Research from Audencia Business School showed that the lockdown has revealed the social bonds that matter, and the importance of their materialisation, says Claire Champenois
During the lockdown, I re-read Albert Camus’ iconic The Plague (La Peste), a novel, published in 1947, that tells the story of plague sweeping the then French-Algerian city of Oran.
I saw in it an allegory of ‘ordinary’ heroism and of humanist tolerance, through the figure of one of the characters, Doctor Rieux.
I also saw a parallel with the myriad of ways in which we have responded to the current epidemic, over seventy years after the publication of this novel, with attitudes ranging from denial to engagement, panic, flight and scheming.
But what made the greatest impression on me was the effect on the connection between individuals, the social bond, most likely because during that time I was researching, together with my colleagues Yuliya Shymko and Natalia Vershinina, the feelings of teleworkers in lockdown, and in particular their feeling of isolation or connection to a work collective.
Severing of bonds
In the novel, the inhabitants of Oran are cut off from the rest of the world, and the main cause of suffering is not the plague itself, but the severing of the bonds between them and their loved ones.
In France, like in many countries, the lockdown has proved to be a new test for social bonds. It created an experience of radical physical isolation for everyone whether they were the 20% of French workforce working from home, or the preparatory class students who had to take their courses and prepare for their exams at home. This experience has often led them to reconsider their social and personal connections: ‘Who means the most to me? In what ways in particular?’.
The lockdown experience has revealed interesting findings.
Unexpected strengths and fragilities
Some have discovered both unsuspected strengths and fragilities in some of their bonds. Others have developed a new taste for ‘distanced socialisation’, with Skype drinks parties, Zoom quizzes, and blind tests on Google Meet. tasted the joys of ‘distanced socialisation’, seen as positive new ways of socialising by psychologists from Stanford University like Jamil Zaki.
In the workplace, leaders and managers who were initially resistant to teleworking, saw that this new resource could be beneficial in helping them and their teams to maintain a productive professional bond – so much so that many of them have continued remote working since lockdown rules have relaxed. In French office culture, for example, systematic remote working during the lockdown has even thwarted presenteeism. Unsurprisingly, in companies where trust and autonomy were already strong in the work culture, the lockdown has led managers to trust their employees even more, and enabled them to develop further their autonomy. On the other hand, in companies where the level of trust was not so high, teleworking was found to reinforce control and micro-management and made employees showcase their constant availability and progress, leading to risks of added stress, and burnout.
Daily routine
Our study also showed that some employees gained a greater awareness to what extent coffee breaks, impromptu discussions, and jokes shared with co-workers in the normal office environment were vitally important to their daily routine, and their teleworking day spent at home felt very dull. Teleworking during the lockdown has strained the bond between employees and employer. It has sometimes strengthened this link, especially when managers maintained a human and personalised relationship with their colleagues and reassured them in a context of unprecedented uncertainty, even creating convivial moments remotely (online sports sessions, informal discussions, social catch-up calls). Many of the students we interviewed said they also realised the value of embodied human bonds with their classmates and teachers, in or around an actual classroom on the campus, and therefore all prefer face-to-face teaching.
These experiences echo what German sociologist Georg Simmel saw as the ‘non-rational’ dimension of human existence. For Simmel, it is precisely this non-rational dimension – emotions, aesthetics, faith, and not just the pursuit of a goal, calculation or efficiency – that gives life its richness. In the absence of this dimension, individuals find themselves alienated and their life feels impoverished. This makes clear the apparent paradox experienced by many teleworkers, who, despite the intensified exchanges and communications for work, nevertheless feel an increased sense of loneliness. The distanced exchanges which were multiplied in a professional context had a utilitarian goal of productivity for the company – a problem can be solved during a telephone call or information shared during from a zoom catch-up session, for instance. The non-useful, non-productive, that is to say the ‘non-rational’ dimension of life had disappeared from the world of work. Yet, as Simmel pointed out, all this also takes away ‘the spice of life’.
The bonds that matter
Finally, at the societal level, the lockdown also shone the light on the bonds that mattered. No one will forget the messages of support to healthcare workers who became ordinary heroes overnight. We also understood to what extent our daily comfort and our survival depended on the efforts of key workers, particularly those in the distribution and the logistics sectors. The lockdown made everyone realise who they depended on to survive on a daily basis.
According to the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour, it is precisely this question (‘on whom do we depend on a daily basis?’) which should help us to face the current pressing climatic and social emergencies, in particular the issue of overexploitation of the earth’s natural resources and the unsustainable nature of our growth. Bruno Latour, who received much media coverage in France during the COVID-19 crisis, was, with some considerable foresight, already writing in 2017 in his book, Where to land? (Où atterir ?) that, ‘humans have the very delicate problem of finding out how many other beings they need on this earth to survive. It is by drawing up this list that they will draw up their land of life.’
Collective proposals and choices
For Latour, in our modern societies, individuals can be regarded as unrelated atoms and there is no longer any established collective that can create or support a set of acceptable propositions in the face of a problem. Latour therefore recommends, in order to respond to the climate emergency and our collective subsistence issues, to follow an approach similar to that contained in the Grievance Books of 1789 (The Cahiers de doléances included the lists of grievances drawn up by each of the three Estates in France – the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility) and the Third Estate, which consisted of everyone else, including the urban working class, the rural peasantry, and middle class and professional people – to express their hopes and grievances directly to the King).
These new Grievance Books would give us the opportunity to name things: ‘what do we depend on to survive? how to represent these new entities? who are our allies and our adversaries?’
Such books would make it possible to bring out individual interdependencies, compare perspectives on our respective situations, draw up an overall vision, and federate new collectives producing acceptable collective proposals and choices.
Our research showed that the lockdown has in fact revealed the social bonds that matter, and the importance of their materialisation. Teaching that can be instrumental in building a world that is both more ecological and human at the same time.
Claire Champenois is a Professor and Research Head of the Department of Business and Society at Audencia Business School.
