Collective forms of coping and the social construction of work stress among industrial workers and police officers in France

Abstract

While dominant approaches to stress and coping focus on individual responses, field studies show that strategies of adaptation to difficult and harmful work conditions are partly collective. The notion of collective coping takes interactions and group behavior into greater account than the concepts of social support. The collective forms of coping are parts of the mediation between potential stressors due to work organization and health trouble. This analysis approaches stress as a social construction and contributes to a better understanding of the meaning of stress in different occupational groups. Examples from industrial workers and police officers (based on c.120 interviews) illustrate the different configurations of collective resistance and show how its weakening may explain, among different causes, the rise of stress complaints within these groups.