Gestion symbolique et dispositif communicationnaire

The links between management and communication in the firms can be actually translated into the attention to the employees as « communicating subject ». This particular figure of employees spreads in a set of practices, discourses, procedure rules, prescription, which concern relational and communicational skills ; this set forms a particular device, we analyse in the basis of data collected in a firm. This device reflects the evolution of symbolic and social engeeniring highlighted by the french researcher Bernard Floris 20 years ago. In this perspective, if communication contributes to the autonomy of employees, it contributes to a form of post-disciplinary power too ; but on the contrary – and it is on this point we insist - communication is also the active substance of a renewal of the disciplinary logic. The highlighting of this device and of its link with discipline is the occasion to give some details about our critical position in the field of organisational communication research