Death, retirement or redeployment for unproductive farm animals? Dispositional tensions in organizational routines
Résumé
Human-animal relationships, including ethic of care relationships, are of growing interest to organisation studies, reflecting the substantial role of animals in organizing processes. While some scholars approach these as working relationships, almost no studies examine the organizational routines established to manage animals in the period after they have been retired (due to age, illness, or lack of productiveness). Through a multiple case study of four contrasting sectors in France (dairy ewes, horses, experimental animals, hens), we use dispositional analysis to examine variations in the performance of such routines. Our results show that death dispositives are the most common (animals other than horses are killed immediately on stopping work), but that operators often attempt to implement opportunistic dispositives to 'save' animals and guarantee them a decent retirement. The culling routine is highly conflictual and a source of mistrust and suffering, not least because the ethic of care relationships between operators (farmers, technical advisers, ranchers, animal carers, researchers, slaughterhouse employees, veterinarians etc.) is variable. The numerous conflicts between elements in the dispositive (actors, instruments, discourses, values, places, machines, etc.) allow us to discuss the stabilizing and/or dynamizing effects of the performance of the routine at multi-organizational level, revealing the lack of agency of the operators who directly work and live with animals. As the concretization of a technology that governs our relationship with animals, this routine must be collectively questioned so that we can exit the ethical blindness associated with it and move instead towards a form of ethical foresight.
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