Social Memory and Future Prospects As Seen by Employees following an Industrial Disaster

This article examines the role played by social memory & previous work experience in the construction of relations with the company & prospects for the future as seen by employees who, as a result of an industrial disaster, were faced with the sudden closure of the chemical plant which employed them in the suburbs of Toulouse (September 2001). Faced with the sudden & unexpected loss of their jobs, employees in this plant must now choose between the different occupational reclassification choices that are being offered to them under a "Social Plan." We presume that the development of career shift plans for these employees and, more broadly, their view of future prospects linked to the various spheres of their lives involve the activation or inhibition of memories which are shared within the work groups & which constitute a "social memory" of the company. A brief literature review of Maurice Halbwachs's concept of social memory shows that the latter corresponds to a psychosocial construction which translates & expresses, through narratives & accounts, the events & experiences of a past history. As a support of the social identity of a given group of individuals, it is linked to a reflexive activity through which the subjects seek to redefine their perceptions of their past, present & future life trajectories inside & outside the organization. Data were collected through semi- structured interviews conducted with a sample of 15 former plant employees. The themes addressed were: the individual's life plan, previous work experience, memories linked to company history & the subject's relations with the various spheres of his or her life. The interview data were analyzed using ALCESTE software to separate the corpus into categories of statements based on which the subjects' representations could he captured & analyzed. These categories were characterized by the text segments they contained & by the occurrences of words within these textual units. The results derived from the ALCESTE analysis highlight four forms of discourse (lexical & morphosyntactic) which reveal both differentiated relations with one's personal & collective history in the company & specific outlooks on the future. The first form of discourse is characterized by an exploration of the future linked to the traumatic nature of the disaster. Suddenly faced with the prospect of withdrawal from working life, these subjects have difficulty constructing a new life plan because of the diverse nature of