The “crisis” tells us Didier Fassin, professor at the Collège de France, is always a social construction with two essential components, one objective, and the other subjective, I quote: “It is not enough for a problem to arise in society, it still needs to be understood as such.” The “who” here is fundamental because depending on its status and driving force, the crisis can be methodically dealt with or ignored.
Thus, in a crisis, he says, there can be a disjunction between the objective component, the objective phenomenon and the subjective component, that is to say its subjective expression.
Concerning the “management crisis”, there is indeed an objective phenomenon concerning the difficulties that organizations are going through in terms of their management. Surveys by researchers as well as statistics on workplace ills attest to this. However, do we have a shared subjective expression?
It seems to me that this is not the case because the different stakeholders in the problems do not have the same interests or the same perspectives and as a result, it is difficult for them to have a shared subjectivity to transform reality. objective starting from the root causes and not simply the consequences or symptoms.
Indeed, there is a fundamental disagreement between the stakeholders in collective action (shareholders, managers, employees, unions, etc.) which does not allow us to understand the difficulties in depth, notably the fact that maximum efficiency always implies the minimum of freedom and therefore the ability to recognize oneself in what one does, a source of health and sustainable performance: “from a human creature, John Ruskin tells us, you can make a tool or a man; you can’t have both at the same time.” Implacable truth!
From the moment when the different stakeholders are not aligned on such an observation and its consequences but also on the fact that there can be a path between the “materialism of the barbarians” and the “spiritualism of the salons” to use the term Mounier’s expression, they do not collectively give themselves the means to grasp the problem at the root and implement a new way of thinking and doing things.
What are the concrete consequences of such epistemic dissonance between stakeholders?
Without shared subjectivity, a “crisis” phenomenon becomes a simple call to action without the reflection and actions necessary to grasp the root causes by accepting a certain price to pay to transform reality. This gives, for example, greenwashing on the subject of climate change and managementwashing or even workwashing, talking about work without drawing the real consequences, concerning management.
In organizations, the result is an increase in managerial fashions and other devices without necessarily having a real impact on the cause of the effects: leadership development programs for managers and executives, training plans on soft skills, use of AI to create employee experiences, etc.
Moreover, the superficial provisions implemented can aggravate the “management crisis”: radicalization of the skills approach with an additional layer relating to behavioral skills (the famous soft skills) while forgetting that the faculty is not not the judgment; worsening of work ills by increasingly treating individuals (disciplinary, coaching, etc.) without treating work situations, etc.
We can therefore say that the so-called “management crisis” hides at least a crisis in perceptions about work and management. Language once again, through the word “crisis” veils multiform realities which are not neutral in the capacity to deploy shared reasoning to act in a sustainable manner, in time and space.
This is why, without adjusting the perspectives between all the stakeholders in collective action, we will continue the current transformation fueled by the dialectical illusion in the Kantian sense of which Jacques Bouveresse spoke: “irresistible in its motivations and condemned to “failure by the nature of its pretensions”.