General Introduction

Attempts to execute employment contracts constantly come up against problems of interpretation. To express the difficulty in concrete terms, when an employer gives an employee an instruction, how is the latter to comply with that instruction? With what level of commitment? How are employees to interpret the injunction to work diligently if, as Marsden (1999: 155) notes, ‘Diligence concerns partly how hard people work and the care they take on their jobs, but also their time-keeping, attendance and general reliability’? In the 19th century, factory rules, in France and elsewhere in Europe, stipulated that workers guilty of ‘negligence in the execution of their work’ would be fined, but how was negligence to be defined? Similarly, how do employers go about controlling work and, in particular, how do they measure work intensity? Companies in the English-speaking world go even further by formulating strategies likely to help them obtain the maximum ‘discretionary effort’ from their employees. Employers in Continental Europe, who tend to reduce this problem to one of work intensity, still largely ignore it. In general terms, how do employers and employees decide to trust each other in the absence of any guarantee about the other’s intentions and of any means of obtaining such a guarantee, since it can never be known whether a guarantee of intent (such as a written IOU given to a friend) is merely an intent to guarantee (that is, a promise designed to reassure the friend, who will not be reimbursed)?