The commercial real estate market emerged in France in the 1970s to respond to the growth in the number of office jobs in the industrial and tertiary sector. The french government plays an important role in the building of a commercial real estate portfolio with the creation of the DATAR (Interministerial delegation for regional planning and regional attractiveness) in 1963 and the implementation of its policy metropolises of balance which promotes the construction of business centers in Lyon and Bordeaux [1] . The development of a commercial real estate market allows the growth of new professions dedicated to the management and fitting out of offices. This professional space will mainly open up to the trades of urban design from the years 1980-1990, where the white buildings will give way to the construction of office buildings taking into account the demand for project management [2 ] . We then see architects, urban planners and building engineers positioning themselves in the sector by offering project management assistance services (AMO) or general contracting [3] .

The office Design & Build market is not a professional sector with well-defined borders, it is a competitive space where different professional groups seek to appropriate the monopoly of certain activities [4] or at least to be recognized as a greater legitimacy in their exercise.

Extract from a chapter of a collective work in preparation

[1] Jacques Bonnet, “The evolution of the office market in France and abroad” , Géocarrefour 78, no Vol. 78/4 (October 1, 2003): 281-94.
[2] Ingrid Nappi-Choulet, Business real estate, economic market analysis, 2nd ed., Economy (Paris: Economia, 2013).
[3] The work of a general contractor consists in supervising the intervention of the various professions involved in the design of the plans and the carrying out of the development work.
[4] Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Alexandre Butin is preparing a thesis in the sociology of work at IDHE.S, University of Paris-Nanterre. His research topic focuses on the issues around the development of offices in a context of financialization of business real estate. For 5 years, he carried out several research assignments on the work of office furnishing professionals. His mission at Waitack consists, through a scientific investigation process, in identifying the needs of his clients to enable the development of new performance indicators in the management and layout of office space. But also to support customers in the use of new decision-making tools.

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