Sanitized basement atmosphere, pale neon lights and dehumanized employees: Severance is back January 17 on Apple TV+. In this dystopian series, the basement employees of the Lumon company all have a particularity: having chosen “dissociation”, a surgical operation consisting of placing a chip in their brain to define an impermeable cognitive boundary between private and professional life . Result: their personal worries disappear at the office doors. And their story with it. “Severance came out right at the time of the generalization of teleworking, when this question of borders arose”, recalls Claire Edey Gamassou, teacher-researcher in management at Paris-Est Créteil University and co-organizer of the conference “Management en series”. “This fiction illustrates well what we learn in management science: being disconnected from oneself goes against the potential for development of a collective.”
An anti-management manual
In the first season (note spoiler), each of the “dissociated” ends up, in fact, suffering from ignorance of who they really are and desperately seeks to escape this psychological prison. However, in an attempt to keep its employees calm and motivated, Lumon deploys treasures of creativities: prank-and-catch games to win, “waffle parties” organized in a reproduction of the patron saint’s room or even “well-being sessions” where employees are shown the qualities of their ” exter” (their “themselves” in personal life). To calm the recalcitrant, a psychological torture room is planned. The torture? Chanting apologies until you’re exhausted.
“Severance is a caricatured concentrate of the most manipulative, absurd and cynical management methods, analyzes the specialist. From the injunction to build relationships without allowing shared breaks, to the cult of the boss, through the use of playfulness, many scenes can be analyzed. But if I had to rely on this series in a course, I would use it to illustrate the concept of competition.” Lumon has, in fact, found a simple idea to dissuade the different departments of the company from speak: the presence of a painting representing a group of people being massacred – literally – by the one at the other end of the corridor…
Making emotion and human relationships tangible
In the world of education, the fictional object has become a support, making emotion and different human relationships tangible. Since 2023, the interdisciplinary conference “Series management“dedicates two working days a year to these questions. We are interested in the power struggle through Peaky Blinders or the management of an employee in rebellion by relying on The Legends Office.
“All fictions can be useful, recalls Claire Edey Gamassou. If we think about it, as soon as we seek to achieve an objective and there is a collective, we are doing management: it even works for the organizing a dinner with friends.” As a result, the series are finding a place in academic literature: Mad Men serves as a reference for a marketing manual just like Papel’s housefor a work on management (both published by EMS). Three years after season 1, will the return of Lumon’s dissociated people to our screens also be an opportunity for new lessons?
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