From a 'Control-based' to an 'Inquiry-based' Model: the power of pragmatism to question the mainstream view of organization and human activity

International audience; The paradigm of organizational control supposes that human activity is simple and transparent enough to be represented from the outside, in a stabilized and standardized form, depriving workers of control of product and process (Delbridge & Ezzamer, 2005). The “control” approach, epistomized by Taylorism and rediscovered in the recent applications of Lean management (Lorino & Arnoud, 2016), thus implies some denial of the complexity of activity and favors the representation of activity as a set of standardized and measurable operations rather than activity itself, as the primary object of management. This communication seeks to shed light on the contribution of pragmatism and the theory of inquiry to criticize and renew this approach, which is a source of deleterious effects on work and workers.