The liberated company: A myth of protest to free the imagination in organizations?

Abstract

The traditional management model imposes particularly paradoxical conditions of existence on actors. In order to free themselves from this, they produce “noisy utopias” that have the role of challenging established models. It is in this register that the movement of liberated companies seems to fit, whose enchanting discourse has all the appearances of a myth in the sense of Barthes. Like any trend, it must be appreciated with respect and intelligence, because it announces new forms of organization and management that are not yet stabilized. The suddenness of its appearance suggests that it is a myth in an “exploding state” (Durand 2016). It testifies to the urgency of freeing the imagination in organizations shriveled by management practices that have remained subject to quantophrenia for too long. To analyze this phenomenon, which certainly heralds more democratic models, the author draws mainly on the contributions of Gilbert Durand's anthropology of the imaginary and Julia Kristeva's semiology.