The book. “Goodbye my executioners. » At the end of a meeting, the head of a public structure specializing in addictive behavior greets the two sociologists who have just completed the restitution of their investigation carried out within his organization. The man is marked. His phagocytic and destabilizing behavior was brought to light in front of his collaborators by academics, who evoke “castrations” symbolic. His teams had never dared to complain openly about it. “Should I commit suicide? », he said in reaction, chilling the audience. The person in charge will ensure that the scientific study never comes to an end.
Sociological intervention in a professional environment is often made up of unforeseen events, tensions and painful challenges. This is what Gilles Herreros and Bruno Milly, university professors (Lyon-II), demonstrate in their essay Sociological intervention in organizations (Eres). A work through which the two sociologists look back on their various missions carried out in the 2010s, revealing the behind the scenes of field studies. They thus describe over the pages the “chaotic paths” that they must borrow frequently, where their desire to “hustle” the organization and abandoning any neutrality faces a lot of resistance.
The two sociologists must first manage complex relationships with the sponsors of the intervention. Because, very often, an implicit request has been “slipped under explicit command”. But also because many entrepreneurs want the work carried out to validate their strategy or promote its acceptance by the work collective.
This is where a misunderstanding can arise, a source of future tensions: detaching itself from all “hagiographic orientation”, MM. Herreros and Milly point out that their mission is distinct from that of consulting or auditing firms. They describe “freer university surveys, more risky for the sponsor”.
Free the floor
But they are also, they assure, “more interesting because they can get the organization moving, get it to work, by mobilizing a large number of actors (and not just its management levels)”. This is the major advantage of these sociological interventions, in the eyes of the authors.
Their missions can help free speech. “Organizations contain, in their folds, invisibility, the buried, the indisputable, the undiscussed, the repressed, the unconscious; whether these forgotten dimensions are social or psychic, the silence that accompanies them allows their infinite reproduction, establishing a collective alienation”they analyze.
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