40%: this is the share of executives called “planners”, according to a study by Marie-Anne Dujarier and Lou Wolff carried out in partnership with the Association for Executive Employment. These managers who organize remote work, not by teleworking, but through devices to prescribe, pace, control activity, represent the managerial trend of the 2000s. Four out of ten executives are thus spreading “disembodied management” in companies “. A concept developed in a work of the same name (La Découverte, 2015) by Marie-Anne Dujarier, professor of sociology at Paris Cité University.
In his contribution to the scientific mediation project “What do we know about work? ” of Interdisciplinary laboratory for public policy evaluation (Liepp), broadcast in collaboration with Presses de Sciences Po on the site’s Employment channel Lemonde.frthe sociologist explains how the organization of work through systems has spread and formalized in companies, with the first consequence of distancing management from work itself by separating “the thought of action”, “the organization of the tasks of their realization”notes the researcher.
These planning managers remotely design “change management”, “flow optimization”, “cost reduction” systems. The changes imagined without starting from reality thus force the targeted employees to understand the intention of the planners in order to adapt the system to the realities on the ground.
Absurd situations
Same scenario for cost reduction. Whether they are a counter clerk in a car rental agency or a local executive in the petrochemical industry, or even a hospital doctor, those who act must understand what these systems require, name, measure, value, in order to be able to produce with them , but also to try to get around them, especially since it is impossible to interact with the planners to get out of absurd situations.
Planners themselves agree with this when working with devices designed by others. Moreover, 35% of them think that their activity is not useful or ambivalent. Another third perceives that “their greatest professional risk is psychological suffering or loss of senses”adds Marie-Anne Dujarier.
But these new bureaucrats, who produce as many reports as absurd situations in the private sector as in the public, are the actors of a very real market: that of sellers of managerial solutions, of certified products, to resolve the complex problems of ‘work organization. Faced with the impasses of the business world, new merchants of illusions are prospering.
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