Identification of pathways of permanent employees in farms : a framework proposition and application to the case of dairy farms in Auvergne-France ; Identification des trajectoires d'évolution du travail de salariés permanents dans les exploitations agricoles : proposition d'un cadre d'analyse et application à l'élevage bovin laitier en Auvergne

In France, hiring employees in agriculture has become more common during the last forty years, especially non-familiar permanent employees. The progress of employees is related to strong structural transformations in agriculture, such as the enlargement of farms and the decrease of family workforce. Decreasing employees’ turnover is a challenge for farms’ sustainability. Thereby, our hypothesis is that take into account the role of employees in farm teamwork and understanding changes over time is a fundamental condition to identify ways to support farmers and employees to face this challenge. The aim of this thesis is to build a framework which associates both the approach to the work in livestock farms and the career development of employees to analyze how their works evolve. For this reason, the concept of human resources management has been used, in order to bring valuable contributions concerning work planning and career development inside organisations.The framework was built with the concepts of tasks assignment, versatility, specialization and autonomy. It was implemented with and empirical data from individual interview with 14 non-familiar permanent employees and 8 farmers (their employers), on dairy farms in Auvergne, a center region of France. The framework is composed by 8 variables, 19 categories, 3 rhythm of changes and 12 drivers of changes related to the farm, the farm teamwork and the employee. A conceptual representation of framework was built by linking its content. Results show that our framework is pertinent to analyze the evolutions on employees’ work from a dynamic perspective. Five pathways were identified based on eight variables that describe the evolution of task assignment, the trend toward versatility vs. specialization, and the evolution of autonomy. These pathways qualify the role of employees in farm teamwork. They could be useful for farmers, employees and agricultural advisors to plan employees’ career, thus to keep employees in farms. The longer-term goal is to discuss these ...