Assistant professor at Montpellier Business School (MBS), Thomas Simon defended a management thesis in June devoted to the way in which young graduates react to “absurdity” in business. In addition to in-depth interviews conducted with young people aged 24 to 30, graduates of major business schools and engineers in post for a maximum of five years, the researcher relied on a travelogue in Africa by the writer Michel Leiris to account for the disillusions of these young people, lost in the middle of the organizational and managerial “desert”.
Why did you choose to work on this theme of absurdity?
First for autobiographical reasons; I am 30 years old, I myself graduated from a business school, where I followed totally nebulous courses. In my close environment, many young professionals have been won over by a feeling of absurdity when they arrive in a company, whether it is because of useless meetings, contradictory orders coming from the hierarchy or objectives impossible to achieve. Management research provides keys to help companies operate better, but there is also a more critical current, that of Critical Management Studies. [CMS]which allows us to take a step back, in the wake of the work of anthropologist David Graeber on the bullshit jobs.
You speak of a disillusion that begins even before the company, as soon as you enter the big schools…
Overstimulated in preparatory classes, the students I interviewed then come up against a double gap, from prep to school, then from school to business. They are disappointed with their courses but think that it will be better once they are inserted into the professional world and immersed in the “real life” of adults.
“Young people imagine that they will become corporate adventurers, charged with exhilarating missions”
Schools feed a grandiloquent discourse on the positions they will occupy after their training, and young people imagine that they will become corporate adventurers, responsible for exciting missions with an international dimension. However, they very often experience a new disillusionment, because the gap between what they were promised in the interview and the concrete work once in post is immense.
Your observation goes beyond boredom at work: some young people talk about real injustices, even lies encouraged by their superiors…
For some, a datable event occurs, from which they reach the limit of what is tolerable. A young graduate who was forbidden to attend her sister’s thesis defense one afternoon, another who, after a stroke, found herself like a stranger among her colleagues on her return… Some have had to lie on their LinkedIn profile and add experiences on their CV, to justify the prices of consulting companies that sell their clients the services of young consultants who are actually inexperienced.
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