The France Télécom suicides : management control, tone at the top, and the sociology of the workplace

International audienceTwenty-five of the 183,000 employees of France Telecom [FT] committed suicide in 2008 and 2009. Suicide notes indicate that most were prompted by an FT restructuring plan, NexT, that involved 22,000 job reductions between 2005 and 2008. FT has argued that its employee suicide rate is no higher than the national average of 16 deaths per 100,000. We critically explore the employee suicides and aspects of the management control at FT, using Durkheim’s theory of suicide (2007) and Quammen’s theory of species extinction (1996) as analytical lenses. We combine text analysis techniques (DICTION 5.0 software and ‘close reading’ analysis’) to explore whether the tone at the top, expressed in CEO letters and suicide notes, contributed to an unsavory working environment and the isolation and estrangement of employees. We also explore whether employees perceived there was a growing distance between them and managers; and that they were being inflicted with aggressive rules and ‘a management by terror.’ According to Durkheim (2007), such perceptions could culminate in suicide if employees become isolated from the collective spirit of their workplaces, and feel more fragile and worthless. For Quammen (1996), such perceptions lead to fragmentation, dispersal, (metaphoric) ‘islands’ of smaller populations, and extinction. We argue that management policies promoting division of labor, isolation and alienation of employees could be implicated in the (partial, at least) extinction of a species (employees) in many different ways - including by suicide