The Reproduction of Socio-racial Hierarchy and the Development of
Educational Psychology in a Multilingual Context: A Case Study of
Future Technical Managers

Louisa Baralonga

(Université Sorbonnes Paris Cité, France)

Abstract: Recent geopolitical events, such as the Arab spring, North-South relations, neocolonialism, subordinates’ speaches, terrorism and far right radicalisation, as well as the intensification of competition between multinational companies, are having a considerable effect on cooperation between multinational teams, which, in turn, is affecting the training of future technical managers in engineering schools. In the context of such phenomena, this paper considers a management training plan for a pluricultural environment that takes into account the subjective and intersubjective stress affecting the working environment of multicultural teams. The research behind this project took place at the “École Centrale de Paris” using company games put in place by the Human Relations Department about twenty years ago. The paper looks at the time period from 2012 to 2017, using a research-intervention methodology. It deals with leadership duties, in particular those who are in charge of the shared social and cultural environment (history, institutions, law, language), regardless of their nationality or native tongue. In the training phase, teams tend to separate functional and emotional elements. This trend creates a lack of group and individual control at the emotional level, which could lead to functional apathy. The alliance based upon rationalization leads to two positions: firstly a position of non-conflict with regard to the presence of international students; and secondly the formal request to mediate feelings of hatred directed towards international students.

Key words: racism, intersubjectivity, training, cross cultural, intervention