Chapter 8: An Example of Chapters in books Based on Intervention Research: Research on the Theme of Functional Illiteracy and Employment

There is increasing demand in the management sciences to not confine themselves to basic research that is deemed publishable in traditional academic journals—there is a clear need for our research to respond to broader social demands. As in medicine, in which a great deal of research is devoted to suffering caused by a pathology that is hardly curable, in the management sciences protocols need to be developed to improve distressing situations in the life of organizations and companies, and to publish these findings in journals read both by practitioners and researcher-teachers.

This situation is comparable to the suffering caused by functional illiteracy in the context of unemployment. Functional illiteracy, defined more broadly than illiteracy per se, affects people who may have gone to school but who lack basic reading, writing, and numerical skills. People with these shortcomings have difficulty finding jobs, even if they only need to write a job application letter and a resume. Furthermore, companies that employ some staff suffering from functional illiteracy have difficulty coping with this handicap, especially in a world in which productive activities increasingly rely on the written word and digital communication. So they hire very few such people, and they may be tempted to sideline or dismiss underqualified staff or staff who cannot adapt to the digital world. As an example of how intervention research can lend insight into this problem, the chapter presents two publications issued in the form of chapters in a book published by the French Ministry of Employment in Documentation Française on the theme of remediation of functional illiteracy in the workplace (Bonnet & Moulette, 2000; Savall, Bonnet, & Moulette, 2000).