The company must make profits or it will die. But if we try to run a company solely on profit, then it will also die because it will no longer have a reason to exist.” Make no mistake, this quote is not the result of an awakening of the consciences of CAC 40 companies faced with the urgency of the climate crisis. These words date back to 1920 and we owe them to Henry Ford who, because he introduced the notions of paternalism and philanthropy into the flamboyant capitalism of his time, is considered by many to be a pioneering entrepreneur of CSR. Since the 1990s and 2000s, the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has become established in France to define a set of good practices intended to make the world a better place without giving up profits. And the “raison d’être” that Ford is talking about is precisely the expression that all companies have on their lips today. It is part of the Pacte law (Action Plan for Business Growth and Transformation) which, since 2019, has made it possible to rethink the place of companies in society*. It includes three main measures: the first makes CSR mandatory for all companies; the second allows companies to include a Purpose in their statutes to specify their long-term collective project; the last offers the most willing companies the possibility of adopting the status of a mission-driven company to solve an identified societal or environmental problem. This redefinition of the role of companies seems more than necessary at a time when young people are saying they are ready to give up a job if the company does not take environmental issues sufficiently into account (their percentage has been rising steadily since 2018 and the launch of youth marches for the climate) and where student groups from leading universities (Polytechnique, HEC, AgroParisTech) are calling for desertion or a change of direction.
The company must offer meaning rather than meal vouchers, “attractive remuneration” and table football. But in this race for meaning, it can also say anything and everything to try to appear more conscious than it is. CSR had barely become commonplace when the words corporate washing, social washing or even social bullshit appeared to describe companies that talked a lot but did little, or even treated their employees badly.
A short glossary to avoid the ruts of false probity
Where have the employees gone? In the same way that candidates have become talents, the word employee has been replaced by collaborator. Except that from the point of view of etymology and the labor code, this word has no meaning. Being a collaborator means being placed at the same level in the organization of a common project. However, the employment contract establishes a “permanent legal subordination relationship”. Since 1996, the Court of Cassation has defined this relationship as “the performance of work under the authority of an employer who has the power to give orders and directives, to monitor their execution and to sanction the subordinate’s failures”. However, the term is used at will, in particular to feign equal treatment and fantasize the idea that if we are going to work, it is first and foremost to participate in a common work and not to be paid. This can also be used to encourage overinvestment – which is not expected of an employee. In the same vein, the leader replaced the chief, in order to erase the hierarchical relationship in favor of a more inspiring vision (even if the “collaborators” are often not fooled).
After having spread into entrepreneurial language and then become common under the verb “to impact”, the word is returning in the form “with impact”. An “impact” job works for the common good, or at least seeks to mitigate the negative repercussions of what the company does. However, there is no clear definition of what an impact company would be (and even less of a binding definition). This word promises a kind of result but without the tools to measure it, or even an idea of what should be measured. These companies would probably like to pass themselves off as mission-driven companies, forgetting that the latter include their “mission” in their statutes, which obliges them to a minimum.
Since 2018, there has been an index for professional equality that allows the companies concerned to assess the level of equality between women and men out of 100 points based on the following criteria: gender pay gap and individual pay increase rate gap. But the system is criticized, precisely, for its way of counting points. The NGO Oxfam points out, for example, that the index indicators were constructed in such a way that they can significantly minimize or even hide the reality of pay inequalities within companies. For example, 15 points are given according to the number of employees who receive a pay increase upon their return from maternity leave – which is also a legal obligation. However, for example, it is enough for the employer to increase all employees returning from maternity leave by an amount of 1 euro to obtain 15/15. Furthermore, displaying a purpose or a gender equality mission can also translate into actions outside the company (partnerships with NGOs or the public-private sector, development and education in entrepreneurship, campaigns on women’s emancipation) which on the one hand only prepare for possible access to equality, but can hide bad practices within the company itself or even a neo-colonialist/racist vision which would consist of taking pride in bringing “gender equality” to non-Western countries or cultures – implied to be less evolved than ours. Finally, the use of the perfectly binary expression men-women also shows a form of delay in relation to current social issues since they completely erase the question of other genders, intersectionality and racial discrimination.
Under the guise of mobility and “we’re not here to stay glued to our desks all day,” flex-office often hides tiny spaces where employees are crammed together in a constant hubbub, their asses unscrewed between two chairs and a less than rewarding way of maximizing profits. The most striking example is perhaps that of We Work. This coworking pioneer had included in its statutes the “transformation of working methods” as its raison d’être and, why not, “raising the world’s consciousness.” In reality, its economic model was based on real estate speculation and it was this same speculative bubble that ended up bringing down the behemoth. In the same order of intentions hidden under other more laudable ones, let us also mention the word “temporary.” Often used to justify a redistribution of work (without a raise or benefits) when someone leaves without being replaced, it has the unfortunate habit of becoming permanent (still without a raise or benefits). This process is so common that it now has its name: quiet hiring.
This is the word that we hear everywhere, and not just in companies. Today, we are first looking to be aligned as individuals. The issue has grown in particular in personal development. If the definition of the word align describes placing things next to each other on a straight line, everyone would be hard pressed to say what these things are. The body and the mind? Our deep desires and the life we lead? Human values and profits? The word aligned is thus a delicate word to use since it contains in itself the idea that we can give a form of coherence – thanks to a clear and tidy straight line – to objects or concepts that have nothing to do with each other (the desire to save the planet and the desire to sell more and more objects for example). A Marie Kondo-style storytelling that tends to replace the morality exercise, even if we know full well that putting all our t-shirts by color in the closet says nothing about the quality of the textiles.
This word is almost less hypocritical than the others provided that
we consider the family not as a place of serenity and affection but rather as an assembly of people that we do not choose but with whom we must spend time while remaining more or less pleasant.
Forced sociability in companies, particularly start-ups, is a “value” that is increasingly denounced and poorly experienced by those who work there. Because being sociable implies spending a lot of time with colleagues, participating in events, during but also outside working hours. This obligation blurs the entire transactional process between a company and an employee (i.e. completing a given job for a given number of hours and a given salary), whose famous sociability is defined as a soft skill. For Mathilde Ramadier, author of Welcome to the New World, How I Survived the Coolness of Startups (Premier Parallèle, 2017): “we emphasize soft skills to dispel the fact that diplomas or experience are secondary. And conversely, we praise benefits in kind, which will better mask low pay, a disappointing employment contract or authoritarian management.”
Authentic, caring, resilient: all these words to describe management or the values of the company should be taken with a pinch of salt. First of all, obviously, because they are based on a subjective feeling, neither qualifyable nor quantifiable. But also because they are part of what Michel Feynie, doctor in anthropology and occupational psychologist, calls the positive rhetoric of “as if”. That is, a language that consists of pretending that everything is fine by simulating a “facade of unanimity”. Behind this rhetoric, and particularly behind the word resilient, there is also the idea that potential problems will resolve themselves and that it is therefore not necessary to intervene (since we will be able to see with benevolence that the situation has completely degenerated). The same lying optimist watches over the word autonomy, the nightmare of apprentices and new hires. Under the pretext of trusting and believing in a form of natural integration, it is a way of saying that they will just have to manage to do the same job as the others but without vacations, teleworking or complaints, since their role is to “relieve” the team and not to ask them to transmit or teach them things.
Le mérite de ce mot est peut-être qu’il reconnait quand même que quelque chose a été abimé́ et qu’il est temps de réparer. Il désigne aujourd’hui l’The merit of this word is perhaps that it still recognizes that something has been damaged and that it is time to repair. Today, it refers to all practices that aim not to limit negative impacts on the environment but to have a positive impact. This first involves taking into account all planetary limits. Is the word the right one? We have barely become aware that resources are not infinite when a word appears that seems to say that yes, well, we will end up running dry, but that everything we have plundered could regenerate, return to life and to a sort of original state. This shift in meaning is particularly marked in agriculture. Developed in the 1980s by the Rodale Institute, an American pioneer of organic farming, the concept of “regenerative agriculture” was for a time the business of historic agroecology activists, such as the Indian activist Vandana Shiva. The idea was to guarantee “not only the absence of chemicals in our food, but also the health of the soil, the well-being of animals and that of agricultural workers”. The term has since been taken up by large industrial groups to green their productivist approach, so much so that a collective of around thirty companies and associations published a platform worldwide in August 2023 to alert on the misleading use of the term.
This is the challenge displayed today by many companies, whether or not they define themselves as “impactful”. The subtlety lies in the fact that the latter declare that they are tending towards sobriety and not already being sober. However, that makes all the difference. If we extract the word from the environmental and social context in which we now find it, sober rather designates abstinence than temperance: we do not call ourselves sober if we reduce our alcohol consumption but if we stop completely. Of course, production, whatever it may be, cannot be sober, but the word implies a notion of frugality that we would not find in the words temperance or limitation, which draws a universe of constraint and discipline. Sobriety (or frugality), itself, evokes a natural disposition, an organic philosophy, which moreover would not be incompatible with a form of happiness – like the happy sobriety of Pierre Rabhi.
Being embarked is first of all the promise of an adventure and a collective adventure. But also of an adventure of which we do not know where it will lead us, and especially of an adventure of which we are not the hero. ïne. In English, “Embedded” refers for example to journalists embarked on the ground of armed conflicts alongside the army. Is this the case for an employee in a company?
Faced with the questioning of young graduates who no longer want to feel like a cog in a machine whose interest they no longer understand or of experienced employees rinsed by the coldness of the processes, the human being is reappearing in the discourses of companies. And not just anywhere, “at the center”. Except that “putting back at the center” has already been very (really very) used for other subjects that we did not know where to start. So we have already tried to put the child/the customer/the French language/the climate back at the center, but at the center of what?
Of the family, of the debate, of the economy, of history, in short, of an ecosystem sufficiently vague that we continue to think it is governed by laws of its own – with therefore a logical and natural center that no human will can move.
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