“The feeling of disillusionment that overwhelms today’s young graduates in the labor market is very similar to that of the young romantics of the 19th century”

It’s 7, Jules wakes up and wants to vomit. What did you do last night? I drank too much, like three or four nights a week. He drinks to forget his dull daily life. and his “taff”who does it “gerbera”. This is how “the confession of a young man of the century” begins, told by Marion Cina, Thomas Simon and Xavier Philippe, three researchers in an article about the feeling of “disease of the century” among young graduates of the main business and engineering schools. . published in April in the magazine Management.

This detour through fiction and the creation of the character of Jules (based on interviews with the thirty-five young graduates interviewed for the survey) illustrates, according to them, the feeling of loss of meaning that many graduates feel when they reach the businesses. , once they become executives, managers or engineers. Occupying what, in other times, the American anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020) had called “shitty jobs”these meaningless jobs that abound in tertiary capitalism.

Marion Cina, a 33-year-old young researcher in management sciences and professor at ISC Paris, explains the use of literature and romanticism to try to shed new and original light on these contemporary losses of meaning.

How did the idea arise to compare the feeling of disillusionment of young graduates regarding work and the “disease of the century” of the young romantics of the 19th century?^my century ?

The three of us have a marked taste for literature, especially that of the 18th century.^my and XIX^my ages. It’s a bold and subjective choice, which was designed to hurt people’s conscience a little. This fictional and subjective approach allows us to reflect on the feeling of disillusionment that affects young graduates in the labor market today and that is very similar to that of the young romantics of the 19th century.^my century.

Organizations always present themselves under the guise of logic and ultrarationality. They almost systematically deny that they come from a human mind. Now this point is crucial: companies are fundamentally poetic, since they are created from scratch by the imagination of an individual at a given moment.

You also show that the seeds of this absurdity are present long before the first job: at the best business school. What is the problem today with these training courses?

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