BENQUET Marlene

From the English case, an analysis of the rise of libertarianism via authoritarian regimes since 2010. By studying the sources of election financing, the authors reveal the organized action of a part of the financial bosses who wish to keep control over the Western democracies and the planet's resources to ensure the free circulation of capital.

"This book explores the renewal of forms of capital accumulation and the institutions that shape it. It focuses on three main sources of accumulation: the extraction of profit through labor and the commodification of nature, financial speculation and the ways in which profit is converted into wealth. It thus offers a new understanding of the economic and political logics of capital accumulation within capitalism in the 21st century. It shows the recomposition of the sources of profit, from the traditional mechanisms of labor exploitation to the contemporary logics of speculation and dispossession. Bringing together the work of scholars who study the social fabric of capitalist accumulation, Accumulating Capital Today goes beyond disciplinary frontiers to describe how capital is accumulating in a world threatened by social and environmental collapse. This book heralds the emergence of "accumulation studies" and will be of interest to researchers in sociology, anthropology, politics, political economy, geography and economics".

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This book explores the renewal of forms of capital accumulation and the institutions that shape it. It focuses on three main sources of accumulation: the extraction of profit through labor and the commodification of nature, financial speculation and the ways in which profit is converted into wealth. It thus offers a new understanding of the economic and political logics of capital accumulation within capitalism in the 21st century. It shows the recomposition of the sources of profit, from the traditional mechanisms of labor exploitation to the contemporary logics of speculation and dispossession. Bringing together the work of scholars who study the social fabric of capitalist accumulation, Accumulating Capital Today goes beyond disciplinary frontiers to describe how capital is accumulating in a world threatened by social and environmental collapse. This book heralds the emergence of "accumulation studies" and will be of interest to researchers in sociology, anthropology, politics, political economy, geography and economics.

In this article, we conceive of business law as an agonistic process of co-production of rules, between representatives of public authorities and private interests. The asymmetric interdependence between the agents who exercise the power to institute rules, including those for capital accumulation, and the financial intermediaries who compete for the means of allocating it, explains the introduction, at the end of the 1990s, of a tax niche favourable to private equity - DSK life insurance contracts. Our approach, which considers the state neither as a kind of referee nor as the instrument of capitalists, thus makes it possible to reconstruct the rivalries between financiers, as well as the disputes between central administrations, ministerial cabinets and elected officials. These antagonisms indicate that the rules of law, like their uses, are not external to economic activity, but rather constitute the ways of making profit. In business, establishing the rules of the game is part of the game.

This book explores the renewal of forms of capital accumulation and the institutions that shape it. It focuses on three main sources of accumulation: the extraction of profit through labor and the commodification of nature, financial speculation and the ways in which profit is converted into wealth. It thus offers a new understanding of the economic and political logics of capital accumulation within capitalism in the 21st century. It shows the recomposition of the sources of profit, from the traditional mechanisms of labor exploitation to the contemporary logics of speculation and dispossession. Bringing together the work of scholars who study the social fabric of capitalist accumulation, Accumulating Capital Today goes beyond disciplinary frontiers to describe how capital is accumulating in a world threatened by social and environmental collapse. This book heralds the emergence of "accumulation studies" and will be of interest to researchers in sociology, anthropology, politics, political economy, geography and economics".

This article describes a major shift in French capitalism: the emergence and development of the new private equity sector. It discusses the particularities involved in the construction of this capital accumulation centre in France, studying how an advantageous institutional arrangement was coproduced by fund managers, government and traditional industrial managers. As such, it takes an institutional approach focusing on the history of the rules that enable financial activities. This article’s empirical material takes the form of (hitherto untapped) archives from the professional association of French private equity funds covering the period from 1984 to 2017, 12 interviews with former presidents of the association and ten interviews with partners of large French private equity funds.

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This article shows how investment funds have become, between 1980 and today, a central pole of capital accumulation. It describes how the reconfiguration of the institutions of French capitalism has allowed the accumulation of profit by these new financial intermediaries. To do so, it questions the opposition between public and private actors, and highlights the modalities of cooperation between these actors in the co-production of the new institutional arrangement favorable to private equity. This article is based on the hitherto unexploited archives of the private equity industry association from 1984 to the present and on 12 interviews with former presidents of this association.

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Based on ethnographic data and the analysis of a corpus of 48 interviews, this text describes the indigenous conceptions of the value of firms among members of investment funds. Using a pragmatic approach to value judgements, the paper assesses the prevalence of a substantial neoclassical definition of value among these investors, and shows that it is not accepted when they comment on their professional practices, but is used to justify them.

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How do private equity firms decide on a fair price for a business? Drawing on 76 semi-structured interviews, this article contributes to the sociology of finance and valuation studies by showing that pricing companies is not just a valuation operation but also a capital-repartition issue. In so doing, it shows how concrete, local pricing methods contribute to the financialisation of the economy through the creation of a new capital accumulation centre. The article’s ethno-accounting approach describes three pricing steps: first, the capital access rules applicable to the private equity firm members (the price rationale). second, the expectations about the capital that can be transferred from the business to the private equity firm (the theoretical price level). and third, the transaction participant coordination mechanisms (culminating in the actual price). This description of the practices and concepts inherent in business valuation sidesteps the traditional divide between price formation in constructivist concepts of value as well as price discovery in substantivist concepts of value. Instead, value is defined as the expectation of a transfer of capital from the productive sphere to the private equity firm.

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This article aims to solve the enigma of the deployment from 1990, and then the abandonment in 2012, of a system for evaluating the state of mind of employees in a French retail group. It is based on an ethnographic survey conducted within the group's human resources department and with one of the local facilitators of the system, as well as on interviews conducted with senior managers and employees. It deals with the diversity of uses of this system, called "personnel listening". It shows that an evaluation tool can be used simultaneously for various purposes by the same group of users. While some of these are widely publicized, including to audiences outside the organization, others are pursued more discreetly and only become apparent through direct observation of the various uses of the tool. The article also shows that the appropriation of the tool by different groups of users produces global effects that may not be intended by anyone, while being the result of the ends targeted by each. In so doing, we argue for a micro-sociological approach to evaluation devices centred on the description of their uses, proposing to mobilise the notion of evaluation reference.

How do you decide on the right price for a company? The answer to this question is the main activity of private equity funds, central actors of the new phase of financialization of the economy. This text approaches the analysis of the ways in which prices are set as a particularly crucial moment in the circulation of money in the social space and its distribution between particular sectors and groups of individuals. The determination of prices is thought of as an operation of evaluation as much as of distribution of appropriable capital. It consists in showing, on the basis of qualitative data, how the concrete and local modalities of price setting participate in the solidification of a massive regime of capital accumulation. To do this, he distinguishes three ways in which prices are formed: by the rules of access to capital for members of investment funds, "the reason for the price"; by expectations of capital transferable from the firm to the funds, "the theoretical level of the price"; and by the mechanisms of coordination between the various participants in the exchange, "the effectiveness of the price".

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Without claiming to provide the answer to a question that is of interest not only to business historians but also to business professionals and public authorities, this article first explains what private equity is. It then describes the archives of the main association that represents this sector of activity and its practitioners: the Association Française des Investisseurs pour la Croissance (AFIC). Finally, the article outlines the research directions that can be envisaged by using these new primary sources....

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In 1982, the first French private equity fund (i.e. an asset management company that invests innon-listed private companies, such as venture capital or leveraged buyout funds) was created.Twenty years later, in 2016, the French private equity industry raised €39bn and was the thirdcountry for private equity investment in the world after the US and the UK. The developmentof this new financial industry has required the reconfiguration of the institutions of Frenchcapitalism, from the circuits of capital to the ownership of industrial companies. Thesetransformations enabled financial actors to disconnect their expected returns from the financialrisk they make industrial companies endure – therefore generating a phenomenon of financialirresponsibility within the French financial world.Going beyond traditional approaches of the role of institutions in the development of“high finance”, this paper puts into question the split between private and public actors in thereconfiguration of French capitalism’s institutions. It emphasises the constant cooperationbetween administrative and financial actors in building a new institutional “arrangement”favourable to the circulation of capital through the interface of private equity funds. Inparticular, studying these interactions at a microsocial level, this paper shows that the Frenchprivate equity industry had to produce a moral discourse on its activity (equating private equityinvestment with “value creation”) and to organise itself through lobbying groups, in order toaccumulate the legitimacy that enabled it to attract more capital and to defend its favourable regulation. As such, it highlights how the construction of the circuits of capital on which theprivate equity industry relies has required the earlier accumulation of symbolic, administrativeand social capital by this emerging financial sector.This paper is based on an exceptional and lively empirical material, including a fullaccess to the internal archives of the main French private equity lobbying association since1984, and 12 interviews with former presidents of this lobbying association (who also used tomanage some of the main French private equity funds).

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Since the 1990s, working conditions have gradually come to the forefront of social debate. Nevertheless, the situation remains critical. The traditional risks have not disappeared: heavy handling, occupational exposure to carcinogens, noise or vibrations remain widespread... Moreover, certain "improvements" have only displaced and concealed the problems, such as the outsourcing of risks. At the same time, the transformation of work and of the methods of workforce management have weakened collectives and increased the isolation of employees, leading to a visible rise in psychological suffering.

Marlène Benquet spent three years investigating one of France's leading retail companies: first as a cashier, she then did an internship at the group's headquarters and another within the majority union organization. The identity of the founders ("grocers") has been turned upside down by the arrival of new financial shareholders: management by promotion has largely disappeared, and all employees have difficulty accepting what they experience as growing insecurity. So why do they accept these weakening reorganizations?" I wanted to know what it was like to be a cashier to understand why they did not revolt or, in any case, less than in other professional sectors." At headquarters, compartmentalization is the rule: it is impossible to move to other departments without a good reason. As for the majority union organization, how did it manage to establish itself? Neither "membership" nor repression is enough to explain why employees are involved in their work. More akin to a game of go than chess, the employers' strategies neutralize the employees but do not subdue them.

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The objective of this article is to show, from ethnographic observations, how certain union organizations participate in maintaining a relative social peace by putting themselves at the service of managing professional conflicts in the precarious and feminized sector of mass distribution.

At the end of the 2000s, sociologist Marlène Benquet conducted a three-year investigation in one of the main French supermarket companies: first she became a cashier, then she did an internship at the group's headquarters and another within the majority union organization. It is the result of this extraordinary investigation that she presents in this book, which is quite astounding in what it reveals about the "underbelly" of the retail industry. The identity of the founders ("grocers") has been turned upside down by the arrival of new financial shareholders: management by promotion has largely disappeared, and all the employees have difficulty accepting what they experience as a loss of autonomy and growing insecurity. So why do they accept to "take" these weakening reorganizations? To understand better, it was necessary to live their lives: "I wanted to know what it was like to be a cashier to understand why they did not revolt or, in any case, less than in other professional sectors. At headquarters, compartmentalization is the rule: badges only give access to the floor where one's own office is located, it is impossible to move to other departments without a good reason, and information circulates poorly. As for the majority union organization, how did it manage to establish itself? How does it contribute to social peace? Neither "membership" nor repression is sufficient to explain why employees are committed to their work despite an oppressive environment and uninspiring remuneration. More akin to the technique of a go player than a chess enthusiast, employer strategies neutralize employees, but do not subdue them.

From a survey in transversal participant observation conducted within the management of a large distribution group, the majority union organization and the employees of hypermarkets, this work aims to study the means of obtaining the work of the employees in a group of large distribution with financial shareholders. In 2008, for the first time since its creation, this group leaves the hands of its founding families to pass between those of an investment fund which appoints a new CEO. The profitability targets set by the new shareholders were close to 15%, a colossal cost-cutting plan was put in place and the new management was forced to operate an unchanged number of hypermarkets with 9.3% fewer employees. How is employee investment obtained in this context of shareholder financialization and cost reduction? It is in fact the product of a continuous process of multiplication of links between management, trade unions and employees, which ends up creating a web dense enough to make it very difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from it. Individuals are more trapped than convinced. Placed at the center of economic, normative, personal, and emotional interactions, they are ultimately bound by a relational configuration that prevents them from totally divesting themselves. The ways in which investment is obtained consist in defining the parameters of the employees' professional situation in such a way that it seems neither possible nor desirable for them to disengage.