Following the interview with one of the greatest contemporary French socio-anthropologists, Alain de Vulpian, Irène Dupoux-Couturier and Caroline Gerber discuss the societal metamorphoses of the 20th century, the issues of socio-perception and the increasing role of emotions in our societies.
A visionary patron, Antoine Riboud has made BSN and then his son Franck Danone a deeply singular company, a melting pot of multiple reflections or social reforms.
It was in Marseille in 1972 that Antoine Riboud, to the amazement of the employers of the time, gave a quasi-revolutionary speech that attempted to reconcile in the same project the economic and financial constraints of a company and its responsibility towards employees and the community. To move from speech to action, Antoine Riboud sets three priorities:
– Improving working conditions in factories.
– New labour organizations.
– The implementation of social planning in the companies of the BSN group.
He also decided to set up a laboratory for social innovations. In 1974, after the Lip affair that the whole of France followed with emotion and passion, the appointments of Assas were created. This club of exchanges between the bosses and the CFDT has helped to transform the social dialogue.
In 1985, BSN became the first French company to sign framework agreements with an international reach.
In 1987, Jacques Chirac was inspired by the modernization mode d’emploi report…
In 2006, Danone signed a social business company with Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate…
In 2015, the Livelihoods agreement for family farming was signed with Mars to help sustainable agriculture in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Jérôme Tubiana plunges us into this rich and eventful history where friction, conflict and tension have often led to profound metamorphoses.
Foreword by Franck Riboud
Antonio Damasio invites us to a radically new and profoundly original reflection on the links between the origins of life, the emergence of the spirit and the construction of culture that Antonio Damasio invites us in this landmark book.
Combining, in a pioneering approach, the achievements of the life sciences and the contribution of the humanities, Antonio Damasio shows that the living carries within him an irrepressible force, homeostasis, which works for the continuation of life and regulates all manifestations, be they biological, psychological and even social.
The Strange Order of Things describes how, in the course of an invisible genealogy, emotions, feelings, the functioning of the mind, but also the most complex forms of culture and social organization, are rooted in the oldest single-celled organisms.
A strong thesis, powerfully argued, which is sure to provoke debate.
A great book that changes our thinking habits and makes us see in an unprecedented light our place in the long chain of life.
A look back at the evening-dialogue between Alain Berthoz, Professor at the Collège de France and Alain de Vulpian and testimonials from actors of change.
On the occasion of the release of Alain de Vulpian’s new book, Praise of Metamorphosis. On the march towards a new humanity, SoL France gathered last May nearly 200 agents of change and leaders concerned by the ongoing metamorphosis of our civilization.
The consolidation of the Happymorphose network has been announced.
"Increasing his knowledge increases his ignorance," Friedrich Schlegel said.
"I live more and more with the consciousness and the feeling of the presence of the unknown in the known, of the enigma in the banal, of the mystery in all things and, in particular, of the advances of a new ignorance in every advance of knowledge" says Edgar Morin.
Thus he undertook in this book to patrol the new territories of knowledge, where reveals an inseparable trio: knowledge mystery ignorance.
In his eyes, the mystery does not devalue the knowledge that leads to it. It makes us aware of the occult powers that command and possess us, like Daimon inside and outside of us. But, above all, it stimulates and strengthens the poetic feeling of existence.
Our brain is bigger than all his creations. It is not up to our brains to adapt to our creations, but the other way around. From medicine to politics, from marketing to education, applying this principle is about changing yourself… and change the world. Our society today brews a huge amount of knowledge and, despite everything, produces very little wisdom. But a civilization that produces a lot of knowledge without wisdom is doomed to self-destruction. The book deals in particular with neuroergonomy, the science that studies the brain at work. From school to office, or in the city, the potential of this new science is immense, both socially and economically. It accurately describes our brain, its abilities, its limits, its blind spots, and the known ways of using it to the best of its ability. Recent cases show us how perfect the use of our brains is: prodigious calculators manage to calculate the thirteenth root of a hundred-digit number in less than four seconds. Now they have the same brain as us! The difference therefore lies in the way they use it, and in particular in their ability to spread the cognitive load over several functions of their mind.
This ability, Idriss Aberkane explains how we could all master it.
Left and right, politics and civil society, presidentialism and parliamentaryism, liberalism and ecology… AND’s big comeback in politics?
May 24, 2017
With one of the highest tax rates in OECD countries and one of the highest structural unemployment rates, with the need to strengthen the competitiveness of French companies, with a hundred years of talk on equal opportunities and one of the school systems that produces the most inequality, with the contradictions between the aspiration of the French to shorten working time in a lifetime , the desire to maintain and increase the purchasing power and rapid progress of emerging countries in terms of technological mastery, with the “third social round” that we are already promised in the face of the will of the next president to go towards the Scandinavian-style flex-security, Emmanuel Macron will have on his desk from his inauguration a heck of a pile of files with the urgent stamp in red ink.
Will he be able not to fall under these emergencies? Don’t give in to constant media and political pressure? To understand that in a French society undermined by distrust, especially between politicians and citizens, in a global society as objectively interdependent as it is tragically segmented, it is necessary to lead a systemic transition towards sustainable societies, to understand that most intellectual software is obsolete and that, under these conditions, only major intellectual and institutional changes will be at stake? The future alone will tell.
I would just like to make a small contribution to this, on politics, territory, Europe, the economy, finance.
Politics and democracy must be radically redefined. Politics, before being a confrontation of programs, a disparate catalogue that we were given ad nauseam during the election campaign, is an ethic and a method. We have an extraordinary opportunity in 2017: a president-elect but without a majority endorsement of the program he proposes! A great opportunity to engage in genuine processes of citizen dialogue, according to a rigorous and proven methodology, on each subject of reform, allowing, after electoral episodes that are more of a wrestling match than a deep collective reflection on the future of our societies, to reinvent democracy, the ability of citizens to inform themselves, to feed on exchanges with others, to build elements of consensus in the face of the great challenges of France.
In doing so, we will soon understand another truth: it is at the level of the territories that citizens can together think of the world and act on it. Decentralisation in France has been going on since the beginning because its promoters, the Defferre, Guichard, Mitterrand were feudals. Attached to the old institutional and intellectual framework of the exercise of power, they did not understand or accept that no real problem of our society could be solved at a single level and that under these conditions the different levels of local authorities should not share the competences but invent the rules for the exercise of a shared competence, of multi-level governance. Moreover, the territories, better scale than that of the State to manage the relations of any kind that characterize our societies, will be major players in the transition… provided that a vast transformation of territorial governance is undertaken, less through the umpteenth reform of institutions than through a profound transformation of conceptual systems, methods and practices.
The new president is also expected on Europe. In the face of growing Euroscepticism, he had the courage to state clearly that Europe was the political space in which the French had a future in the world. Daring to say it is not nothing. But it is nevertheless essential, sixty years after the Treaty of Rome, to re-found the European project, including by leaving the ever-present debate between sovereignists and federalists that excites political and administrative frameworks more than it arouses the passion of the peoples themselves. The truth is that the construction of Europe has missed a step: it is not enough of institutions or even common currencies to bring out the consciousness of a community of destiny. The re-foundation of Europe requires a process to establish citizens. I have proposed a concrete way of doing this based on the achievements of deliberative democracy and building on the regions of Europe. But in order to re-enchant Europe, to make European integration an epic, it must also be at the forefront of the global struggle for the transition to sustainable societies, daring to bring bold proposals to the international stage and to implement bold proposals internally. For example, a policy of quotas and the creation of an energy currency, without which the schizophrenia revealed by the Paris Agreements between what states are prepared to do and what is necessary for survival will only get worse from year to year.
And all of this requires a radical rethinking of the economic model. The flight forward in competitiveness has every chance of leading to the same impasses as the competitive devaluations rightly denounced by opponents of neo-protectionism. We must dare a “great return forward”, from the economy to the economy, considering that what organizes the relations of production and exchange are not so-called “natural laws” of the market but rather rules of management of the common home.
Finally, the example of finance is one that best reveals the gap between the impacts of large public and private actors on the planet and the state of international law. The 19th century invented the limited liability company, a condition for developing entrepreneurship by limiting the risks of the entrepreneur. But the 21st century, the Age of the Anthropocene, has invented societies of unlimited irresponsibility, where the planetary consequences, some irreversible, of the actions of institutions and their leaders unfold on a global scale while they are exempt from civil and criminal liability against them. It has become necessary, starting with Europe, to build an ethic and a right of responsibility. After the 2008 financial crisis, none of the real perpetrators of a tragedy that has had incalculable consequences on a global scale ended up in prison. Most of them even got away with a golden parachute. Until this problem is solved, there is no need to talk to the people about morality and effort.
Free Tribune of opinion – April 10, 2017
Combining these three words seems a challenge. And yet this is the bet that SoL France, the Society for the Learning Organization and the think-tank Synopia took in front of a hundred officials and company executives. How do we marry the words learning and public governance? How to infuse the start-up spirit into the political world? The bet was not as big as it seemed.
At both the state and regional levels, “learning stories” showed on the ground the profound metamorphosis of our society (1): the inclusive approach of COP21 drawing part of its energy from the encounter with civil society was taken up by living experiences of neighbourhoods and cities, Humanity in Lille or Kingersheim in Alsace for example (2) , through innovative research by companies, through administrative experiences in the Val-d’Oise, the concept of “delivery unit”, the creation of the job-service cheque…
No hierarchy. The start-up spirit was present: no hierarchy, let the innovations of the base rise, act in transdisciplinarity, trust, accountability. From these daily challenges, from these experiences from all over France, a personal awareness and a shared vision were born that were the same in the circles of administration, companies, or associations. How to create dynamics, allow the public servant to be an actor of well-being and progress. Keywords have emerged that resonate as a call to the traditional political world.
The collective intelligence approach has allowed and allows these words to burst like fireworks across the country. Founding words, and words of action: accelerators, boosters of tomorrow’s governance. Four founding postures: humanism and personalism, search for the common good, listening, discernment. Ten paths to action: catalytic governance, participation, hybridization, self-organization, inclusion, female role, groping strategy, experimenting, moving from the to and, leaving time to time.
Behind these words, there is know-how, know-how, energy: a catalytic ruler is the one who lets innovations rise and puts coherence. Participation: citizens no longer want to be represented, they want to be involved in the orientation. Hybridization is one of the key words of metamorphosis, unexpected collectives combining, often locally, public authorities, companies, associations, arise everywhere, they create “third places” (3) from which innovation springs. Being a strategist and groping is an oxymoron, it is knowing how to create a shared vision and looking for how to implement it.
It is positive France, it is, we must hope, the France of tomorrow. Let the politicians hear it!
Irene Dupoux-Couturier is vice-president of SoL France.
(1): Alain de Vulpian, Praise of Metamorphosis, on the road to a new humanity
(2): Joseph Spiegel, What if we took – at last! – Voters Seriously, Present Time, 2017
(3): Pierre Giorgini, The Twilight of Places, Bayard 2016
