France Télécom on its two shores: The globalization of management and “national particularities”

Abstract

The privatization processes of public companies in Argentina allow to trace the contours of the redesign of a society inspired in a neoliberal government doctrine. The transition from classic liberalism to neoliberalism encounters in the wide transfer from the public sphere to the private capital a grid of intelligibility for the social practices through which the formalization of a neoliberal order will be sought. The participation of France Telecom in the privatization of the Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (ENTel) in Argentina, and the management practices which the company will undertake in France, with only a few years separating both experiences, evidences that the depth of change we are approaching, is distant from being the curious stage offered by a faraway country in the south american periphery. In this article we will try to establish a debate with french tradition, as represented by the works of Philippe d’Iribarne, who assigns “national singularities” a fundamental role to understand the different management models of the workforce. An aspect which, in light of our research, we consider largely refuted. On both sides.

Key words: privatization, telecommunication, management, neoliberalism, Latin America.