“When good and evil come together at work”: the trap of ready-to-think

The book. It’s a little music that we’ve been hearing in offices for many years. It is played with consistency by managers, executives and consultants, and taken up by a “managerial literature” prolific. Its main theme can vary: it sometimes invites people to give meaning to work, sometimes to encourage discussion, employees to speak out about the company’s activity, or even to see any novelty as progress.

But this background sound also and above all represents, for Sandra Enlart, a set of “moral discourse” which allow organizations to define the good, the fair, the true… and what is not.

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Throughout his work When good and bad come to work (PUF), the author, director of research in educational sciences at Paris-X-Nanterre, works to deconstruct many of these stories that are current in companies. She tries to understand what underlies them and what also explains their permanence over time. M^me Enlart recalls, for example, that “the idea that it is necessary and that we can reconcile the company and its employees” has been in vogue since “the appearance of large modern organizations. Didn’t Taylor himself plead this cause before the unions? [au début du XX^e siècle] » ?

Preconstructed discourses and conformism

Why are these discourses so present in managerial spheres, sometimes inspiring the company’s strategic orientations (definition of its raison d’être, its values, etc.) or management methods (recruitment, etc.)? If they are strategic, according to the author, it is because the organization pursues, through them, a clear purpose: to create a link, an attachment with the employees to ensure their voluntary involvementof their “voluntary submission”.

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Through this dive into managerial beliefs, M^me Enlart denounces preconstructed speeches, a moral conformity singularly lacking in nuance. It doesn’t stop there. The author engages, in the second part of the book, in a similar analysis of the literature critical of the business world, ” works [qui] tried to show how dangerous and disrespectful of the individual the organization is”.

Here again, the author raises the “moral discourse” who come back regularly. “Work kills”, “the reality is on the ground”, “in the company everything is manipulation”… If she underlines the veracity of certain theses, she regrets, there again, the lack of nuances and the Manichean presentations which are regularly made of the world of work.

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