I remember as a child my paternal grandfather going “to Michelin’s” with his satchel in which my grandmother had carefully packed something to eat. Michelin didn’t mean anything to me then: my grandfather just went to work, that’s all. I grew up, until the age of eleven, in Clermont-Ferrand’s southern area, far from the factories, and left the city only to return just before my eighteenth birthday. Moreover, like all other Michelin employees, my grandfather never talked about the company. Only my grandmother would bring up, often passionately, the paternalistic system and the mythical dimension of the Michelin family, praising their simplicity and dislike of waste. I would only listen with half an ear to the stories she was telling me, as I did to my father explaining how he had avoided the “Michelin system” after being expelled from the company schools, in the process drawing a less than appealing picture of the company.
Later, as a more attentive adult to my family’s stories and with an ethnologist’s eye, I realised that Michelin and its spirit hinged on a complex set of elements, and that they were frequently discussed in Clermont-Ferrand. The company also seemed to trigger different feelings, rooted in the three different attitudes alluded to earlier, namely silence, praise and rejection, each one justified by the “Michelin spirit”. To the locals, keeping silent is one of the qualities of those endowed with the Michelin spirit, as embodied by the eponymous family whose key members have become legendary. This spirit sometimes commands respect, indeed admiration, and sometimes it is decried, even treated ironically, but it never leaves anyone indifferent, everyone in Clermont-Ferrand having a view on the matter. Therefore, the initial questions governing this work are as follows: what is the Michelin spirit? How can it be defined, what are its contents and how is it transmitted? Also, ethnologically speaking, is there such a thing as the Michelin myth and, if so, how is it structured and what are its aims?
My enquiry started in 1999, coinciding with the transfer of power from François Michelin, the charismatic boss who oversaw the paternalistic era, to his son Édouard. Although “father” François stayed on until 2002, the new boss exemplified the development of neoliberal capitalism and embodied an evolving business spirit aimed at the ever-growing proportion of executives at the various sites in Clermont-Ferrand. What the workers expressed to me at that time were their thoughts on a changing and disconcerting world, as interpreted through the lens of their feelings and skills.
Furthermore, while drafting the conclusion to this research, Édouard Michelin died in a boat accident in May 2006, confining my enquiry to the period he managed the company. This ethnographic work therefore bears witness to a particular period in time corresponding to (1) the end of industrial capitalism but also (2) the end of a spirit and a company legend as embodied by a member of the eponymous family, and lastly (3) the local urban change resulting from the transformations of the former industrial city, according to the evolutions of both capitalism in general, and the social composition of the workforce in particular.
It has now been twelve since I completed the investigation presented here, which is both a short time and a long time in a capitalist society geared towards the short term. Since then, the number of Bibs (as the employees are called in reference to Bibendum1) in Clermont-Ferrand has kept falling, from around 14,000 to 12,090 (according to the report on employment and working conditions of 31 December 2012), whereas the number of executives and other employees has increased again (25 and 24%, respectively, over all the French sites according to the 2011 report on employment and working conditions) at the expense of the number of workers (51%). I have updated most data in this investigation but the reader should bear in mind that it was finalised in 2006. This also applies to bibliographical references as in the meantime the social sciences have produced scientific literature about the growth of capitalism.
1.1 The Research Subject: The Construction of an Industrial Myth to Justify a Company Spirit
Michelin: this word seldom refers to a tyre brand when used by anyone living in Clermont-Ferrand, but rather to a surname symbolising a dynasty and a spirit. Although “the Michelin spirit” is an expression frequently heard in Clermont-Ferrand, when I asked people to define it, I was mostly met with a surprised then embarrassed silence. The question seemed almost out of place and the person asking from a different world. How can one not know what it means? Yet defining it remains difficult and is often attempted through anecdotal illustrations, which invariably end with “That’s the Michelin spirit, you see?”
To understand what the “Michelin spirit” entails, I will examine it from the point of view of the three main actors in this context: the company, the Bibs and the people of Clermont-Ferrand. My first assumption is that the Michelin spirit corresponds both to the spirit of capitalism according to Michelin and to a specific company culture, endowing it with a symbolic and imaginary role in the eyes of the locals.
Within the company, the Michelin spirit validates entrepreneurial thought and the practices linked to it. It corresponds to the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1950) according to Michelin or, in other words and borrowing Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s definition, to the “ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism” (2005, 8), evolving as it changes. It gives employees reasons (economic, social, moral or security) to commit to the company and remain loyal to it. In terms of content, the Michelin family constructed the eponymous spirit, based on moral and Christian values. It revolves around the exemplary father figure as paternalism legitimises the system for managing the workforce, and also around the standards governing secret and asceticism that ensure its effectiveness. These standards dictate the employees’ way of being and acting, and foster a feeling of belonging to the firm2 whose values are proudly defended, carried and nurtured by its members.
The Michelin spirit therefore also refers to a company culture, meaning a “strategic attempt… at kindling and mobilising consensual identification reflexes with the company for its own ends” (Tripier 1986, 374*3). As a social institution, the company produces ways of integrating through its culture, precisely because it “encompasses a way in which to approach the integration of a group of individuals within a society” (D’Iribarne 1989, 273*). By providing a common cultural model, the company creates identification, which is shared by the various social membership groups associated with occupation, hierarchy, ethnicity, trade unions, etc., thus ensuring staff loyalty. This echoes the ideological aspect of the notion of spirit of capitalism. The company culture “affects the way of governing people” (D’Iribarne 1989, 9*) and makes living together possible by promoting shared standards and values to which the employees generally subscribe. At Michelin, these values are part of a Christian and paternalistic discourse. The standards ensure that the secret is kept and that the practices remain ascetical. They govern the ways of working together, of entering into conflict, of submitting to hierarchy, of defining fairness and unfairness, good and evil, what is deserving and what is not, etc. (D’Iribarne 2002).
Also, from the employees’ perspective the company culture is not a strategic tool but rather a complex of skills and life perspectives guided by ideal references, which finds expression in the practices, images and beliefs linked together in a coherent whole. According to Italo Pardo, “highly valued material assets are often transacted with stress on meanings – e.g., sentiment, self-representation, own moral image among significant others – beyond basic material need and strictly monetary value” (Pardo 1996, 10). At the heart of its cultural identity, the Michelin spirit weaves a system of belonging, which directly generates the feeling of belonging to a community through parameters of living together, a community that is gathered under the same emblem “Michelin”, or even “father Michelin”. In other words, the culture “builds a system of social meanings” that provide an interpretation grid for the world, giving it meaning, and that “shape the ‘self-evident facts’ which [individuals] rely on to act ‘rationally’” (D’Iribarne 1989, XIV*). Asking a Bib to define the Michelin spirit is tantamount to asking him to define the culture which he belongs to, a difficult task for someone who is one of its more or less acculturated members. This explains why the people I spoke to found it difficult to define the Michelin spirit and why only those mocking or condemning it were able to offer a description, however negative, thus forcing a definition of its outlines which were described as “military”, “strict”, “narrow-minded”, “austere” and “stingy”.
Clermont-Ferrand itself sees the Michelin spirit as the spirit of a company with a symbolic role since it is an emblem captivating the locals’ imagination, especially as most of them have at least one Bib among their friends or relatives. The paternal figure therefore also plays a role outside the factory. When in 1886 the brothers André and Édouard Michelin took over the rubber manufacturing company from their grandfather and transformed it in 1891 into a tyre factory, the population of Clermont-Ferrand consisted mainly of ploughmen, craftsmen and winegrowers. The company’s growth was the driving force behind the city’s demographic expansion and soaring industrialisation. The company’s presence tripled the population, from 40,000 to 120,000, in the space of fifty years as the employment opportunities led to migration from rural areas and immigration from abroad. In the late 1970s, the company employed more than 30,000 staff in its local factories. As a result of its economic, spatial, demographic and therefore political power, the new industrial city was soon nicknamed “Michelinville”. The history of the company and the Michelin family is thus embedded in Clermont-Ferrand’s history. Michelin is not only the symbolic father, that is to say the embodiment of the paternalistic model, for his workers but equally for the locals who are grateful to him for providing for and educating the city. It is an important benchmark for the city’s population and feeds its imagination, in particular by linking the Michelin spirit to urban space and spreading mythical stories. I will come back to this. Indeed, Michelin gradually imposed itself as the true urban decision-maker, translating its discourse into the space it created, developed and organised within the company as well as in the city. Indeed, As Jerome Krase demonstrated, spaces are the witness of the culture, since the cityscape carries social and cultural meanings (Krase 2012). The discourse of Michelin, both paternalistic and disciplinarian, is anchored in an ideological and functional urbanism and architecture, and expresses the austere spirit, which has contributed to the construction of a local identity as it spread to an important part of the population.
For the locals, the Michelin spirit with which the Bibs are endowed is almost related to ethos (“mores” in Greek), that is, a set of moral standards governing social activity. Bateson, who coined this term in his study of the Iatmul society, defines it as “the expression of a culturally standardised system of organisation of the instincts and emotions of the individuals” (1958, 118, emphasis in original). The author adds: “any group of people may establish among themselves an ethos which as soon as it is established becomes a very real factor in determining their conduct” (1958, 120). Just like culture, the ethos is in permanent movement and cannot be separated from the eidos, or the “standardisation of the cognitive aspects of the personality of the individuals” (ibid., 220, emphasis in original), which the locals refer to as “education” of the spirit, whether they subscribe to it or condemn it, in which case they are more likely to talk about “brainwashing”, “moulding”, “shaping” or “conditioning” the spirit.
The second assumption I would like to explore is that, in order to justify the set of standards and instructions governing the Michelin spirit, the company constructed a local myth based on manipulated history and memory (manipulated in the literal sense of “handled” and in the figurative sense of “influe...