Institut Mines-Télécom 1 Dr. Thibault de Swarte ISPSO 2013 Symposium, St.Catherine’s College, Oxford Working in a High Tech Company: a Lacanian Perspective

Institut Mines-Télécom1

Dr. Thibault de Swarte

ISPSO 2013 Symposium, St.Catherine’s College, Oxford

Working in a High Tech Company: a Lacanian Perspective on « Orange »

Institut Mines-Télécom T. de Swarte ISPSO 2013 Oxford22

Institut Mines-Télécom

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Introduction

A high tech company is a company where desires are primarily focused on innovating technologies

What means work in a high tech company ? Work as a subjectivation process (Gilles Arnaud) in

companies where the subject is often canceled (« oblitéré »)

The kind of high technologies considered in my presentation is « Information Technologies »

Orange is a specific IT company which has been « near from death in 2002 » (Former Chairman Lombard)

My « perspective » : more than 2O years of observation of Orange and a Lacanian theoretical anchorage T. de Swarte ISPSO 2013 Oxford3



Research questions

● Paradox : could Lacan be usefull to understand a high tech company ?...While he has written nothing on companies, nothing on high tech and not a lot on work.

● My research path

● I have started with Sociology, Economics and « basic » Organizational Psychoanalysis then tried to go farer and deeper with Lacan

T. de Swarte ISPSO 2013 Oxford4







The research question

Could Lacan be helpful to understand a high tech company ?



Summary

Part 1 : research context and theoretical topics Part 2 : lessons from Lacan and the « forgotten

interview » of Mr. Van Flemish Conclusions



Research Context : recent history of France Télécom (Orange Group)

● A worldwide high tech champion in the 80s in the field of digital communications and networks (ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network, Minitel as an ancestor of the web...)

● A highly innovative Public Monopoly (and an alternative model to the deep liberalization of the high tech sector) in the 90s

● After the Internet bubble : the world highest private company debt in 2002 (about €60 Bn, €400 000/employee)

● A hard and painfull restructuring (2008-2010) focused on a fast donwsizing (About 25 000 employees out of 150 000)

● Then comes the « suicide crisis » : people suicide on the workplace writing that they do for « reasons related with work»

● A public and research debate on « suffering at work in France » at the end of years 2000 and the beginning of years 2010




A methodology focused on analysis of discourses

● My theoretical background for listening to discourses

– Empathy (Carl Rogers)

– « Neutral and benevolent listening » (Freud)

– Eugène Enriquez : how the « Organizational instance » (among 7 instances) appears through managerial discourses

● Lacan, linguistics and discourses

– Lacan's 4 possible discourses : university, master, hysteric and psychoanalyst

– My Lacanian perspective on High Tech Organizations lies on ● listening discourses● trying to interpret those discourses inside a coherent framework




From methodology to more theoretical questions

● At a more theoretical level, I try to apply to High Tech Organizations the Lacanian structural triangle : Real, Imaginary, Symbolic

● A focus on Imaginary as the driving force inside a high tech organization

● Death drives as the Real of Orange

– A first death as a Public Administration (1998)

– A second death as a financially efficient private company (2002)

– A third death as a managerial benevolent company (2008-2010)

– A fourth death with a strong destruction of financial value (historical minimum in 2013, about €8 per share )

– A fifth death with a technological « disaster » by comparisons with Apple or Google

● Great ambivalence of discourses on death inside the organization

● Theoretical question : what happens with the Imaginary function and the technological dreams when the Real is so difficult ?







End of Part 1





Who is Van Flemish?

• His role : State controller of France Telecom in the 90s• We share a Flemish name that is to say a common signifier linked with what

Lacan calls “the name of the father”• The goal of the open interview : sociology of managememt control process

inside France Telecom



A Lacanian perspective on Van Flemish’s division

Van Flemish and the Spaltung : the inaugural division of the subject

VF is a « controlled controller sometimes able to control but not to be heard as a controller»

The symbolic order mediates VF’s relation to the Real : he explicitly tells me that he is « divided »...

...by knotting together the Real and the Imaginary orders : to be a good State controller




We could say something really different from what we believe we are saying when we speak

Van Flemish : « Do not tell anyone what I’m telling you » (I’m the State controller but there is a deep lack of external control on this organization)

Primary repression and mordial signifiers (« signifiants primordiaux »)

S2: Name-of-the-Father signifier (i.e. shared flemish names)

S2/…s1: the metaphoric process introduces a new signifier S2 that pushes the former signifier S1 under the bar of signification

« Let's talk about control and forget our flemish names »

Reference : Dor J. (1998)




Lacanian principles for an analysis of the signifying chain

Reference : Dor J. (1998)







From Primary Repression to Return of the Repressed

Primary repression•The Name-of-the-Father signifier (S2) comes to designate metaphorically the primordial object of desire that has become unconscious (S1)•« It would be nice if we were friends from the same village in a flemish bar drinking a beer and talking freely »

Secondary repression (S6/…s5) :•Metaphoric action of the signifier « flamand [in english: flemish] » (Name-of-the-Father).•Hypothesis of a « code » which gives the real sense of the interview :




Return of the repressed (S8/S11/s11) and connections of similarity between S8 and s11

●S8= « Do not tell everybody what I have told you »

●s11=Flamand● Lacan (1959 p. 711) : « a minimal combination from the battery of signifiers

is all that is needed to set up in the signifying chain a duplicity that conceals its reduplication of the subject… »

● There is no more possibility to work on transference in 2013

● But what matters here is the counter-transference of the searcher who has needed more than 15 years to be able to analyse the role of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father.

● In economical terms the « value » of the slip of the tongue could have been € 60Bn if the scientific community and may be the medias would have talked at the good moment

● But medias are by nature condemned to emphasize on the « après-coup » (afterwards) while searchers (especially Lacanians) are very carefull with predictions




Conclusions (part 2)

Transference and counter transference in a research interview oriented by Lacan’s work

Signifier, signified and the « après-coup » (afterwards)

The signified which has cost 60 billions of Euros







General conclusions

● Ab initio research question : could Lacan be usefull to understand a high tech company ?...

● Lacan is usefull to interpret managerial discourses in a high tech company and probably other kinds of companies (« après coup ») and maybe predictive research

● Lacan can help to work on/with the divided subject of work in the workplace





Further research

• Hypothesis of the perverse organization and the perverse discourse• Eugene Enriquez• Susan Long• Philip Boxer

• Also depends on a possible demand from Orange to get a deeper analysis of the future of work and the work of its future

• Other kinds of high tech organizations to be studied and compared with Orange

• Google• Apple• Applerange• Orapple




Documents

Institut Mines-Télécom 1 Dr. Thibault de Swarte ISPSO 2013 Symposium, St.Catherine’s College, Oxford Working in a High Tech Company: a Lacanian Perspective