Ève Chiapello (born 2 April 1965) is Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, where she holds a chair in the 'sociology of the transformation of capitalism'.
[1] Chiapello has focused her sociological research on analyzing the nature of artistic critique against capitalism and its cooptation over time from the 1950s and 60s to the present.
[2] Another major research focus has been the "language of capitalism", analyzed by employing the methods of critical discourse analysis to managerial and corporate human resources documents.
[4] The main thesis of the book, as summarized in a separate article of the same title, is that from the 1970s capitalists began to adopt a libertarian conception of running the workplace, allowing greater employee initiative and autonomy.
Chiapello and Boltanski conclude that this "new spirit of capitalism" is not emancipatory, but rather more subtle in its continuation of exploitation.