Cyril FOURNIER

Jury

Abstract

Fire and emergency services are grappling with growing tensions between vocational commitment, institutional changes, administrative constraints, legal requirements, and budgetary pressures. Against this high-pressure backdrop, this dissertation examines the conditions under which leadership practices claimed to be meaningful can be linked to the creation of meaning at work, the relative stabilization of collective commitment, and the fulfillment of the mission. The objective is not to establish a univocal causal relationship, but to identify mechanisms, mediating factors, and observable effects within a professional environment characterized by urgency, uncertainty, and high emotional intensity. Grounded in a constructivist epistemological framework, the research employs an analytical autoethnographic methodology. Through a narrative framework that creates distance and the adoption of a meso-level perspective, it transforms a situated professional experience—structured around three leadership roles—into analyzable empirical data, which is then examined against explicit theoretical frameworks and requirements for traceability of reasoning. The results lead to three main theoretical propositions. First, they highlight forms of fragmented sense-making, in which collective coherence is challenged by partially dissonant operational, administrative, and institutional logics. Second, they lead to a redefinition of meaning-bearing leadership as a function of symbolic mediation through which heterogeneous rationalities can be translated, articulated, and made provisionally compatible in action. Third, they introduce the concept of organizational conatus as an analytical tool for examining the perseverance of groups under constraint, while discussing its conceptual boundaries and the risks of unregulated over-commitment. The proposed integrative model does not constitute a fourth theoretical contribution; rather, it stabilizes, at the empirical-analytical level, the observed mechanisms that make these three propositions formulable and open to discussion. It shows that, in the situations studied, meaning stabilizes when the leader’s action is embodied in a triad—exposure, protection, explanation—that is sustainably supported by institutionalized credibility routines.