September 2014
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Ethnography in the firm
Issue 117
Editorial
By Pascal LEFEBVRE
Editorialiste
Introduction : Ethnographie dans l’entreprise
By Michel VILLETTE
Professeur de sociologie à Agro-ParisTech et chercheur au Centre Maurice Halbwachs (ENS/EHESS/CNRS)
« Les gens ne font généralement pas ce qu’ils disent qu’ils font, mais autre chose. Par conséquent, il faut être là et regarder pour savoir ce qu’ils font. » (Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (1), Argonauts of the Wertern Pacific, 1922).
Focus on making numbers: Fieldwork on a risk committee
By Nicolas Meunier ,
doctoral student, LAMES (University of Aix-Marseille)
A financial transaction does not spring out of a vacuum. It is a decision that comes out of the procedures followed by financial institutions and a discussion between individuals (eventually with diverging interests) inside these institutions. At the core of this process, the “country note” is used to summarize/measure a country’s economic state of health whenever a committee examines the limits to set on the institution’s financial commitments to a country. Focus is placed on how such committees use this note at several levels. This note measures a complex object and enters into the creation of conventions between parties. At the center of both conflicts and negotiations, it has a “procedural” function. This tool helps impart a common momentum to those who use it, and it is a means for sharing liability.
The art of business: A fieldwork view of a hypermarket’s local management
By Mathieu Hocquelet ,
postdoctoral student, Maurice Halbwachs Center (ÉHÉSS)
Despite the growing number of external controls related to the just-in-time management of merchandise and customers, department superintendents in hypermarkets still play a key role in the everyday organization of work. The staff’s job has changed owing to the restructuring of big retail chains over the past twenty years. Major technical and organizational innovations in this sector - computerization, centralization of data, the logistics of the supply chain, the integrated management of merchandise and labor - have led to an increasingly “closed” organization in hypermarkets. Subject to strong institutional imperatives, department superintendents are forced to take more risks and to make their employees do so too.
Selling store cards, an introduction to the social branding of dematerialized money
By Hélène Ducourant ,
associate professor, University of Paris Est Marne-La Vallée
This detailed description of how hypermarkets sell the store’s cards exposes the technical, organizational and interactional conditions of this activity as well as the effects of a homologous habitus between salespersons and customers, which boosts the sale of these cards. Light is also shed on a phase of learning how to use “virtual” money.
The impact of variable pay: Real-time observations in the financial industry
By Olivier Stul ,
doctoral student, Maurice Halbwachs Center (ÉHÉSS/ÉNS)
What effects do significant increases in variable pay have on the employees receiving them and on their colleagues? What changes in the wage-earner’s attitude and interactions with others? This analysis of the impact of increasing the variable proportion of pay borrows from academic literature on this topic and the author’s observations in the financial industry between 1990 and 2012. Firms consider this sort of pay to be efficient for reaching targets, such as attracting new talent or retaining current employees. The literature on these effects is more ambivalent. Many findings, in published statistical studies and quantitative comparisons, have drawn diverging conclusions. The author’s observations made in everyday situations cast light on how the behavior of wage-earners changes.
“Techniques” as an activity or a shared idea: Fieldwork in an aeronautics firm’s R&D
By Hadrien Coutant ,
doctoral student, Center of the Sociology of Organizations (Sciences Po)
As in the case of someone studying a distant tribe, being accepted in a big technology firm’s R&D division requires a long phase of learning the language, ideas and implicitly shared assumptions. In this world of engineers, “techniques” are a language and, at the same time, the key element in social bonds. By appropriating this language and measuring it against the practices and careers of research engineers, the fieldworker came to see that “techniques”, omnipresent in words, are elusive in actual work and in individual career trajectories. Both individual and collective, both a productive activity and a factor of social integration articulating a profession, a company and a group project, techniques are the key element in the mental world of engineers in Research and Development.
Cutting HR costs? Fieldwork on setting up shared services in Human Resources in a multinational corporation
By Nathalie Mérai ,
doctoral student, EHESS
This description, drawn from a future dissertation, inquires into the conditions for successfully reorganizing the function “Personnel” in a multinational group. The goal of this reorganization was to cut the costs of the Personnel administration (where the author holds a white-collar job) by setting up a Center of Shared Services in charge of pay and the administrative management of the workforce. The decision, recommended by international consultants, was supposed to rapidly reduce costs. This ethnographic study is based on documents used in the firm. The description of stages in the implementation process of the proposed plan sheds light on: the difficulties and troubles encountered, the forms of adaptation by persons in the field, and the attempts to find a new - viable - organizational equilibrium.
May I challenge you a little? Transmitting knowledge and the rules of managerial sociability
By Benoit GAUTIER,
doctoral student in sociology
White-collars from several firms, academics and consultants met to produce a very specific “product”: a “case study”. The case took shape in two phases: the story presented by certain white-collars about a managerial practice and the other parties’ reactions to it. When questioned, the speakers were invited to “tell more”, to show the “other side of the picture”. “Tantalizing” pieces of information determined an argument’s weight and its value to participants, who will use it later on. The game is to see as much as possible without asking “embarrassing” questions, which would make the case useless for purposes of communication - whence the importance of following group rules.
Specialized insurance agents, entrepreneurs under pressure
By Luca BartoLomei
The author, who has chosen to remain anonymous, describes the installation of an insurance agent specialized in estate planning. We see how the insurance company recruited and trained agents, and how it made them loyal despite difficulties and disappointments. Although their personal finances were often in an unsatisfactory state five years after installation, nearly a third of these recruits stayed on. Their commitment is hard to explain in terms of pure economic rationality. Other explanations are needed to understand why they pursued a career that turned out to be much less attractive than what they had expected.
Mosaics
À quoi sert un économiste ? Enquête sur les nouvelles technologies de gouvernement
À propos du livre de Mariana Heredia, « À quoi sert un économiste ? Enquête sur les nouvelles technologies de gouvernement », Éditions de La Découverte, Collection « Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond », 180 pages
By Alain Max GUÉNETTE
HEG - Haute école de gestion Arc, Neuchâtel