Pascal Ughetto is organizing the Grets seminar session on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 (9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Maison Suger/FMSH, Paris).
The session will be introduced by Jérôme CIHUELO (EDF R&D).
Drawing on a variety of sources of inspiration, large corporations have shown renewed interest over the past decade in rethinking work organizations and the place they give to autonomy. Management has rediscovered that these companies operate in silos, with procedures and processes. They therefore felt it was urgent to review their operating methods and their highly vertical structure. The 2010s began with an urgent call for stakeholders to bring about a "cultural transformation." The second half of the decade saw greater efforts to operationalize this transformation through experimentation with new mechanisms aimed at promoting collaboration, creativity, and collective idea generation, as well as trust in teams to self-organize. This resulted in workspaces that allowed employees to feel empowered to propose and test prototypes without any obligation to succeed, the use of agile methods, and even references to the liberated company.
In principle, the question raised by this call to promote autonomy through new forms of work organization relates to the practical possibilities of reconciling it with a fact that is unlikely to change within large groups: managing on an industrial scale requires coordination, forms of consistency, if not homogeneity. Since standards are unlikely to give way completely to autonomous achievements, what formulas are large corporations likely to invent to integrate such operations with their industrial constraints?
Pascal Ughetto, who raised this question in his book Organiser l'autonomie au travail (Organizing Autonomy at Work), will discuss the case of agile working in this session. Based on the initial results of his work on this subject, he will defend the value, for the sociology of organizations and work, of examining agility, even if it means questioning whether the management of large corporations has truly grasped the implications of agile principles. Potentially, project governance and even the organization of power are at stake. He will use the case of a corporate IT department to study an agile transformation that is supposed to take place.