Moral Divisions of Work among Ticket Controllers in the Paris Metro

The RATP’s new marketing guidelines change the work of the ticket collectors. They conceive their work according to two categories in tension : le commercial (to be “commercial”) and le répressif (to be “repressive”). This paper explores, first, how these categories structure the ticket collectors’ working practices and how they produce a dissimilar way to deal with passengers. Then the article deals with the preference given by ticket collectors to the repressive aspects of their work, which responds to a social strategy to keep some autonomy while working conditions are deteriorated by commercial guidelines.