Abstract

Despite the growing number of external controls rela­ted to the just-in-time management of merchandise and customers, department superintendents in hypermarkets still play a key role in the everyday organization of work. The staff’s job has changed owing to the restructuring of big retail chains over the past twenty years. Major technical and organizational innovations in this sector - computerization, centralization of data, the logistics of the supply chain, the integrated management of merchandise and labor - have led to an increasingly “closed” organization in hypermarkets. Subject to strong institutional imperatives, department superintendents are forced to take more risks and to make their employees do so too.