La loi PACTE ou le dernier avatar de la réforme de l'entreprise : une relecture historique depuis 1945

The French PACTE law will gradually extend the representation of employees into the board of directors. Thus, we can consider that the governance of French companies is gradually evolving toward a more stakeholder-oriented corporate governance system. This raises more broadly the question of the potential reform of the company. This overall question leads to a potential paradigm shift. It opens the door to the diversity of profiles within boards, moving away incidentally from the phenomenon of small world, often used to describe the secret environment of corporate governance and board members (Kogut 2012). Considering the reform of the company and the participation of the employees is also going back to debates that were lively around the question of industrial democracy (Mouriaux 2013). In this article, we propose a historical reading of the question of the possible participation of employees to the governance of their company, sometimes considered as an ideal of democratic participation within the firm (Chapas and Hollandts 2017 ). Since the end of the WWII, it is more than seventy years of the history of democratic participation and industrial democracy that can be read around an issue and debates around the essential question of the reform of the company. Our longitudinal and socio-historical analysis is mainly based on the main milestones (schematically one per decade) that crystallize at a given moment the elements of the debate around the reform of the company. Particular attention is paid to the Sudreau report (1975), which could have been a turning point for the reform of the company. Our article intends to contribute on several elements. In terms of governance, it traces historically the roots of employee participation into corporate governance and more some alternatives to a shareholder-oriented corporate governance. In terms of the history of thoughts, this article also documents the reduction of the project of reform of the company which fades over the decades to be reduced in the end to the (technical) question of the number of employees on the board. Finally, our article also critically discusses the current framework of employee association to governance and questions the reform of the company, as a central institution of contemporary capitalism.