Gilles Jeannot

Bio

Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at École des Ponts.

Over the years, my research has focused primarily on two figures: the ‘user’, in relation to the evolution of public services, and the ‘civil servant’, as seen through their work and in relation to public management reforms.

On users and the public service, alongside an exploration of the history of the concept of the user, my work has accompanied ongoing developments: the emergence of the issue of service relationships in the public sector (with Isaac Joseph), the first moves towards opening up public network services to competition (with Claude Quin), the observation of ‘customer fatigue’ faced with unequal contracts and low-cost offers in a new economic context (with François Mathieu Poupeau), the observation of some counter-trends towards remunicipalisation (with Olivier Coutard), and finally the new effects of ‘digitalisation’ on the ‘smart city’ (with Steve Bernardin), the ‘platform state’, and public enterprises (with Simon Cottin-Marx).

Regarding changes in public administrations through the work of their staff, attention was first focused on the activities of managers in the departmental directorates of infrastructure and of territorial development policy coordinators (rural development officers, urban policy project managers) in France and then in the UK (with Barry Goodchild): the “blurred professions”. My research then focused on the use of management tools through two questionnaire surveys in France (INSEE survey – Centre for the Study of Employment, Organisational Change and Computerisation, ANR COI-COSA) (with Danièle Guillemot) and in Europe (FP7 COCOPS project) (with Philippe Bezes), leading to a measurement of new forms of bureaucracy associated with ‘New Public Management’. This work was also accompanied by a chronicle of the evolution of human resources practices within public administrations.