Jeanne Fillonneau's thesis topic is "Switching to flex-office. Actors, rationales, effects on project management between consulting firms and client companies," co-supervised by Pascal Ughetto (LATTS) and Sophie Bernard (IRISSO).
She began her higher education studies at CPGE ENS D1 in Toulouse before enrolling in a Bachelor's degree in Social Sciences at Paris Dauphine University.
Her ambition to work on flex-office stems from an internship she completed in 2020 at the Center for the Study of Social Movements at EHESS with Vincent-Arnaud Chappe. During this internship, she was able to conduct her first research on the transformation of workspaces.
She then joined the Master's program in Sociology, Business Policy, and Social Responsibility at Paris Dauphine-PSL University to conduct research on flex-office in line with her professional goals. During this master's program, she completed two research theses on the subject of the transformation of workspaces. In her first year of the program, she studied a team of professional development consultants responsible for implementing flex-office in companies under the supervision of Sarah Abdelnour. In her second year, she worked with employees of a company that had recently switched to flex-office, and her thesis was written under the supervision of Sophie Bernard. It was based on the results of these two studies and in order to explore numerous avenues of research that she was able to come up with her thesis topic.
With teleworking, employees no longer need to come to the office on a fixed and regular basis, some of the workstations remain unoccupied, and the future of commercial real estate can be rethought. This is what companies are doing through the implementation of flex-office. It consists of eliminating assigned workstations by offering fewer offices than employees to ensure a rotation in the occupation of space. It aims to fulfill a dual management objective: on the one hand, to modernize management through more flexible organizational methods, and on the other hand, to respond to the need to reduce real estate costs. Its deployment relies on significant decision-making and negotiation involving management, working in concert with a booming sector of activity, namely professional space planning consulting. This combination has a considerable impact on and transforms work within the company. The hypothesis guiding the thesis would therefore be that flex-office projects are driven by a variety of actors with multiple rationales, with negotiators and decision-makers in companies torn between financial and managerial interests on the one hand, and a variety of consulting services on the other. The question then becomes whether there are different ways of designing flex-office projects, questioning who the actors are and the power relationships behind the figures of management and consulting teams, and then studying whether or not these projects leave significant room for taking into account the realities of work and their complexity.