In "The New Spirit of Capitalism" (First French Publication 1999) we studied with L. Boltanski the profound transformation of the organization and justifications of capitalism between the 1960s and the 1990s in France.  The starting point of the book is a comparative study of the management literature between the two periods. This allowed us to stylize a new spirit of capitalism associated to a new polity (the projective city). One of the theses of the book is that capitalism has been transformed through the responses that were constructed to answer the criticisms that put capitalism in crisis in the 1970s: the social critique that is concerned with social justice and fights against exploitation and what we called the artist critique after my previous work (Artistes versus Managers) that denounces the lack of authenticity and freedom.

After this book, I carried out some works aimed at extending the historical period concerned and the dialectical model by focusing on other critical moments and other critiques (notably conservative critique and ecological critique). I developped certain questions such as that of ideology. And I also tried to make the model of transformation of management practices work on cases on smaller scales, around some situated devices.