The theory of social representations to measure the perception of the social object "management". Application in government civil service

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show how the approach to social representations allows identifying relations that individuals have with a social object. It first presents the study on social representations that constituted my Master’s degree dissertation on occupational psychology and organizations at the central
administration of regional affairs of Bourgogne – Franche - Comté in 2017. The objective of this study was to verify, in a context of the reorganization of government services, whether management practices and certain personal characteristics have an effect on social representation. I am particularly interested in the impact of status, experience and generation on the perception of management by managers and those they manage.
I was then able to exploit this work on social representations in the INRA. In the framework of my functions as administrator of the Agroecology joint research unit, in 2019-2020 I carried
out a study on the image of the Serres-4PMI platform (Plant Phenotyping Platform for Plant and Micro-organism Interactions), attached to the joint research unit, which was then faced with difficulties. The aim of this approach was to objectivize the perception that the users had of the "greenhouse" and "4PMI" tools in order to propose an action plan.
These two studies show that whatever the social object, the social representations approach is capable of producing knowledge that characterizes the diversity of actors and their interrelations with the object studied. It above all permits clarifying the object under debate, and developing the capacity to propose paths of improvement.