From Disciplinary Authority to Deliberative Authority (Part 1)
Jean-Claude Casalegno
Professor Emeritus at ESC Clermont
Member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis & Management
Management today is presented as a set of functional and rational methods aimed at optimizing the collective efficiency of organizations in the four space-times of management well identified by Octave Gélinier (Gélinier, 1976): operative, organizational, strategic, and cultural.
1. Research hypotheses
But behind this technical facade and this instrumental neutrality, another reality is hidden. By reducing management to a simple performance lever, we obscure its symbolic, political and anthropological dimensions. This reductive vision, widely disseminated in the Grandes Écoles and universities by Anglo-Saxon-inspired textbooks centered on “organizational behavior”, tends to make us forget that management is also a vector of production of norms, power relations, and social imaginaries.
We hypothesize that this conception of management is the product of a double reduction: epistemological, by reducing the complexity of management to operative tools, and anthropological, by denying their interdependencies with the economic and social forces that overdetermine them. By retracing the evolution of managerial forms since the mid-nineteenth century, this research proposes two complementary hypotheses:
– Management is the bearer of many “unthoughts”, rarely questioned in the dominant approaches. These blind spots notably evacuate the questions:
– of the authority defined by Hannah Arendt as “the ability to obtain adherence without resorting to force or persuasion” (Arendt, 1954);
– of the power that Weber (1922) presents as “the ability to influence others”, potentially by “constraint and/or seduction; of symbolic domination internalized through the codes, the habitus and the cultural capital which have shaped the individual through his social career” (Bourdieu, 1979);
– of submission to authority by a relationship of subordination and its consent unveiled by Milgram and questioned well before by La Boétie;
– the influence widely denounced by Emanuel Diet, Vincent de Gaulejac (1991), Max Pages Max, and Eugene Enriquez.
(So many dimensions that show that the managerial exercise involves much more than the mere efficiency of the processes: it mobilizes deep springs linked to the place of authority in our societies).
– Management is a “contingent discipline”, deeply shaped by the socio-economic contexts, the collective imaginations, and the relations of production in which it is inscribed. Its history is inseparable from that of the mutations of capitalism, forms of work organization, and social representations of the company.
In this perspective, and following Roland Barthes (1957) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1975), we propose to consider management as an “instituted imaginary”: a set of stabilized representations that give meaning to the organization of work, to authority, and to cooperation. Management functions as a contemporary mythology: it does not merely structure practices, it produces narratives, figures (the “inspiring leader,” the “liberated company,” “agile innovation,” etc.), and norms that shape subjectivities and behaviors.
As a mirror of contemporary societies, it reflects their tensions, beliefs, contradictions, and hopes. Far from being neutral, the managerial imaginary acts as an operator of legitimation, naturalizing political choices and instituting implicit norms.
2. Methodological Protocol
The exploration was carried out from a qualitative, interpretative, and comprehensive approach that mobilized a combination of methods from the social sciences and anthropology to analyze management as “a total social fact”.
Marcel Mauss (Mauss, 1925) in The Gift, uses this term to describe “facts that are at the same time legal, economic, religious, and even aesthetic and morphological: they are so large that they cannot be reduced to a single category of social life. “
This is the case of management, which we wish to demonstrate is the product of real economic constraints, beliefs, and imaginary representations that will condition the strategies of organizations, reasoning, action devices, and decision-making modes. The research method articulates three approaches:
An analysis of the speeches
We mobilize a corpus analysis based on the tools of critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis: Pêcheux, Charaudeau, Fairclough (1992), aiming to identify lexical invariants, rhetorical inflections, and semantic shifts in dominant managerial discourses.
The corpus includes:
– professional journals and publications specialized in management (from 1950 to today),
– training materials and management manuals,
– audiovisual and communication productions of companies,
– academic articles and works disseminating hegemonic managerial models.
This analysis aims to try to bring to light the mythological figures of managerial discourse (in the sense of Barthes, 1957), as well as the devices of legitimization and naturalization of managerial norms.
Organizational Ethnography and Participant Observation
In the tradition of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel (1967)) and the pragmatic sociology of organizations, we analyze managerial practices based on extended field experience: more than 200 organizational contexts (private, public, associative), in which we intervened as a reflective practitioner (consultant or facilitator).
This participant observation posture, which has been engaged for more than thirty years, makes it possible to collect dense empirical data on the daily practices of authority, the interactions between actors, the forms of resistance or adherence, and the regulatory mechanisms at work. These elements were recorded between 2006 and 2025 in a resource site called the 4 Temps du management, visited each month by more than 12,000 managers.
Semi-structured interviews and trajectory analysis
In order to complete the in situ analysis and access the identity dimension of management reports, we conducted more than 150 semi-structured interviews, carried out as part of the preparation for numerous seminars devoted to management and leadership, organizational transformation or change management. Inspired by comprehensive approaches, this approach aims to reconstruct, according to the times: the representations of authority and managerial power, and the logic of adherence, distancing or reinterpretation of the imposed norms.
We will try to treat these materials by relying on the theoretical frameworks derived from clinical sociology (De Gaulejac, Eugène Enriquez), which itself relies on a clinical and psychoanalytic anthropology.
3. Research Results
These observations make it possible to identify three historical figures of managerial authority. By retracing the history of management in the light of the concept of authority since 1850 (Chaumont Regulation), we have identified 3 currents of authority that are “signified” in organizations. The term “current” refers to the concept of “semantic basin” proposed by Gilbert Durand (Durand, 1996). He uses the hydraulic “metaphor” to describe the different phases of a socio-cultural topic from its emergence, its development, its exhaustion, and finally its disappearance.
We propose to apply it to a thorough understanding of each of the three authority figures that we have identified behind the implementation of managerial practices:
3.1 The disciplinary figure
Between 1850 and 1970-80, it is the “disciplinary authority figure” (Taylor, Fayol, Weber) that will take over: it is characterized by pyramidal organizations and the importance given to hierarchy, obedience, and the division of labor; it is part of a centralized logic.
We borrow the term disciplinary from Foucault (1975) to describe the devices that are implemented in this model, which are characterized by numerous practices of prescription and surveillance, considering a priori that the man at work is by nature inclined to “nonchalance” and transgression; that he must therefore be monitored and punished if he deviates from the imposed order.
What dominates this model is the figure of an authoritarian and strict father demanding obedience to imposed standards. It is the superego that guides the collective action of prescribing and proscribing.
3.2 The Motivational Figure
From the 1980s to 1990s, it is the “motivational figure” (McGregor, Maslow, Herzberg, Lemoine, Deci & Ryan) that takes over: the manager becomes a “collective energy generator”. It is on him that the collective performance rests as a priority. In this model, they are presented as a hero responsible for “transmitting to their employees the passion for the product and the service” (Lemoine, 1994).
It is a form of management that is apparently more benevolent, but just as regressive because the manager is installed in a position of all power. In this model, it is no longer the archaic Superego that is mobilized, but the Ideal of the Ego of individuals and collectives. Nicole Aubert (Aubert, 2003) and Vincent de Gaulejac (de Gaulejac, 1991) have particularly well explained the new form of alienation that is implemented. It is a question of playing on the narcissistic flaws of the actors by conditioning their commitment, if possible total, to the recognition that is granted to them. This, however, is not unconditional, it is inseparable from a level of performance achieved.
This dynamic presents at least two dangers:
– That of “the burn of ideality” in subjects who are invited to enter “what Nicole Aubert (Aubert, 2003) called a hyper combustion of self. By wanting to meet the more or less realistic expectations of the ideal of the organizational self, one risks exhaustion. We then speak of Burn Out; in Japan, Karochi.
– The depressive collapse that can suddenly occur when the subject is betrayed by the company in the case, for example, of a brutal dismissal carried out without hesitation for economic reasons. The confessions of Didier Bille, who describes himself as an executor, are particularly enlightening from this point of view.
This model had its moment of glory, especially among leaders, because it gave results, but the work of the two aforementioned authors who founded clinical sociology, clearly shows what must be called a “certain form of perversion”. Indeed, everything is based initially on an operation of seduction, the duration of which will be conditioned by the more or less lasting achievement of a level of performance. At the slightest failure – whether it comes from the individual himself or from the company – the organization will no longer keep its implicit promises, thus revealing the chilling rationality of management that is always at work behind this game of relationship as shown in the film “Rien du Tout” by Cédric Klapisch. The HRD, represented in this case by the actor Fabrice Lucchini, is responsible for reviving a Parisian department store in distress. To do so, he relies on motivational methods that were very popular at the time and that today seem questionable, such as parachute or bridge jumping, combined with unifying collective activities such as setting up a choir. This approach allows to remotivate the staff; which results in a return of the commercial performance of the establishment. But at the end of the film, invisible shareholders appear in the shadows, who will take advantage of this return to fortune to resell this high-performance department store at a good price, thus jeopardizing the newfound security of the employees.
3.3 The Deliberative Figure
From 2012, a new form of more shared authority appears, which we will call “deliberative” (Mintzberg, Laloux, Detchessahar, Sennett): authority is distributed in the collectives through the processes of co-construction, dialogue, and continuous organizational learning.
Some organizations are definitively questioning their hierarchical model by lightening their structure and encouraging horizontality. The focus is now on the “raison d’être” of the company and the dynamics of more collective work. The objectives are no longer imposed from above but from below, then authorized to make proposals that will be discussed again with the hierarchy. The main orientations that drive these new systems are now based on accountability and empowerment.
This model began in an eccentric way by proposing a concept that can now make you smile: that of “liberated enterprise” (Getz, 2012). A first reading could make it look like a trend. But Roland Barthes (Barthes, 1957) advises us to take fashions seriously. This is what we did by considering that its extreme form constituted a challenge to the established model (Casalegno, 2014).
From there, many models have developed characterized by the same invariants, such as the “service management” of Yan Carlson in Sweden, the Servant Leadership of Greenleaf in the United States, the “empowering management” in France, the “sociocracy” in the Netherlands and “holacracy” in the USA.
Today, this model is in development and is taking more peaceful forms. For example, we find “sociocracy” at Orange under the term “Shared Governance”.
These new models make extensive use of the techniques of Collective Intelligence, which began to be disseminated in France under the title of Design Thinking, which is now found under the term “facilitation”. It is also interesting to note that they are increasingly associated with the desire to develop “regeneration” strategies in the face of global warming. After a critical phase, it seems that they are entering a more positive imaginary perspective.
To go further
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(to be continued)
