Culture in France, like many other Western countries, is patriarchal based and build on a principle of learning domination and submission. Indeed, since the beginning of our lives, whether at school, at home, or in society more generally, the individual is subject to an omnipresent authority to which he must obey. This culture is crystallized in several dimensions, including the professional sphere where manifest hierarchy prevails.
The emergence of new occupational diseases leads to new entrepreneurial modes like Freedom-Form Company. The Freedom of Companies, through empowerment, consists in reducing the hierarchy and increasing the involvement and responsibility of employees within their Company. It is then relevant to know if the practices of hierarchy banishment influence workers differently depending on the Company style. Furthermore, the changes of these methods on the representations of the individuals have, stemming from this omnipresent French culture, are relevant to know.
Through a questionnaire followed by a prototypical analysis method, social representations of the professional success of individuals from two types of Companies diametrically opposed in their hierarchical practices were studied: typical Companies with a high degree of hierarchy and Freedom-Form Companies with a very low degree of hierarchy. Men and women from Freedom-Form Companies were hard to find because this type of Company is not legion on the territory therefore only 40 people passed the questionnaire (30 women and 10 men). Luckily, the same number of people was able to answer for each type of Company.
The results of this study showed several elements. First, for both types of Companies, professional success is confirmed as an object of social representation. Moreover, it is neither neutral nor negative, and very positive on average. Evidence shows that a common core exists between the two types of businesses: mostly fulfillment, and money in a least importance. Although the results show a nucleus around the notion of fulfillment, the individuals of the Freedom-Form Company represent professional success as self-esteem while those of the standard Company show an interest in power. Namely, for the individuals of typical Companies, the notion of professional success is linked with several ideas like ambition, decision-making, direction, and hierarchy while the individuals of Freedom-Form Companies associate this idea with self-esteem terms as trust, pride, respect, value, and consideration.
Beyond these differences, the results of this research seem to sketch the portrait of a French culture amidst a transitional upheaval towards a culture more centered on spiritual success than on success of domination. This is particularly relevant when these results are compared with the advertising injunctions that encourage to take care of oneself increasingly and take into consideration one’s well-being in everyday life. Nevertheless, these assumptions can be questioned because of many biases in this study. Indeed, this experiment has been done with a reduced sample not representative of the French population. Moreover, a very important number of Companies exist and each one of them has its own type of management. Added to that, the level of concentration of the individuals (i.e., seeing themselves as an individual, as an element of their membership group or seeing themselves as a human being) is proved to influence answers in this type of questionnaire. However, these results can influence Companies to improve their levels of training, feed backing, and bonding to recreate self-esteem and corporate fulfillment for their employees.
To conclude, even though this study cannot be extended to the French population, it draws the portrait of a population that tends to extract itself from the classic patriarchal system of domination and submission to the other where the search for self-esteem prevails on the search for power.
Keywords: Social Representations ; Culture ; Professional success ; Power ; Freedom-Form Companies
Words I have learned :
- to prevails: prévaloir sur
- amidst a transitional upheaval: au milieu d’un bouleversement transitoire
- stemming from: issu de
- to sketch the portrait: esquisser le portrait
- advertising injunctions: injonctions publicitaires