Experimenting with freedom at work. Evaluating the democratic potential of participative management
(2021) 33th SASE Annual Meeting — Location: Online Conference (25.June.2021)
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- In the recent years, a rising number of firms in French-speaking Europe experiment according to the management doctrine of “liberating leadership” (Getz, 2011; Getz & Carney, 2012). The growing popularity of this fashion, and of the practices of self-management that it promotes, in the academia and the HRM professional community (Gilbert, Raulet-Croset, & Teglborg, 2017; Lee & Edmondson, 2017) sparked a trend of research to grasp the phenomena (Coutrot, 2018; Fox & Pichault, 2017; Gilbert, Teglborg, & Raulet-Croset, 2017; Hélène Picard & Islam, 2019). “Liberating leaders” promote freedom at work by implementing anti-hierarchical and anti-Taylorian policies and practices (Getz & Carney, 2012). Firms inspired by this doctrine experiment different practices ranging from raising the involvement of frontline workers in decision-making (collective intelligence), changing the management structure (from pyramids to multi-level circles) to promoting an egalitarian culture (less symbolic privileges for higher-ranking company officer). Supported by more than psychological justifications (Linhart, 2015), “liberating leadership” draws on multiple elements of the political critique of work that would entail a careful examination of how it may contribute to the democratization of the work-life (Ferreras, 2017) However, these participative arrangements are mostly described by French work sociology as a ploy for workers (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999; Borzeix, Charles, & Zimmermann, 2015; Borzeix & Linhart, 1988; Spurk, 1998). It would grant the illusion of autonomy in the working experience, while being the counterpart of stronger emotional and personal investment, newer forms of control (Barker, 1993; Gilbert, Teglborg, et al., 2017), neutralizing critique (Daudigeos, Edwards, Jaumier, Pasquier, & Picard, 2019) or distracting workers from important strategic decisions (Ferreras, 2017). Evidence from field study of “liberation leadership” are also supporting the thesis that managerial goodwill is not enough to ensure workers emancipation (H. Picard, 2015) considering the fundamental political institutions of the work organization have not changed. Taking these criticisms seriously, the paper uses Amartya Sen’s (1999) capability approach to interpret the democratic potential of these experiments in light of their potential in the development of economic and democratic capabilities for workers. This is in line with other papers in the field of industrial relations that also studies the capability-enhancing potential of employment regulations and institutional features of the system of employment relations (Bonvin, 2012; De Munck & Ferreras, 2013; Subramanian & Zimmermann, 2013). Past and recent studies on recuperated firms show that workers face important challenges in the democratic transition of their firm (Quijoux, 2011, 2018). External support is more than often needed to teach workers how to run their business in a democratic fashion: what I define in recent work as the skills and dispositions for the democratic self-government of work (Jégou & Souhaya, 2021). Based on an ethnographic case study that describes the daily work life of an industrial food processing family-owned firm in Belgium, this paper evaluates the conditions that may hinder or foster this capability for the democratic self-government of work. The paper argues that such experiments in “liberation leadership” contribute to the development of organizing skills and professional self-awareness needed to build up workers’ collective autonomy (Castoriadis, 1998).
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Jégou, O. (2021). Experimenting with freedom at work. Evaluating the democratic potential of participative management. 33th SASE Annual Meeting, Online Conference. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239918