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Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, national risk management scenarios took an unexpected course at different individual and collective scales. In France, in the field of occupational risk, long-established practices, rules, and categories have been disturbed and placed ‘under stress’. The field of prevention of occupational risk, which has constituted a distinct field in health policies, with its own bodies, missions and approaches, was similarly disturbed. To describe and analyse these social phenomena, we propose using two complementary concepts: the British ‘risk work’ and the French ‘prevention work’ [‘travail de prévention’]. We show some of the empirical manifestations of risk work associated with prevention work and their effects on the boundaries instituted in the field of prevention at work. Our investigation used data from documentation and interviews in order to explore the experiences of two categories of professionals – physicians specialising in occupational health and home care aides – concerned with prevention during an acute phase of the pandemic. We point out that the question of protective means and equipment has been a central issue, in a context characterised by tensions between knowledge and available material resources. We also show that contradictions and points of tension between actors reveal the subjects under discussion and the more or less porous nature of the boundaries. Amid these processes, however, the principles underlying occupational health were reaffirmed, along with the need for a cooperation between workers and prevention professionals.
Author contributions
All the authors contributed equally. They all were involved in the data collection, analysis and writing of this article.
Acknowledgements
The five authors were altogether involved in shaping the project, conducting the searches, analysing data, and writing the paper. During the acute phase of the crisis, we experienced a collective adventure with strong commitment to dialogue when all working from home and using videoconferencing. We are grateful to the participants for giving up their time to share their experiences even though they had lived through difficult working and personal conditions. We give our thanks to E., P., and the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments on earlier versions. We are also grateful to R., a professional English copy-editor, for rewriting this paper with us, conveying our intended meanings into another language to make them crossing linguistic and cultural borders.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. The ‘confinement’ was renewed twice and lasted until May, for a total of 55 days. In this article, the first and/or acute phase of the health crisis refers to the first containment phase and the first two weeks of deconfinement.
2. The Regional Directorate of Business, Competition, Consumption, Labour and Employment (DIRECCTE), under the supervision of the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
3. With regard to occupational health professionals and HCAs, the data collected during the acute phase of the crisis were usefully supplemented by ethnographic observations carried out in the preceding months. For example, the data collected in this article from the HCAs follows research conducted in the same year concerning organisational cultures of prevention in home care and, more generally, the prevention of occupational risks (Drais & Bonnet, Citation2020). The analyses here are based on a larger corpus comprising 328 hours of observation and more than 63 hours of interviews.
4. Responding to these requests required work to clarify requirements and to propose recommendations for the prevention of the COVID-19 risk. The work of these experts is in itself a work of risk. It is currently being analysed, and will be the subject of a forthcoming article.
5. Many outbreaks of epidemics around the word have started as a result of inadequate hygiene measures within companies.
6. In France, ‘geste barrière’ is a new Covid-related term meaning ‘an action you can take to prevent an infectious disease from spreading, such as washing your hands or covering your mouth when you cough’ (Cambridge Dictionary, 2020). Health institutions presented wearing disposable masks as ‘barrier gestures’ after they were no longer crucially lacking.