Sustainable Development Policy and Impact on Activity: The Case of Gardeners in the Suburbs of Paris

This text discusses the impacts of introducing new work tools that fall within the framework of a policy of sustainable development on the activity of gardeners in Parisian suburbs. Introduction of new tools without taking into account the gardener’s way of working and the organizational and temporal constraints leads to tensions. The analysis of the gardener’s activity shows that three forms of prescription guide his activity: (1) The hierarchical prescription comes from the work organization, (2) an implicit prescription comes from the residents for whom the gardeners work, (3) an individual prescription form the gardeners themselves with own rules built on personal experience. Oppositions between the directions given by the management, the capacity of the gardener to find a balance to carry out his own work activity and the adjustment between the 3 forms of prescriptions can appear. Tensions in the group of gardeners and with the managements characterize the organization. The lack of debate on how to proceed between the gardeners but also between gardeners and management, leads to contradiction between the three forms of prescriptions. The lack of discussion about methods in using the new tools and how they are integrated in the daily organization is the ground for these tensions. Our ambition here is to defend the need to create the conditions to discuss and deliberate on the forms of prescriptions in work organization with sustainable development issues.