Jean-Laurent Cassely: “The intellectual potential of executives is underutilized”

 

In his work “La révolte des premiers de la classe” (Arkhé, 186 pages), the journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely describes this basic trend observable among the CSP +, who are increasingly likely to leave comfortable and well paid positions craft trades considered more fulfilling at the individual level. Fromagerie, pastry, catering, convenience stores: the idea is to return to the basics of trade and consumption to better reinvent themselves.

 

L’Echo: In your book, you accurately describe the individual career of former executives who decided to leave large companies to set up their own business, on a small scale. What are they rebelling against exactly?

JLC: If we stick to the declarative, these former executives say they revolt against an impression of not being recognized in their individuality, in their ability to do something creative and really personal in their work . They explicitly rebel against bureaucracy, pyramid schemes and excessive procedures. They suffer from a form of existential boredom and profound loss of meaning in their work.

In the background, do they express a rejection of capitalism, the rise of artificial intelligence, hierarchical authorities, or even all of this at once?

There is an anxious media background noise around the digitization, with all these more or less credible studies on the long-term impact of robots on skilled jobs in the tertiary sector. For those people who were previously considered the winners of globalization and meritocracy, there was the idea that they would be spared the technological revolution that would attack others, that these victims are working in other parts of the world or in the same society as them but at lower levels of qualification. But all of a sudden, they realize that it’s their turn and that the next wave of automation and reorganization may be good for them.

This reasoning remains unconscious: a senior executive in finance or digital marketing does not necessarily have a clear awareness of his future replacement. But he can find in the manual trades, on a small scale, at the local level, a safe haven, which allows him to control things and to feel that he has an impact on his work and his future, which is less and less the case in organizations caught in the whirlwind of digital transformation …

Are big companies aware of this diffuse malaise?

HRDs or think tanks are thinking about these issues, but companies do not really have time for long-term forecasting and projections. They are aware of the problem, but their response is not appropriate, because too focused on the short term, almost in a panic reflex. They notice the flight of the cadres, and have not yet understood that they will not succeed in bringing them back. These will continue to create value, but elsewhere, on another level. We often forget to mention that in the process of destruction-creator that we drink to nausea, destruction and creation are not made in the same place, or at the same time …

 

Is it the end of a world, derived from Taylorism, where the intellectual tasks of white-collar workers have been modeled and automated on the model of factories? Tasks more and more executable by artificial intelligences …

Executives realize that their intellectual potential is used at an extremely low level, out of sync with the very long studies they have done. They expected something else. When they entered this millennium (in the case of my generation) fifteen to twenty years ago, many of them believed in this mythology of the happy globalization driven by new technologies, to the idea that they would all be creative in their professional lives. They were disillusioned by the fact that they are part of the post-baby boom generation, which was expecting personal growth and development beyond work security and comfort. They realize that they can not get either, and this is particularly true of the latest waves of graduates coming into the job market …

Is there not also a desire to recreate a direct, authentic link with the buyers, with the community?

Their attraction to local commerce stems indeed from this ideal of a direct, pure and incarnated relationship with their customers as part of an authentic production, that is to say, that would escape the circuits of the economy. market and would not be considered a “commodity” -paradox because they are entrepreneurs of authenticity. What they have learned from big companies is, on the contrary, this kind of climate of insincerity, of permanent hypocrisy, but also of corporate, anglicized vocabulary. These people want to produce things that look like them, unlike the companies in which they work in exchange for a salary.

The phenomenon you describe is quite urban. Beyond, does it translate an ecological awareness?

Among those people who let go of everything, there are also some who become farmers and move towards permaculture, a very popular concept. Taking into account the environment in the way of producing is also a constant among these new artisans, tradesmen and entrepreneurs, this concern being a strong generational marker. What I also wanted to show insisting on the urban anchoring of this revolt is the way in which these new actors renew the consumer society. They are not radicals, but rather reformists, in the sense that their revolt consists in reinventing modes of consumption rather than challenging them.

They are also distinguished by a form of storytelling, narrative around the reinvention of these trades …

This is indeed a fundamental aspect. In this movement, there is the idea that when you consume a hamburger, a beer, a mobile phone or a trip, you must be in agreement ideologically with what you are. This aspiration to be a virtuous consumer is reflected in several ways: it can be manifested in the choice of a fairer, more ecologically responsible trade or by the return to more direct and incarnated forms of exchange with traders than we know personally. Beyond the storytelling and marketing of authenticity, which undeniably exist, we are really in a consumption of meaning. And graduates know how to respond to this aspiration because they share the same codes, the same values ​​and the same vision of the world as these new consumers.

Are there any connections with movements like Nuit Debout, or La France rebellious, or is it deeper and wider?

Apart from a politicized fringe who will actually recognize themselves in movements or parties of the radical left and opt for diminishing models, the rebels of whom I speak do not necessarily read books that dispute consumer alienation, and their culture is closer to schools of commerce and startups only from Marx and the Indignados. Their commitment is quite concrete, it is not an intellectual movement, conscious of itself. They are people who act, who exist through action, not through theoretical thinking. For all that, they are curious heirs to a 1960-70 anti-cult intellectual tradition that criticized the inauthenticity of lifestyles, the materialism and the alienation of consumers through advertising and standardization, what we called “The Critic Artist of Capitalism”. They are part of a critique of the ambiguous market economy and show some distance rather than frontal opposition. This is once again the hallmark of this generation.

What model will follow the next generation of graduates, those born after the advent of the Internet at the turn of the millennium?

The generation of rebels I’m talking about in my book, which belongs to Generation Y, has been a transitional generation. She wiped the plasters. Its members were referred to trades they did not like, before retraining. The next generation will probably not want to go through the same disappointments. Its members will be trained, will study because they understood that it was important, but at the end of these studies they will immediately open a bistro, a restaurant, or embark on another type of small business . The fringe of the rebels will not want to go through the stage of contact with the big company, whose model has been even more corny and relegated to our imagination of success.