Do farmers groups support quality of work life? A framework for analyzing group farming in France

Abstract : Group farming can be a powerful lever to face ongoing technical and societal transformations of agriculture, environmental challenges and to facilitate new farmers setting up. Despite expanding activities of farmers groups, new generation of farmers are sometimes reluctant to involve in groups which arose in a very different social, economic and political context, during the modernization period. Our research explores the following hypothesis: the difficulty to attract new generation of farmers is linked to different visions and aspirations of governance and work organization within the group. Younger generations of farmers express high expectations in terms of quality of work life. Farmers groups functioning is analyzed to understand how different types of work organization and governance impact quality of work life. The objective of this paper is to report on the analytical framework mainly built upon the definition of quality of work life and to illustrate what quality of work life means in a context of farmers groups.