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Marie-Noëlle Albert
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A person is not a resource

The proposal fits into a single sentence, but it is no slogan: speaking of a “human resource” is a category error, and that error has practical consequences. The vocabulary of management produces the organizations it describes.

A person is unique, irreducible to their skills, and cannot be managed like a stock of goods. Management then becomes an activity of persons towards other persons, oriented towards a durability that is at once human, organizational and environmental.

The founding text

2015

From Resource to Human Being: Toward Persons Management

Michèle Fortier, Marie-Noëlle AlbertSAGE Open, 5(3)

The manifesto article. To speak of a "human resource" is a category error with practical consequences: a person is unique, irreducible to their skills, and cannot be managed like a stock of goods. The text draws in particular on Emmanuel Mounier, Edgar Morin, Domènec Melé and Emmanuel Levinas.

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Philosophical anchors

Emmanuel Mounier
Personalism: the person as an irreducible subject, never as a means.
Edgar Morin
The paradigm of complexity: a human being cannot be simplified without being missed.
Domènec Melé
Humanistic management: the purpose of an organization is human before it is financial.
Emmanuel Levinas
The ethics of otherness: responsibility arises from the face of the other.

The text also calls on Kant, Hans Jonas, Bergson and Mintzberg.

SourcesOpenAlex — A5089632508Crossref

Extension

The community of persons

If a person is not a resource, an organization is neither a sum of individuals nor a simple knot of contracts. It can become a community — but nothing compels it to.

Dialogue is the condition

Without genuine dialogue — that is, without the possibility of being surprised by the other — an organization remains an association of individuals, whatever the values it displays.

Albert & Pérouma, 2017

Diversity makes dialogue necessary

The move from an association of individuals to a community of persons is described step by step. Diversity is not a problem to be administered there: it is what makes dialogue indispensable, and therefore possible.

Albert & Lazzari Dodeler, 2022

Solidarity cannot be decreed

This is the nuance not to be flattened: solidarity in the workplace can be developed, but when imposed it breeds derision rather than mutual support.

Albert, Lazzari Dodeler & Ohin, 2022

SourcesCrossrefOpenAlex — A5089632508Cairn — publications de Marie-Noëlle Albert

Reach

A change of paradigm, not an adjustment of vocabulary

“Gérer des personnes dans la complexité : un changement de paradigme”, 2023Published in French; the publisher’s English title is “Managing Persons in Complexity: A Paradigm Shift”.

The displacement engages a way of thinking: the operators of complex thought — the dialogic, recursion — become management tools rather than metaphors.

The most recent displacement gives the measure of it. In 2026, the proposal turns on diversity itself: one does not manage an abstract diversity, one meets diverse persons.

“De la gestion de la diversité à la gestion des personnes diverses”, 2026

Corpus

The works attached to this line of inquiry

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A proposal that is taught

Persons management did not remain a position taken in an article. It gave rise to programs: a master’s degree in workplace persons management, offered at a distance since the autumn of 2020, a graduate diploma (DESS), and a short graduate program in the management of equity, diversity and inclusion. Marie-Noëlle Albert chairs the program committee of the master’s degree at the Rimouski campus.

See the projects and the programs

SourcesFiche professorale — UQAR