Three Worlds of Professional and Managerial Staff in France

Changes in the work of professional and managerial staff ( cadres) in France were studied in a research project based on 100 interviews, conducted in seven private and public companies. Through a discourse and correspondence analysis-of a corpus amounting to some 600,000 words-, this study concludes that this particular French employment group can be seen neither as a homogeneous entity, nor as a totally fragmented socio-professional category. Rather, reflecting on working life experiences, it describes three groups that correspond to a horizontal division of professional and managerial staff: the serene, the individualized and the resistant.