Thesis supervisors:
(LATTS) and Sophie Bernard (IRISSO).
With teleworking, employees no longer need to come to the office on a fixed and regular basis, some 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 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 within the company 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 relations 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.
Year of enrollment: 2022
Doctoral school: Organizations, Markets, Institutions (OMI)