From "age management" to "health-at-work driven employability and pathways management" : a French case : renewed analysis of HRM practices ; De la « gestion des âges » à la « gestion de l'employabilité et des parcours par la santé au travail » : le cas français : une analyse renouvelée des pratiques de gestion des ressources humaines

Abstract

Demographic ageing is leading governments to prolong working life. Age management was therefore invented. However, our bibliographic review shows this concept is based on nothing but chronological age and economic considerations, which causes its own failure. Worst of all, health at work is not taken into consideration even if it's a major problem as far as working life extension is concerned. We propose to bring it back at the center of the debate thanks to a new concept, initially called "employability through health at work over time". Three case-studies have enabled us to test it: we analyzed how it materializes in daily current HR practices, with a particular attention given to their contexts and actors. Pichault and Nizet provide us with an analytical approach, which we completed with a theoretical framework from M. Weber's comprehensive sociology in order to enrich our political approach with a particular focus on rationalization.As a theoretical contribution, we proposed to adapt Pichault and Nizet's analytical framework to render it specifically suitable for the study of health questions in HR practices. As a managerial contribution, we observed that HR managers must answer a unique question: how long can/must a worker stay in a constraining job? We noticed that two different answers were provided, leading to the implementation of two distinct variations of "health-at-work driven employability and pathways management". Some managers consider that they ought to enable employees to stay in a constraining job during their entire professional lives, in which case, health and security at work have to be taken into consideration in each of what we call "classical" HR practices, but also in dedicated practices. Other managers consider that constraining jobs can be held for a limited period of time only. In this case, beside good practices listed above, they take measures to implement what we call "flexi-security", on a company scale, but also on a broader one. ; Le vieillissement démographique a conduit les ...