Mesurer les risques psychosociaux : de la commensuration au compromis

In this article, we look at the measurement of the social and how a quantified representation of psychosocial risks can be accepted in organizations. Based on interviews and documentation from two major international companies, we study the construction of psychosocial risk measures using a benchmark occupational health questionnaire. We show that the measurement of psychosocial risks can be a compromise in the two organizations studied, when it succeeds in evacuating the very situations experienced at work that it sets out to represent. Our results show how this compromise results from a set of practices and discourses by which individuals (1) tinker with and (2) extrapolate the measures produced from the questionnaire, to the point of (3) neantizing psychosocial risks through their representation in these two organizations. In this way, our study hopes to contribute to research into the difficulty of taking social issues into account in accounting, as well as to work dedicated to the commensuration of these risks, whose manifestations are difficult to represent in organizations.