lHospitals, education, justice, public services in general… nothing is going well! However, this is not because the supposedly good recipes of private management have not been applied to public management since the 1990s. And if management does poorly among the public, it doesn’t fare much better in companies, where employee disengagement is one of the priorities of human resources managers and where the loss of meaning is regularly mentioned.
The companies themselves are looking for ways out of sclerotic management, trying to “release energy” or revive “business culture”, synonymous with initiative. What happened to management that has almost become a dirty word to some?
We like to say that the French are bad at economics, which is debatable. On the other hand, it is true that we no longer understand each other when we talk about management, although it is now everywhere. What a paradox!
In reality, management is very difficult to understand, because it is at the same time an art, an industry and a science.
At school and at work
Like all art, it is a practice that has been professionalized by mixing techniques, practices and creativity. It is taught in school, but especially at work. As in catering, there are apprentices, brigade leaders, more or less high-level chefs and stars.
The industry is consulting, which has seen spectacular growth. Performs diagnoses, comparisons, standardization and industrialization of practices. There we find junior consultants from the best schools, seniors and associate managers who have the ear of business leaders.
The science, first called administrative science, then commercial science, has become “management and management sciences” for more than fifty years. It covers numerous disciplines, such as accounting, organizational theories, strategy, human resource management, finance, marketing, logistics, information systems, etc. Its researchers produce knowledge through interviews, case studies, statistical analysis, in the form of models, descriptions. .. Surprisingly, when politicians or journalists want an opinion about the company, they insist on questioning economists, although this is not the subject of “study.” Find the error!
In reality, these different types of actors are specialists in how to organize themselves for a purpose, what the Anglo-Saxons call organizingbut also specialists in organizations, that is, companies, associations, public services, etc. This double meaning of the word organization does not facilitate collective understanding.
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