When sports is put at the service of management: The shaping of the “high-level employee”

Drawing on the empirical study of training seminars combining sports activities and personal development, this article analyzes the process whereby employees are shaped by their firms in order to optimize their career development, which is expected to have a positive effect on their productivity. This evolutionist approach considers the human being as an asset to be optimized through investment. It therefore contributes to the dissemination of a bioeconomic morality that proves to have a depoliticizing effect and that exerts potentially violent relations of symbolic domination on those who fail to comply with it.