La gestion des ressources humaines dans une visée de transformation sociale : trois études de cas de coopératives d’activités et d’emploi

In a context of growth of self-employment, Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) stand out for the importance they give to autonomy in work and for the social protection of their members in a framework that promotes cooperation. Our problematic questions the new experiments carried out by the BECs in HRM, by focusing on their objective of social transformation concerning the autonomy of their members through cooperation. This research is based on complementary qualitative surveys of three BECs. Theoretically, we combine two fields of HRM literature: one devoted to atypical employment systems in the context of changes at work and the other to its declination in social and solidarity economy organizations. We propose an initial definition of the HRM in BECs based on the distinction of five functions, to which are associated management tools, characteristic of their inclusion in the grey areas of employment and work and of their cooperative identity. We discuss the resulting tensions according to four dimensions: autonomy in and through work, training and learning, production cooperation, and the regulation of complex relationships. On the theoretical level, we stress the need to develop the conceptual tools of HRM to consider atypical forms of employment, especially in social economy.