Created by the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labour), the Observatoire des Cadres aims to promote and study the role of management in business enterprises.
Thierry Pech is the editor-in-chief of Alternatives économiques and general secretary of the think tank ‘La République des idées’.
François Chérèque is general secretary of the CFDT.

Do managers still have a role to play in business enterprises? If we are to believe the articles about ‘managerial blues’ that appear regularly in the press, it would seem that managers themselves have lost confidence in their usefulness, particularly since their status took a battering in the wake of such businesses and management upheavals as the increase in flat, team-based organisational charts, the prioritisation of the client and the explosion of digital technologies. All these developments challenge a pyramidal hierarchical structure, with workers at the bottom and senior management on top.
The outcome of a colloquium held under the auspices of the Observatoire des Cadres in the spring of 2012, this concise, accessible book reviews recent developments, re-examines the role of management and, more broadly, of work as it is performed nowadays.
If managers still carry out their traditional and indispensable tasks of coordination and cooperation, they have essentially become facilitators: they infuse life into the goals and procedures developed within a given enterprise, whether public or private. In addition, the authors underline the significance of new areas such as management training, which is traditionally insufficient and poorly adjusted to the reality of managers’ present-day tasks.

• New business management methods examined by labour experts.
• Eminent contributors: Pierre Rosanvallon, François Chérèque, Thierry Pech, among others.