The inspector lives in a universe of which the complexity goes well beyond the simple face to face with the customer, with whom he has,
in effect, a relatively neutral relationship – particularly in a normal situation when such a relationship boils down to checking travel docu- ments, carried out as quickly as possible. With his boss, the supervisor, relations are stretched: the inspector considers that his line manage- ment is of no help to him in his daily life, and even less so in awkward situations. He is alone to face his surroundings, with a distant boss who cannot give him the necessary information, nor help him to resolve his immediate problems, which above all have a bearing on his relation- ships with other actors. In addition, he bitterly reproaches his bosses, themselves former inspectors, for having “forgotten everything”, and for having taken refuge in a passive application of the rules, a long way away from the reality of work, and which mean for example that he will be appraised on his appearance, general presentation, and so on.
“Traffic” is a key actor, which will help us to understand the systemic complexity. In appearance, its relationship with the inspectors should be distant, even non-existent: they belong to two quite distinct com- pany departments. Traffic deals with regulating traffic flow, ensuring safety and continuity and above all, as needed, it makes crucial arbitra- tions between punctuality and connections, based on criteria which, as we have already noted, were vague, if not non-existent. Inspectors blame them for this lack of transparency and, when they occasionally need to contact them in dealing with an urgent situation, they empha- size the very dubious reliability of the information obtained. When questioned in depth, the traffic officers, for their part, seem to be unaware of the very existence of inspectors, who are not part of their From Symptom to Problem 141
Figure 7.17
Planning Supervisor Unions
+ + – +
– – = – – Inspector
Traffic Customer Station and equipment
working environment. They have a technical perception of their work, marked by an obsession with security, which means that the customer, in the materiality of his daily problems of punctuality, is not a concrete preoccupation for them.
Under the general designation of “station and equipment”, we find, on the one hand, all the actors contributing to preparing the means of transport (cleanness, lighting, heating, arrival at the station on time) and, on the other, all those involved in receiving, directing, informing customers in the station, including the sale of tickets. Here again, the inspectors emphasize just how little care such actors show in their work through a multitude of anecdotes, certain of them being well known to the company which carefully files them under the heading “return of experience”, which seems to signify that there has been a problem and that, for once, it was known. This concerns technical infractions, involving the way in which things were done but not taking into account the reports, apparently many and varied, sent in by the inspec- tors. The officers in charge of equipment, if one only listens to them, defend themselves by saying they do not read the reports, of which they even deny the existence. As for those allocated to selling tickets, they carry out their work under pressure from customers who are always in a hurry and consequently not concerned with asking too many compli- cated questions. As a result of this, there are discrepancies between the tickets sold and the journeys made, which might lead to a conflict situ- ation in the relationship between customers and inspectors, if the latter did not prefer to refrain from checking tickets in such circumstances, even if this means that the company loses money.
As its name indicates, the planning department is in charge of fixing how inspectors are allocated, in accordance with extremely complicated rules which have given rise to the development of an impressive set of regulations, intended to ensure everybody’s equality in terms of work- load and working constraints. One can fully understand the importance of this function for an itinerant population, often concerned to carry out the shortest possible shifts – those making it possible to go home in the evening. Here it is not the rule which makes this possible, but the accommodation with the rule, which is negotiated directly with planning officers without the need to go through any sort of official procedure.
One can understand why inspectors find their colleagues in the plan- ning department to be friendly and obliging. One will see, in passing, that this powerwhich conditions the life of such staff is not held by line management, and this gives us an idea of the extent of the confusion, within the company, between organization and structure. On one side
we have rules which are supposed to plan for and organize every situation but which are endlessly broken in order to allow life to follow its course, and on the other we have bosses who have no real hold over this life and who therefore hide behind formality and ritualism.
There are many union organizations and they are even more active when in competition for this population which is a key actor across the whole company, since legally transport cannot take place without the presence of inspectors on board. The result of this is continual bargain- ing, continually renewed negotiations, which sometimes lead to a surprising feeling of absurdity: in this way, it has been necessary to reach agreement on the average number of steps that an officer takes per minute, in order to determine whether the fact of going into a hos- tel at the end of a journey was part of the working day or not! When questioned on the subject, the inspectors express doubts on the real knowledge that unions have of their daily lives although, with nothing better available, they nonetheless appreciate obtaining additional advantages through their intervention. As for the unionists, truly a state within a state, they have the monopoly on access to top managers, who only communicate through the unions in accordance with mechanisms and rites that nobody ever puts in question. In addition, the human resource department has a good number of former militants among its ranks.
If one now wanted to get this sociogram to “speak”, although one should bear in mind that it is only a tool, one would note first of all the extreme complexity and diversity of the relevantuniverse in which the inspector exists, and which has little to do with the official structure to which the organization chart links him. Even better – for him, his boss is not an important part of this structure.
One can then see that the actors with whom he has the most strained relationship are those who affect his professional life, whether upstream or downstream of his work – those who plan the journeys, sell the tick- ets, make important choices. However, these actors themselves act out- side of any anticipation of the consequences of their acts and their decisions on the face-to-face contact between the customer and the inspector. At best, they are not bothered; at worst, they think of him as a nuisance, and are not far from sharing their doubts with management on his true involvement in work. Even if they wanted to take things dif- ferently, the company’s official organization would make this difficult.
The absolute and sought-after segmentation does not push towards this, and does not make it possible finally to leave the narrow confines of one’s own action, which leads all those involved towards a sort of From Symptom to Problem 143
resigned fatalism faced with the observation that what is happening is neither wanted nor decided by anybody whatsoever, it is simply there.
On the other hand, the inspector has a very positive relationship with the actors who participate in the organization of his private life, who allow him to choose his way of life, like those who negotiate his benefits for him. It would not even be necessary to push the analysis any further in order to understand, at least in general terms that do not enter into the detail of the mechanisms, that the less interest the company, in its real method of functioningand not in its statements or its intentions, is able to take in the professional life of its officers, the more they take refuge in their private lives, to which they pay almost exclusive attention. Starting from a symptom, that inspectors do not stay with customers in a difficult situation and reduce such relations to a minimum in a normal situation, we are not far from having understood the problem, simply by looking at the relevant universe in which they evolveand which is a long way from their theoretical and hierarchical context of action.