Fonctionnaires au Travail : bureaucratie et personnalité au ministère du Travail dans la période de son cinquantenaire

From post-war era beginning until 1956 - the year which the ministry of Labour celebrated the first half-century it had been in existence -, its division for Labour and Employment was a strikingly stable organisation. Nearly each of its high-ranking managers (the assistant principals, the principals, the secretaries) had still been recruited through the ancient pre-war examination system, at a time ENA did not yet exist. Yet in 1957, Pierre Laurent (a member of the Conseil d’Etat), who had just been appointed to the position of principal assistant Secretary, launched an internal re-organisation ; he also started supporting a shift in Employment public policy. A few years later on, after a new employment law had been passed on (in 1963), Pierre Laurent’s successor, Jacques Chazelle, endeavoured to reshape in a quite different way the division’s management and goals. In the meanwhile, ENA-trained servants were starting increasing their own influence within the whole structure. These changes (which were not devoid of conflicts), were then studied by a team of sociologists, following up M. Crozier’s famous findings about the French bureaucratic phenomenon. This paper deals with the civil servants’ daily work and its organisation, their career, their sense of duty, the goals which they were pursuing during the two decades surrounding the ministry’s fiftieth anniversary. Relying upon some of H.A. Simon’s seminal concepts, it attempts to think about R.K. Merton’s insights about bureaucratic structure and personality again, and it ains at explaining the dynamics of change inside this ministry. Its viewpoint encompasses history of Public administration and sociology of organisations.