Contents
## Acknowledgements vii
This book owes much to many. First of all to the Centre Européen d'Education Permanente (CEDEP) where I have taught for over 10 years. Participants from member companies were of great help, often without knowing it, in developing and testing the ideas presented here. The Director-General of the CEDEP, Claude Michaud, has never failed in his enthusiasm and support for sociology courses in his institution. I am deeply grateful to him. My thanks go out as well to the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in the United States for its kind hospitality. The Department of Executive Education under the leadership of Cam Danielson provided me with the material and the human support required by the present volume. I consider it a great honour to be associated with Indiana University and the team at Executive Education.
This book presents the results of studies conducted by such top-notch professional sociologists as Touhami Bencheikh, Hélène Bovais, Yves Cornu, Valérie Dixmier, Dominique Gatto, Roland Lussey, Yves Morieux and Luiz Rothier-Bautzer. These researchers, through their work, have ensured the future of the 'Sociology of Organizations' as a consulting tool. They can be proud of this.
I would like to mention my great debt to Dominique Thomas, who provided unfailing encouragement to write and whose sociological competency is equalled only by her selflessness, patience and devotion. Her joyful manner was as consistent as her ability to correct both content and style. My thanks also to Dan Golembeski, who translated the text from the French.
Finally, everything flows from fieldwork: from all of those who, year in and year out, answered sociologists' questions, discussed their results, and were willing to speak openly about themselves and their lives in the workplace, in short, about their reality. If now in turn we are able to help them in some way, and if this book can be a tribute to them, then their trouble has been time well spent.
## Introduction
There are of course good reasons why one might question this best-ofall-possible-worlds optimism in which salaried employees, hourly employees and customers are reconciled. We will not defend this point of view here. But what stands out is the crucial role of the organization, in the sense of 'organizational arrangements', that is to say, not in terms of structure, but in the way in which people work, arrive at mutually satisfactory agreements, and co-operate more effectively and more actively. In particular, as we will see, bureaucracies are organizations which demand very little co-operation of their members. They in fact protect them from it, and in the case of the most strict organizations, they do away with co-operation altogether. This explains then the other aspect of the discussion of 'less' mentioned above: this 'less' strikes at the very heart of day-to-day concerns of the business place, on the relationship with others, on the need to share, to co-operate, in short, on all manner of behaviour which we will show is in no way spontaneous or natural.
This much deeper interpretation of the American situation is not meant to make any claims about its durability, its superiority or its success. We still lack sufficient perspective to pass judgement on the situation. 36 Nonetheless, our analysis helps show the extent to which in the 1990s the day-today affairs of the workplace are affected by this third industrial revolution. It allows us to formulate a first hypothesis, one which we will attempt to verify throughout this book: not only are executives no longer protected as once was possible, but today, they are all caught up together in the great tempest in which new organizations are being formed. They are the ones who feel the full force of what I call 'internal instability'. the fear has broken out that this deterioration might be inescapable and that no compensation will be received in exchange. Even the technologies which accompany -or provoke -the breakdown, are viewed with suspicion. 46 Finally, there is, in the case of France, pressure from abroad imploring the nation to get moving, to 'give up' the idea of protecting itself. 47 In fact, the rigidity of the French system as opposed to the adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon one, which is one way of characterizing the differences between these two approaches to the world, is indeed a matter which it might be worth taking a few steps back to re-examine. 48 But we can already suggest a hypothesis, which we will explore in more detail later on: French bureaucracies -including the French public administration which is at once the archetype and the model which the others have for a long time sought to imitate -are notorious for their skill at spontaneous adaptation, a skill which allows them to keep pace, as best as they can, with changes in the collective fabric in which they are caught up, but never to anticipate them. 49 These modes of adaptation -which include ways of bending the rules, the development of parallel networks linked to the grands corps which they are part of, and so on -appear today simply laughable, even counter-productive in light of the great leap which lies ahead. Above all, one precondition for their development was a context of abundant resources, a context which no longer exists today. As long as bureaucracies could 'buy' their customers, they survived and adapted. The day that they no longer have the means to do this, their deficiencies, their shortcomings, their excessive behaviour quickly become intolerable. The word 'adaptability' has taken on a new meaning, and the line of reasoning of the French bureaucrats provides them with no help in coping with these new realities. 50 In our view, this is why 'globalization' carries with it so much distress and fear: the consequences of globalization cannot be handled in the traditional French way.
## Germany: in its own way
The case of Germany will allow us to expand our inventory of the general context in which the bureaucracy crisis is taking place. In Germany as in France the widespread Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism is not blindly accepted: 'Originally,' writes Alain Lebaube, 'there was nothing more opposed to the strategy of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, of globalization and flexibility than the centralized systems of the sociodemocratic models which tend to standardize social relationships.' 51 This 10 THE CUSTOMER'S VICTORY
## 16
THE CUSTOMER'S VICTORY

lgrsnf/K:\springer\10.1057%2F9780230509696.pdf

nexusstc/The Customer's Victory/3d07448dbb499555d34cc792e2947fbb.pdf

zlib/Business & Economics/François Dupuy (auth.)/The Customer’s Victory: From Corporation to Co-operation_2683762.pdf

Customer's victory : from corporation to co -operation

Client et le bureaucrate

Francois Dupuy

Dupuy, F.

Palgrave Macmillan Limited Palgrave Macmillan [Distributor

Macmillan Publishers Limited

Macmillan Education UK

Campbell Books Ltd

Springer Nature

Red Globe Press

Macmillan business, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England], England, 1999

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Place of publication not identified, 2014

Basingstoke, South Yarra, March 1999

1st ed. 1999, 1999

1, 19990128

lg1474377

{"isbns":["023050969X","0333750225","1349412058","9780230509696","9780333750223","9781349412051"],"last_page":176,"publisher":"Palgrave Macmillan"}

"First published in France as Le client et le bureaucrate by Dunod, Paris, 1998"--T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-157).
Description based on print version record.

Front Matter....Pages i-vii
Introduction....Pages 1-17
Front Matter....Pages 19-19
The Organization, Concreteness, Complexity....Pages 21-35
The Customer’s Victory....Pages 36-51
What is a Bureaucracy?....Pages 52-71
A Requiem for Bureaucracy....Pages 72-87
Front Matter....Pages 89-89
On the Difficulty of Change and its Management....Pages 91-104
The Frame of Reference....Pages 105-127
Listening to Bureaucrats and Changing Bureaucracy....Pages 128-146
Conclusion – Towards New Organizations?....Pages 147-152
Back Matter....Pages 153-157

Francois Dupuy's book describes and analyses how managers need to understand organisations in order to help them effectively implement the changes necessary to operate in today's competitive environment. Focusing on the need to cooperate, Dupuy provides a diagnostic and a methodology that shows managers how to understand why people do what they do and how they can use this knowledge to implement organisational change.
Erscheinungsdatum: 29.01.1999

Francois Dupuy's book describes and analyses how managers need to understand organisations in order to help them effectively implement the changes necessary to operate in today's competitive environment. Focusing on the need to cooperate, Dupuy provides a diagnostic and a methodology that shows managers how to understand why people do what they do and how they can use this knowledge to implement organisational change.
Erscheinungsdatum: 01.01.1999

Introduction
PART ONE: THE PROBLEM
The Organisation, Concreteness, Complexity
The Customer's Victory
What is a Bureaucracy?
A Requiem for Bureaucracy
PART TWO: THE PROCESS
On the Difficulty of Change and the Difficulty of Managing Change
The Frame of Reference
Listening to Bureaucrats and Changing Bureaucracy
Conclusion: Towards New Organisations?

François Dupuy. First Published In France As Le Client Et Le Bureaucrate By Dunod, Paris, 1998. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 153-157).

2016-03-14