Who drives an officer’s career, the individual or his institution? The case of French officers
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852318768005 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Author | Véronique Chanut,Gabriel Morin |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Who drives an officer’s
career, the individual or
his institution? The case
of French officers
Gabriel Morin
ESCE Business School, France
Ve
´ronique Chanut
Paris II Panthe
´on-Assas, France
Abstract
The phenomenon of managerialisation, whose impact is being felt by the state, as well
as its elites, helps bring about the emergence of the individual. The military is not
immune to the organisational transformations that follow in its wake. By analysing
the career path of French officers, this study explores the effects of this managerialisa-
tion. The research question as formulated sets out to determine whether it is the
individual or his institution that drives the career of the French officer. The empirical
study is based on very dense primary data collected from actors who play a key role in
forming the French military elites: general officers, in some cases, directors of military
schools, who have, in turn, been students, instructors and designers of this career path
of the military leader. The results reveal that despite an unprecedented process of
civilianisation within the military institution, the career of military leader is proving
to be more immutable. The career path of the French officer can thus be read as a
marker of military institutional identity.
Points for practitioners
As an institution, the military may seem to mirror the major evolutions of society, in
particular, the phenomenon of managerialisation, which is making its impact felt on the
state, along with its corollary, individualism. Analysing the career of French officers
makes it possible to explore the effects of this managerialisation. The study results
Corresponding author:
Gabriel Morin, 10 rue Sextius Michel, F-75015, Paris, France.
Email: gmorin.cmhr@gmail.com
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2020, Vol. 86(2) 388–406
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852318768005
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reveal a mitigation of the effects of this phenomenon, also called civilianisation in the
case of the armed forces, and, on the contrary, reveal the invariant character of the
career of military leader, pillar of the military institutional identity.
Keywords
career, civilianisation, French army, individual, leader, leadership, managerialisation,
military institution, officer
Introduction
Western armed forces offer a fertile field of study for public management because
of the organisational changes increasingly being rolled out since the late 1970s
(Moskos, 1977). These transformations give rise to many managerial implications
for European military institutions. The subject of the research focuses here on the
case of France, which is emblematic of this evolution.
The military institution represents productive ground for management research
in the field of leadership development (Hargrove and Sitkin, 2011) for two reasons.
First, it is the birthplace of the concept of leadership, which emerged in the fifth
century BCE in Athens (Rost, 1991). Second, unlike private organisations, emerg-
ing leaders spend their entire career within the institution. This gives a longitudinal
character to this type of field, one that is lacking today in research on leaders’
careers (Day, 2011).
The military institution is a paradoxical organisational type, immutable and
plastic at the same time (Durieux and Lecointre, 2012). While its immutability
stems from intangible elements, such as the notions of war and homeland, its
plasticity results from at least three major adjustment variables: war (including
defeats) (Boniface, 2012), politics and society. The recent transformations of the
institution, marked in France by the end of conscription that became effective in
2001,
1
are part of a global movement of banalisation in Western countries
(Jakubowski, 2011). This trend reveals a kind of ‘organisationalisation’ of the
institution (Selznick, 1957) that helps make the armed forces more permeable to
the management practices of the civilian and, especially, private sector.
The military institution is not immune to this form of ‘managerialisation’,
whose impact is being more generally felt by the state (Newman and Clarke,
1994), as well as its elites (Emery et al., 2014), and that helps bring about the
emergence of the individual. Thus, the question that arises today is who really
manages the career of the officer, a question that could seem absurd given the
seeming obviousness of the answer in view of the weight of the institution in society
and within the state (Corvisier, 1995). This questioning, already formulated for
executives in civilian society (Dany, 2002), is here the subject of an exploration
through a field survey of officers of the French armed forces in 2014 and 2015.
Morin and Chanut 389
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