The sick society of management

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Good evening to you all. 
 
I am also glad to be here, and it's impressive because, if I'm not mistaken, I have come to a brand new building with a truly impressive amphitheatre. How can I introduce myself in a way that is interesting to you? Some of you might know me because, at the CEFOC, the Centre for studies and continuing education for social workers, I was quite involved in the approach of "Family affair and social trajectory", "Associative involvement and research", "Life stories on love romances and social trajectory", "Money stories" and so on. In other words, a whole aspect of clinical sociology directed at the individual and their history. 
 
The topic I will address tonight is another aspect of social research that has been conducted with colleagues for the past thirty years. It is, to a great extent, sociological research initiated at the Social Change Research Centre of Paris IX University. 
 
We were just a few psychologists and sociologists. Paris IX is the first University founded in France by Edgar Faure after the 1968 social movement in order to calm students and to be a University of organisational science: Paris IX Dauphine. Two universities were founded at that time: Vincennes in the east of Paris, which was considered to be a left-wing university of social sciences, and Dauphine, which was considered the right-wing management school in the west.
 
As it turns out I was at Dauphine at that time and in fact, it was not that simple of course, but I discovered Max Pages and psycho-sociology and my life took a new turn. In fact, I originally came to start work on an organisational sciences PhD and switched to social sciences.
 
Vincent de Gaulejac
"Society's management disorder"
 
I discovered Rogers, Marx, Freud and so on. It was obviously going to have an impact on my career, particularly the fact of being confronted at that time with the university's project. It wasn't the project of a management school but an organizational sciences one based on three disciplines: mathematics, economics, and psychology. Management wasn't really considered a scientific discipline. It was taught at business schools, such as HEC, and business administration schools but wasn't considered a scientific discipline. Management evolved and Dauphine became a business school. I witnessed this development and was lead to work, especially with Max Pagès and Michel Bonnetti, on the issue of management and its emergence as a new form of power and ideology.
 
It may seem odd to state that management is an ideology because there is nothing more anti-ideological that management. Management is about tools and techniques and not big speeches. It's about management control, accounting tools, marketing; a set of seemingly neutral techniques.
 
In fact, they are not neutral at all. Beneath the surface of these techniques, there is a representation of the world being conveyed and I think a new way of attending the needs of men and women is emerging, a way of organizing production and management.
 
You will notice a phenomenon: management tends to invade the entire social sphere. Everything is managable: a business but also emotions, a career, family, even feelings are managed. All aspects of public and social life are subjects of scrutiny in management terms; when something is wrong, like stress, we manage it. We must learn to manage our lives. Become the entrepreneur of your own life. Become the manager of your existence. 
 
There are a number of similar theories. For example, the theories of human capital or the human resources ideology are all concepts on how to organise things that apply to humans. 
 
I will take two examples to show how management can be considered an ideology. 
 
The first one is the ideology of human resources. If you consider that in a business or organization there are a number of factors to be taken into account, you will have noticed that the arising factors took shape originally twenty or thirty years ago in multinational companies followed by national companies, either private or public. It has now become a model found in sectors as varied as universities, social work, hospitals, health (to which I'll get back later) and even in family management; that is, to consider the family as a small business needing management on these very models that we see developing in the managerial world.
5:50
 
What exactly is the human resources ideology? It is to view a company as having a number of factors like production, research and so on. The human factor, like any other factor, needs to be taken into account. So-called "theories" on human resources and their management will be devised. In other words, human beings are considered as an element of the company and as a resource to be developed in the sake of business efficiency and profit. 
 
That is a spectacular turnaround, it is completely ideological to consider people as a business resource rather than, like anybody else of common sense, the business as an aspect of human beings. It is the company that is the resource for developing society. 
 
Why is it ideological? Because, in a way, we see a turnaround in the relationship between the economic and social aspects. Now, the development of society is at the service of economic development and it is not, as one might think, that economic development is a simple means of the development of society.
 
Similarly, in a business context, one could consider the company as a means to develop the well-being and capacities of men and women in order to improve life together as much as possible. Human beings, however, have become the resource and the means to the end of developing the company. 
 
This means that human beings become objects, they become a means and the purpose becomes the development of business and the economy. Here, we have an ideological shift in the perception of the relationship between economic and social elements, in the idea of the place of humans in a society.
 
Second example: as far as I know there are in a number of social work institutions... since we are at the opening of the "assises du travail social" (The building blocks of social work), I thought I would take examples from a social context. 
 
I know that Switzerland is not in Europe, at least not yet. I mean, it is unclear where it is. It is in the middle of Europe but not in the European Community. 
 
There is a European institution that really surprised me when I discovered it: the EFQM, European Foundation for Quality Management. Let me just quote the beginning of this brochure. It is the sentence below, the one that suggests to all companies and organizations in Europe to achieve excellence. 
 
What is excellence? I'll let you savour the following sentence: "The EFQM's mission is to be the driving force in sustainable excellence in Europe. "You see the quality of the sustainable excellence concept with a Vision. The word vision is capitalized like all other important words." A Vision of the world in which European organisations are distinguished by their excellence. "You see, sustainable excellence is defined by a vision of the world where organisations stand out for their excellence.
 
Besides the tautology of the sentence, one immediately notices an element of managerial ideology and the paradoxical aspect of such a position. What is paradoxical in this sentence? Excellence is defined as something out of the ordinary and the proposal is for all companies to become extraordinary. 
 
When everybody is to be excellent and to stand out, this means everybody stands out and thus nobody stands out. This is just one aspect. I ask you to keep this aspect in mind because the issue of a paradox is a central element in understanding the nature of the power that this ideology legitimises.
 
Let me continue, we haven't finished discovering things. "We define excellence as the exceptional practiceof an organisation's management and the achievement of results, based on a set of eight fundamental concepts."  
 
Hold on tight now, because by concepts, they mean all the following capitalized words. "Excellent results concerning Performance, Customers, Personnel and Society are achieved through Leadership driving Policy and Strategy, that manages Personnel, Partnerships, Resources and Processes." 
 
If there is anyone here who can understand what they are talking about, then bravo! It perfectly illustrates what Castoriadis called the rise of insignificance. In other words, totally abstruse views resorting to words that continually reference each other. 
 
This is why I have highlighted the key concepts of quality. The ideal of quality and the means to achieve it are broken down into a number of concepts that form a magic equation: quality = excellence = success = progress = performance = commitment = satisfaction of needs, accountability, recognition = quality and so on.
 
11:46
 
One of my colleagues who, in my opinion deserves the Nobel prize or to be somehow rewarded, drew up ​a table called "hollow speaking made easy" that perfectly sums up my point. The colleague in question is Didier Noyé. He drafted this amazing table. 
 
Take any word in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth column and you achieve sentences commonly found in corporate communications. 
 
The diagnosis stimulates concepts specific to the project. The method perfects the qualitative changes of the company. Intervention activates the motivational parameters of the beneficiaries.
 
It is a summary of the managerial ideology and this type of position. 
 
We laugh at it because it is actually quite ridiculous, but it is not funny when we are truly faced with it. In my work in the field, I meet people who are told to produce quality... this creates a number of contradictions and paradoxes. To spend more time trying to account for the work done instead of actually doing it is one of them. 
 
The second paradox is that people have the impression that when they are asked to assess the quality of their work; they evaluate based on criteria and indicators that do not correspond to what they think the essence of quality is. This is quite a contradiction for them.
 
The third paradox is quantophrenia. It resembles a speech in favour of quality but ultimately if you remember the much-talked about nine concepts I mentioned earlier on, I suppose I don't need to repeat the sentence: Leadership, Policy, Strategy, Personnel etc. On the left column you find these concepts, and to measure quality, each of them is broken down into several sub-criteria and each sub-criterion is divided into various indicators and each of these into items. The end result, in the EFQM brochure is, even though it was a praiseworthy attempt to achieve quality, an acute delusional quantophrenia.
 
Quantophrenia is the obsession of measures; quality is measured with a score from zero to 1000. Actually, it doesn't even start with zero because there are scores, criteria or indicators accounting for 0.26,0.178 or 0.375 of the final score; quality is measured according to a variable aggregation like that. 
 
I do not have the time to explain why this is madness. Obviously, all the assumptions that reflect quality in terms of criteria, indicators, sub-criteria etc... are never discussed.
 
What is the use of this? To classify. To Order. To orchestrate. In other words, to translate all human activities into the model of processing and managing things, into measurable aspects of management. It is madness to try to transform humans into measures; it is objectivist madness underlined by a kind of scientistic project, meaning that once reality is translated into mathematical terms, we can control and understand it; this tends, of course, to exclude anything that is not measurable.
 
However, the non-measurable is precisely what most people are attached to: dignity, honour and love for example. We could use those words. 
 
I don't have time to go into other aspects of this managerial ideology. But why do I even call it an ideology? Because it is a set of representations at the service of power.
 
One of the paradoxes is the apparent neutrality of management. Yet management tools are not neutral at all. These management tools are being used by a form of power - this is one of the hypotheses of this work. We are witnessing an emerging form of power in our societies that will gradually reveal itself and is founded on a number of values: quality, effectiveness, efficiency, performance to make people useful.
 
I once researched, with Isabelle Taboada, Frédéric Blondel and other colleagues, the issue of poverty and exclusion and called the project "The place struggle".
 
"The place struggle" pointed out the need of each individual to find their place in a society marked by the development of individualism. Those who did not make a place for themselves were considered useless in the world, to use the nice expression Robert Castel revived in his book "Transformation of the Social Question". These useless people are considered as having no place and no social existence. All of them are defined by a negative identity. The homeless, illegal immigrants, the unemployed, those without income etc…
 
This process of exclusion, this phenomenon of place struggle is gaining in strength. It has two other faces. On one hand, those who no longer have a place are considered useless and on the other hand it is the threat in a working environment. 
 
Nowadays, each and everyone of us is in danger of losing their place at any time and permanently. 
 
In France, and I apologise for continually taking examples in France, look at this spectacular regression represented by the new recruitment contract. Under this contract, one can be fired at any given time in a two year period. Workers and day labourers fought for decades against this type of thing. As we said at the time, they were hired "on a daily basis", day by day. 
 
This is social regression and this issue of place... what is the legitimacy of these measures? They were adopted in the name of profitability, performance, flexibility, productivity, mobility and so on. All these terms are evoked to justify so-called economic efficiency however and to fight against unemployment, job insecurity is increased.
 
This is important to understand. Those who advocate these measures are imbued with an ideology and convinced they are acting for the common good. They are convinced of their actions because they are rational. We must absolutely fight against this rationality that is not really as rational as it may seem and no longer makes sense to most people affected.
 
8:05 p.m.
 
Let me give you an example of the nature of the power that this ideology tends to legitimize. I will take two examples for this. I will take one example from Michel Foucault. You are probably familiar with this magnificent work by Michel Foucault called Discipline and Punish, in which he shows that beginning from the eighteenth century in our society, a new form of power has developed that is a disciplinary authority.
 
Initially it began by the invention of the prison but he shows that this form of power, when analyzing the prison system, in terms of architecture, in terms of regulation, in terms of the tight control of time and space, we find it in prisons, in asylums, in factories, in convents, schools and in hospitals. The whole of society is becoming a disciplinary society. 
 
When Foucault refers to power in a disciplinary society he says, "The object of power is the body." In fact, the object of the power is the physical energy of individuals. He proceeds by saying: "The body is, to a large extent, considered as a production force, invested with relations of power and domination. The body only becomes a useful forceif it is both productive and subdued."  
 
The scientific organisation of work is a good example of this power: Taylorism, assembly line work etc that are perfect illustrations. Moreover, Michel Foucault continues to develop on the establishment of surveillance and control systems where individuals are constantly monitored in order to be standardized.
 
Perhaps you are all familiar with Michel Foucault, this magnificent thesis and this extraordinary book in which he gives many examples of this form of power. 
 
If we replace the word body in Michel's work by the term psyche, you have the essence of what managerial power is. "The psyche is, to a large extent as a production force, invested with relations of power and domination. The psyche only becomes a useful force if it is both productive and subdued." 
 
That is, this form of power seeks to make people useful, efficient and profitable either through techniques of psychological rallying or through idealization and identification mechanisms and processes to incite adherence to the company goals by means of a narcissistic contract between individuals and the company. 
 
Many of the processes that we analysed and developed with colleagues such as Nicole Aubert in "The cost of Excellence", Max pages in "The Influence of the Organisation" and Eugène Enriquez in "Struggles of Power and of desire in business".
 
More recently, I will give you the references, some of my PhD students are working on interesting topics, for example, one student is doing an excellent job on McDonald's; the title is "Ketchup in the Veins". She is trying to understand how it was possible to have worked at McDonald's, as a young 19 year old girl for two and a half years even though she was not well paid, she had to work a lot and was completely enslaved by hard hours and difficult working conditions.
 
Let me also refer you to the magnificent work of Fabienne Hanique "The meaning of Work" in which she worked on the modernisation of the Post Office in France and demonstrates how it caused a loss of meaning in the employees perception of their job.
 
There is also the work of Valérie Brunel, "Managers of the Soul" where she shows how consulting firms have developed techniques for personal development in order make people more productive and profitable by allowing them to effectively express their libido, their emotions and emotional intelligence; there are also theories on human capital, emotional intelligence and a range of power technologies aiming to transform and channel people's libidinal energy into labour force.
 
This is the very nature of this power. 
 
It is appearing everywhere and there are consequences. One of them is the loss of meaning. In other words, this speech or ideology is no longer meaningful to individuals. I would like to give you a small example taken from Fabienne Hanique's work on the Post Office and postal workers.
 
Fabienne had a fantastic methodology. One day she went to a Post Office and asked the employees if she could observe them at work. They didn't say no so she stayed two and half years.
 
She did observation work of an incredible finesse. She gradually became integrated and people naturally came up to her to tell her about themselves.
 
She perfectly illustrates what Morin calls complexity when he says "the existance of the whole is in the elements. "Through the observation of the Post Office internal workings and it's so-called modernisation, one can analyse all the issues surrounding the modernisation of a modern company but also all the challenges of today's society.
 
She shows the influences in the tellers' daily life, the transformation of their working conditions and, specifically, the issue of meaning in the working environment. The employees have the feeling that their work and what they are asked to perform is increasingly at odds with what they think they would like to bring to what they do. 
 
I will give you an example. You know that modernisation is to promote the culture of clients. Nowadays we no longer refer to them as users but as customers. To make a good sales representative, challenges are organised between tellers to reward the best sellers.
 
Jeannine, a teller, refers to her victory with these words: "Last year I won a mountain bike. And not a cheap one! I won because I sold 1000€ worth of envelopes to a school principal who wanted to do a project based on the world cup. I was really pleased with my bike but also felt ashamed. I wasn't proud because I won it without having to do anything for it. I didn't really work for it."
 
Fabienne Hanique comments: "the teller notices that, among all the components of her performance, the only one symbolically and financially rewarded by the institution is the one most disconnected from the quality of her particular action. To receive a gift as the reward for an action without pride, the teller finds themselve trapped in a constrictive paradox difficult to resolve either by considering the reward with a certain irony or by ignoring certain terms of this illogical equation, consisting of gratifying something that cannot be gratified like fate”
 
28: 52
28: 52
 
One can clearly see that if a victory is due to chance (the principal bought her envelopes for 1000 Francs) at the time the award is not truly earned. The recognition obtained under these conditions has a negative psychological effect. Even though the agent accepts this token of appreciation, this gratification, she feels ashamed because she considers that she doesn't deserve it, but if she refuses, she would jeopardize her position with the company, and she punishes herself by giving up a reward. Whatever she does, she cannot boast about the reward and it doesn't give her any satisfaction.
 
The only defense mechanism against this is derision. The agent makes fun of a system that devalues ​​her by seeking to gratify her and she also makes fun of herself, forced to accept a gratification that she rejects.
 
The challenge seems to be to ultimately weaken the relationship between the agent and company. How can one be part of such a paradoxical system? 
 
I have another similar example I quite enjoyed: it's about a policeman. He was worthy of his reward and he gave his bonus to the social work section of the police and he made it known. Ok. On the police forums on the web, he declared that he was going to donate his bonus. So, why did he do this? Because, like any policeman, he knows the principle of merit promotion very well. Individual recognition is awarded for collective performance.
 
One aspect of this managerial power is individualization and the permanent paradox that ensues: performances are linked to smooth collective functioning but this very team work is consistently called into question because performances as well as merit are assessed on an individual basis. 
 
What happened when he refused the bonus for himself? His superiors penalised him for giving the bonus to the police social services.
 
I could go on with many examples... all those working in this context know what I mean when I say that the main feature of this power is to be paradoxical, to constantly engage people in paradoxical situations. This is one of the reason why this power is extraordinarily difficult to fight against because you are caught up in the system no matter what you do. You can be penalised or rewarded for exactly the same thing. 
 
Some managers tell you that one must become a convinced failure fanatic because if one fails six months before the others, then it is the way to succeed next time. 
 
These paradoxes are mass produced. I can see that you are interested. I'll give you some other examples.
 
For example, one must be outward looking but is reproached for not being there when needed. Quality is about giving customers deadlines and keeping them yet there isa written guideline stating that to commit to a deadline is professional misconduct. Team work is encouraged but the evaluation of performances is individual. One is asked to provide "total quality" but the company is dominated by concerns about profit and quantitative results. "Merit promotion" is encouraged but the one standing out at the expense of others is promoted. We hear "Solution approach" but one never has time to step back to develop solutions and so on.
 
And in many places today - businesses or other: we have our heads down to go faster, we know we're going to hit a wall yet we work faster and faster. 
 
People are well aware that they are in an increasingly senseless system and are powerless to leave it. They say they are powerless to change it. They say disaster is unavoidable and at the same time they continue to participate. It should be understood that the system would not work if each of us were to abstain from participating. This leads to an inevitable question in the discussion: "what can we do?" 
 
For the moment, I am in the context of analysis. The only way out of a paradoxical system - following the work of Palo Alto, Bateson, Watzlawick and others you may know well - is to move to a metacommunication level. In other words, it is communication within the system to demonstrate that it is paradoxical. As this system is paradoxical, it contains its own criticism.
 
It corresponds to what Marcuse analyzed well in The One Dimensional Man when he spoke of the universe of the closed discourse: a universe that is closed to any other discourse that does not use its terms. You can criticize management discourse provided it is within the paradigms of management such as positivism or utilitarianism.
 
For example: "there is no problem here, only solutions."  (I'm not sure everyone has understood). This states that you do not have the right to identify a problem if you do not provide the solution. This translates as: when everything I have just said is a management problem, it is useless and there is no point in caring about it.
 
Let me tell you why we should care: that system makes us sick. Why does management make us ill?
 
For several reasons: the first is that there is something profoundly destructive in the terms of this power. The culture of high-performance and excellence I mentioned earlier, advocates the individual achievement of excellence, fierce competition to achieve more and better, the pursuit of an indefinite excellence and ideal.
 
The ideal is becoming the norm. Achieving excellence is considered normal. I'll try to give you an example to comprehend this infernal machine and the destructiveness it leads to.
 
It's simple: it is the assessment model at American Express and used in many banks, multinational corporations, Swiss and French businesses. 
 
The model has five scores: 
E: unsatisfactory, 
D: must progress 
C: satisfactory 
B: above and beyond expectations 
A: clearly outstanding 
 
When you work at American Express, you cannot get unsatisfactory. Why? Because you have been to the best schools, you have always been an excellent student, you have been recruited after an extremely difficult process, so you can not be unsatisfactory. But you can't even be mediocre, it is nonsense. This such a disgrace that if you ever were to have this image of yourself, you would quit immediately. So, they removed the E. 
 
Must progress then becomes the lowest score. It is really infamous. What is normal or should be is to be satisfactory, that is to do your job. For many years it was considered that doing one's job was enough. It is no longer the case today.
 
An objective is set at 100. Implicitly, you have to aim at 110.110 is the norm and not 100 The norm is to be beyond normal. Normality is excellence. It's a bit more than what you're asked to do. What you're really asked to achieve is 110. So it's good if you get 110. But it's also normal. The 110 will become the 100 of the following year. Since you achieved 110 you cannot regress, the 110 becomes the 100 of the following year. If the following year you want to be normal, that is, beyond expectations, you must aim for 120. Remember that 110 of year n+1 is actually 120.The year after, it is 130 and so on.
 
Excellence leads to inevitable failure. The pressure steadily increases. There is a demand for even better. It is inevitable that people, faced with such requirements, feel the emerging phenomenon and raise the issue of harassment?
 
People are under pressure. The culture of high performance has produced two phenomena. The first is the obsolescence logic. In other words, a society that constantly destroys what it produces in order to produce something else. I will take an example in the field of computers. The increase in performances have been remarkable for 30 years. Practically every year, new material is released that is twice as effective, twice as powerful, twice as fast, twice as user-friendly, half the size and half the price. Great! 
 
Through these small electronical devices, you can access the entire knowledge produced in the world almost in real time. No utopia could have emergent such a performance. It is quite extraordinary. 
 
But remember it is paradoxical. Let us not forget that high performance culture is actually performant. But what are the consequences? Everything becomes obsolete after a year and sometimes just a couple of months. Not only devices or machines become obsolete because they are less efficient, less powerful, less fast than the new ones, but also knowledge, tools, techniques, factories and those who contributed in their production.
 
We are in a race that produces obsolescence. In other words, the constant destruction of what has been produced by the need to produce something else. If it simply consisted of producing goods, it would not be that bad but we are talking about human beings. This need for flexibility and mobility means that, for questions of miniaturisation, an 18-year-old with good sight will become obsolete at 25, too old to perform miniature work. Consider the human consequences of this type of work.
 
Second consequence: harassment. Make no mistake about harassment. You are aware of Marie-France Hyrigoyen's successful and spectacular book on psychological harassment which, by the way, led to a new law in France to condemn harassment.
 
Marie-France Hyrigoyen is a psychiatrist. She demonstrates how harassment is perverse behaviour that puts people under pressure. In fact, people are under the constant paradoxical pressure of being at fault. She therefore highlights the perversion of a behaviour. And so the law will condemn perverse behaviours. Very good! B ut how is it possible that this book was so successful? Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. Are all these buyers harassed? That means we would have hundreds of thousands of perverts running free in our societies? We should be careful because we are really under threat. 
 
It is quite simple. When the pressure is on, when you find yourself in paradoxical situations, when increasingly more is demanded - each of us regardless of psychological behaviour and the fact that we are speaking of "perfectly normal" people, we are all true polymorphic perverts -, each of us becomes either harasser or harassed. This means that in this high performance culture of increasing pressure for more, harassment becomes a social phenomenon rather than a psychological one that is linked to perverse behaviours that exist elsewhere in society. These systems simply call for perversion. We are all simultaneously invited or rather solicited to become a harasser or harassed.
 
There are several consequences. Another consequence is the culture of emergency.
 
44: 40 
To improve today's productivity and share holder value, we are told that staff and productivity cost reduction are necessary.It is true though that working hours have decreased etc ... but increased productivity does not free people from labour because what they gain in time, they lose in intensity.
 
What kind of system results? This produces a system in which those who work are worn down by overworking while those who no longer work are worn out by inactivity. A split is produced: excellence produces exclusion.
 
If we consider the problem of unemployment we must see that, in the great words of Michel Albert, for companies and for this system of power, unemployment is not a problem, it is a solution.So why solve it when, for them, it is a solution.
 
We expect growth, the solution to the problem of exclusion and unemployment yet growth produces the paradoxical system. Growth has actually produced jobs, but it destroys as much or even more than it produces. So we must no longer maintain this discourse that growth is the solution to the problems of employment and unemployment. 
 
It means: a logic of obsolescence, a culture of emergency, and widespread social harassment. This produces a number of psychopathological effects encountered regularly in business and that we empirically observe around us.
 
People are not doing so well. People are suffering. People are complaining. Some complain of burnout, stress, of being sapped and emptied, to be caught up in a permanent acting out. What is permanent acting out? In the fight against anxiety generated by this ongoing social harassment, there is a solution: it is to work more.
 
That may seem to be a surprising phenomenon. I have witnessed that among managers. Managers have what psychoanalysts call the loss of object anguish. I have a friend called Jacques Rheaume from Quebec who has conducted studies on hyperactivity. What is hyperactivity? It is to work, work, and work to fight against the anxiety of emptiness when one no longer works. It is particularly related to the anxiety of not achieving one's objectives. We could say that it is functional because people are afraid of being penalised if they fail to achieve their goals. But in fact it is much more subtle than that. It is primarily a psychological phenomenon. That is to say that we have to be always in shape. We must always be up to the demands of the organisation. We must always be ready because this ideal we are offered to be a fighter, to be fit, to be excellent etc. It's great! It's really great! You Must Be a Winner. You all must be winners. I want to be a winner. 
It's like when someone proposes that all the young people of the city north Marseille project become like Zidane. This is a great role model, to become like Zidane, right? Even the girls dream it, imagine! Imagine, it is a great ideal. At the same time, do you see the illusion that it represents? If indeed the only hope given to these young people is to become like Zidane, it means that only 1 in a 100,000, 1 out of a million will make it. Do you see the disillusionment and disenchantment at the end of this process? 
 
In fact, what does it cover in terms psychopathologies? Depression. With the ideal of a high performance culture that puts everyone under pressure, there is a widespread syndrome and a general symptom that everyone is at risk of depression. Moreover, you just have to see that, as Alain Ehrenberg said in The Weariness of the self, it is already difficult to live up to demands that are no longer only a requirement in the world of business, but these management models, the realization of self, are spreading outside the world of work.
 
That is to say that parental anxiety is such that, concerning the future of their children and concerning the place struggle, parents are constantly arming their children to make them excellent and are managing the school career of their children as we manage the careers of high potential executives in multinational companies. And when they are not good in languages or not good in maths, we put them through coaching. We call on experts to get them in shape. And you see how the managerial ideology has entered the domestic sphere, in the relations between parents and children. 
 
I do not know if it is the same in Switzerland but Wednesday in France is the day that is supposed to be the rest day for children, but in fact Wednesday's schedule is much worse that of all other days of the week because not only must they be good at school, but they must be good at sports, they must make music, they must be cultivated: a beautiful mind in a beautiful body. They must become successful on all levels, like all men and women need to become successful on all levels. You must become great on a professional level ... Ladies: good mother, good wife, think about your career and at the same time take care of your waist, your chest, your position in bridge, your tennis; you have to be in good shape and keep smiling.
 
That is the ideology of self-realisation. Indeed, the self of each individual has become a capital on which to build on. And I say this in the home of Calvin and the cradle of capitalism.
 
Thank you. 
 
Just to finish, I am a little excited because I received this letter yesterday and I thought it would make a nice conclusion. 
 
Dear Mr de Gaulejac, 
 
I read your book, Society’s management disorder. I would like to say that this book expresses the discomfort I feel in the company I work for. The mails that we receive every three months from our CEO telling us that despite our efforts, we must continue to reduce our costs for the benefit of our shareholders. The layoffs must continue, and there was one that affects me particularly. Pierre spent 20 years at this company. He knew and admired the founder who died five or six years ago. Now the company that has become a world leader, following numerous acquisitions and mergers, fired Peter. Peter is in his fifties, and it seems that everything he did for the company was quickly forgotten.
 
So I wanted to thank you for your book and tell you that it touched me and helps me sometimes to overcome the daily routine by telling me that this is not all in my head. 
 
 
Finally, just a little poem if you will: 
 
When we are told of growth and living increases,
It is not that women's bodies becomes larger
that the trees have begun to rise above the clouds,
That one can travel in any of the flowers,
That lovers can, for entire days, stay married;
But simply that it is becoming difficult to live...simply.
 
Thank you.
 
HETS
Professional School of Social Work
Geneva
Conference given as part of 
"Les assises du social (The foundations of social work)" 
Organised by the Centre of studies and continuing education (CEFOC) 
Hes.SO
Geneva
Specialist Professional School of Western Switzerland