Soyez sans crainte : normalisation langagière et comportementale au travail en contexte capitaliste néolibéral : une analyse critique de manuels de management et de communication d'entreprise

In the early 1980, new managerial practices appeared. This period sees the multiplication of management manuals in which language practices are seen as one of the ways to implement these new organizations. This thesis explores the relationship between this movement and the neoliberal imaginary. A socio historical and discourse analysis of a corpus consisting of about fifty management and corporate communication manuals, shows that they share an utopian vision of organization, where conflicts and tensions are erased. Indeed, these books highlight notions like "participation", "democratisation", "autonomy" or "horizontalisation" of human relations in organization, by calling into question organizations inherited of the XIXth century. Authors of manuals promote, in this way, managerial practices as the politic of "total quality" or the "common language". But, behind this imaginary attached to the idea of "excellence" and to the ideal of a perfect mutual understanding, we find a behavioural normalization, and in particular a normalization of language practices. In this way, these new practices of management and communication seem to have become, not only, an art to organise "scientifically" tasks, like it was the case with taylorism and fordism, but an art to affect people in order to ensure that they are intrinsically engaged in their professional activity. This new definition of work is based on a number of contextual obviousnesses, in particular on economic beliefs based on neoliberal capitalism, whose authors of manuals see themselves as the legitimate experts.(LALE - Langues et lettres) -- UCL, 201