEP/UFG) - CAAE: 48691621.6.0000.5083 – Opinion No. 4.832.467
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Use of A.I.:
For the strict purpose of organizing and formatting the bibliographical references according to APA standards, the Claude Sonnet 4.6 tool/service was used. The author and co-author declare that they reviewed, validated, edited, and supervised the final text, ensuring its originality, accuracy, and ethical integrity, and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.
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Copy Editing services:
Portuguese version - Copy editing and standardization of citations and bibliographical references (7th Edition APA): Luísa de Assis Vieira luisadeassisvieira@gmail.comEnglish version: Guilherme Oliveira Santos traducao@tikinet.com.br
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1
Activity is a concept with a long history, traveling – under the rubric of Tätigkeit – through German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx) and reaching Soviet psychology, with Lev Vygotski and Alexei Leontiev, before later being appropriated by French-based ergonomics. Activity is of an irreducible complexity because it is a unit of multiple, heterogeneous elements. For this reason, no single discipline can monopolize it: “it traverses the conscious and the unconscious, the verbal and the non-verbal, the biological and the cultural, the mechanical and values…” (Schwartz, 2005, p. 2; our translation), imposing dialectics among these domains, as well as between the micro and the macro, local and more global elements, and so on.
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2
As noted, ergology bears a certain relation to ergonomics, but each has its specificity and they should not be confused. Ergonomics is an older discipline, taking shape in the mid-twentieth century in the course of the interdisciplinary demands driven by World War II, focusing on effectiveness, health, and production across different organizational settings and work environments. Ergology, for its part, takes ergonomics’ contributions into account but broadens the scope of its orientation toward work situations by incorporating other references – such as the philosophy of life of Georges Canguilhem – and other concerns, including philosophical, epistemological, and political ones. On ergonomics and its foundations, see Daniellou (2004). An introduction to ergology can be found in Schwartz and Durrive (2007).
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3
Despite the significant increase in women’s participation in the company since 1994, when the first woman took on the role of operator, the electrical sector still presents gender-inclusion challenges. ANEEL (2023) data indicate that the sector’s workforce was made up of 79.19% men and 20.81% women.
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4
The instruction to the double method is a technique within the psychology of work used to access the subjective and objective dynamics of workers’ experience in a given work environment, making it possible to know and collectively rework that experience. The method was created by the occupational physician and psychologist Ivar Oddone and his team in the context of the training actions they carried out with the workers of the Fiat union in Italy in the late 1960s (Oddone, Re & Briante, 2023).
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5
These aspects matter more than is commonly imagined, since they concern the orientation of the meaning of the activity and the values assigned to it by its own protagonists. As Bidet et al. (2013) point out, by emphasizing rationalization, sociology – from Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas – has often ended up conceiving it as secreting its own values. But, at the risk of misunderstanding work, one cannot ignore the values constituted by the very men and women who carry it out. It is by pursuing this line of analysis that Alexandra Bidet has elaborated a kind of heuristic category in her investigations, the notion of vrai boulot. The author asks: faced with a given professional setting, what is real work in the eyes of those who do it? Put differently, what is the portion of a certain modality of work that its professionals mark as valuable, seeking, in a direction opposite to what is presented in the sociological concept of dirty work (Hughes), to claim it for themselves and not for others? (Bidet, 2011, p. 9). The monitoring and control work performed by the workers who participated in our research seems to be assumed and valued by them precisely in this sense.
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6
This question concerning subjective mobilization in the pedagogical process was notably demonstrated in Bernard Charlot’s studies of what he terms the relation to knowledge (Charlot, 2000).
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7
The diagnosis put forward by Naville proved accurate. At that time he observed a tendency toward the “general chemicalization of industry” (Naville, 2016, p. 102; our translation), in the sense that even mass-production industry seemed to be tending toward continuous flow. Is that not the underlying aspiration of what, in the following decades, became—first in the automobile industry—the Japanese model seeking to operate just in time? Some sociologists after Naville identified the issue, noting an overall orientation in the productive system in line with the principle of industrial fluidity, to use the concept developed by Rot and Vatin (2022).
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8
The most common discussion in this research focuses on fatigue induced by the demand for attention to screens and the monitoring of indicators, entailing high cognitive and bodily demands. This angle of analysis of the problem was already present in Naville’s pioneering research (2016) at the end of the 1950s. The issue we highlight here is of a different nature.
Research data availability:
The authors will make the research data available upon request.
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Responsible editor
Chantal Medaets https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7834-3834
